Conservation Conversation
Why does human diversity matter to biodiversity? Without significant changes the conservation community will become a movement of the past instead of a guiding vision for the future. In our new short film, students from around the country discuss identity, conservation and their future in the field.
The conversations were filmed during the first week of the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program at the University of Washington. It’s an eight-week, multi-summer immersion experience for undergrads. The goal of the program is to shape the future of conservation by fully integrating social justice, urban environments and more diverse communities and career paths for the next generation of leaders. We were asked by the College of the Environment to help document the student’s journey through the program. We did this in three ways: the Conservation Conversation film, documenting the student’s final presentations and making portraits of each student.
For the film, we knew we wanted to record interviews with the students early on as our goal was to capture the perspectives and backgrounds the students were bringing in to the program, rather than what they learned over their eight-week experience. We also decided to film conversations between the students instead of conducting normal interviews. Though we lost the ability to lead the discussion, we hoped a more organic conversation might let us capture personal, peer-to-peer moments and avoid the code switch that could happen when students tried to be polite and professional. We provided pairs of students with a list of prompts and then stood back to film wherever the conversation led.
The program leaders were just as interested in the storytelling process as they were in any final product we helped them produce. They wanted the students to consider communication as part of science, and they were looking for the students to build community, explore identity and celebrate authentic voice. For their final presentation they worked with NPR contributor Chenjerai Kumanyika to write and present Moth-style, personal conservation stories. We filmed these live and made them available on Vimeo.
Finally, we made black-and-white portraits of each student for them to use as they begin to follow their conservation pathway through academic and career opportunities.
