This is a special edition of Ecotones, Part 2 of our daily audio digest for June 19, 2023, Day 6 of the historic Held v State of Montana. It was the second week of the trial, which began on June 12, 2023 in the Lewis & Clark County District Court in Helena, MT – Judge Kathy Seeley presiding. Attorneys for The 16 youth plaintiffs rested their case on Friday, June 16th.
Because of limited radio broadcast time, we had to leave Part 1 of the June 19, 2023 session after the direct examination of Sonja Nowakowski, Administrator for the Air, Energy, and Mining Division at Montana DEQ. We now continue with the cross examination of Administrator Nowakowski by Barbara Chillcott, Senior attorney with the Western Environmental Law Center (WELC).
This is followed by The final of only 3 state witnesses, Dr. Terry Anderson, an economist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and emeritus professor at Montana State University. He presented a brief testimony of under 15 minutes of carefully limited inquiry from defense attorneys related to Energy Information Administration data on GHG emissions.
Under blistering cross examination by plaintiff attorney, Philip Gregory, Of Counsel with Our Children’s Trust, who asked about errors in his math and misinterpretation of data in Dr. Anderson’s expert report. The State initially objected, stating the questions exceeded the scope of their direct examination, which consisted of only five questions. However, plaintiffs’ counsel argued that the cross examination went to credibility of the witness. Judge Kathy Seeley overruled the State’s objections, allowing Mr. Gregory to pursue beyond scope of the direct to probe questions of his credibility.
The state had originally listed Dr. Judith Curry as one of their expert witnesses, however they withdrew her name last week without explanation, after pre-rebuttals by numerous plaintiff’s expert witnesses.
This special edition of Ecotones is a daily audio digest for June 19, 2023, Day 6 of the historic Held v State of Montana. It was the second week of the trial, which began on June 12, 2023 in the Lewis & Clark County District Court in Helena, MT – Judge Kathy Seeley presiding. Attorneys for The 16 youth plaintiffs rested their case on Friday, June 16th.
Today, The State of Montana’s Defense attorney, Lee McKenna of the Montana Dept. of Environmental Quality, called Christopher Dorrington, the Director of the Department of Environmental Quality to the stand. After answering her questions, he was cross examined by plaintiff attorney, Melissa Hornbein, senior attorney with Western Environmental Law Center (WELC). Director Christopher Norrington, was appointed to his position by Governor Gianforte in 2021.
The defense then called Sonja Nowakowski, Administrator for the Air, Energy, and Mining Division at Montana DEQ. In this edition we hear her testimony. But Due to broadcast time limitations, the cross examination of Ms Nowakowski by plaintiff attorney, Barbara Chillcott, senior attorney with WELC, will be in the next edition of Ecotones’ Daily Audio Diary.
As you will hear, Judge Seeley was called upon to make far more rulings on objections than during the first week.
We have been recording and producing daily audio digests of the historic Held v State of Montana trial, brought by 16 youth plaintiffs asserting that their constitutional rights are being violated by the State of Montana, which began on June 12, 2023, in the Lewis and Clarke County District Court in Helena, MT, Judge Cathy Seeley presiding.
We share the testimony of the final two witnesses for the plaintiffs, Dr. Lise Van Susteren, an internationally recognized psychiatrist and expert on how climate change affects the physical and mental health of youth differently and more drastically than adults. http://kgvm.org/show/held-v-state-of-montana-lise-van-susteren-testimony-6-16-23/
We will continue to record and produce these daily audio digests of the Held v State of Montanatrial as it continues on July 19, 2023 as the Defense presents their case with witnesses Terry Anderson, Christopher Dorrington and Sonja Nowakowski.
Welcome to this special edition of Ecotones. We continue our coverage on this fourth day of the historic Held v State of Montana proceedings, sharing this audio daily digest from June 15, 2023. In this edition, we feature three witnesses, but not in the order in which they actually testified on Thursday June 15th. Testifying first was youth plaintiff, Kian Tanner, followed by Montana Environmental Information Center Director of Policy and Legislative Affairs, Anne Hedges, and then youth plaintiff, Claire Vlases.
Claire Vlases testifies on 6-15-23, while Judge Kathy Seeley listens intently
Next is testimony from Anne Hedges, who is the Director of Policy and Legislative Affairs at the Montana Environmental Information Center, including cross examination by Defense Attorney for the State of Montana, Bain Johnson (apology if his name is misspelled). http://kgvm.org/show/held-v-state-of-montana-anne-hedges-testimony-6-15-23/
Due to radio broadcast time restraints, we were not able to include the testimony of the final witness on June 15, 2023, Peter Erickson, a climate change policy researcher for the Stockholm Environment Institute in Seattle, Washington. He provided expert testimony on Montana’s contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions – via fossil fuel consumption, extraction, and infrastructure that the state of Montana permits – and how these emissions are both nationally and globally significant. “We are at a decision point about taking action on climate change,” Mr. Erickson said. “The world community has decided we must. Montana continues to issue fossil fuel permits.”http://kgvm.org/show/held-v-state-of-montana-peter-erickson-testimony-6-15-23/
We will include audio of his testimony, as well as those of others we could not previously share, in later programs.
We continue our coverage of the historicHeld v State of Montana proceedings with this audio daily digest of the hearing from June 14, 2023. Dr. Lori Byron continued her testimony from June 13th, discussing Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and human generated catastrophic climate change. http://kgvm.org/show/held-v-state-of-montana-dr-lori-byron-testimony-6-13-23/
After cross examination of Dr. Byron by Defense Attorney for the State of Montana, Mark Stermitz, attorneys for the plaintiffs called Dr. Shane Doyle to the witness stand, testifying on behalf of his daughters, two of the youth plaintiffs, Ruby and Lillian Doyle. http://kgvm.org/show/held-v-state-of-montana-shane-doyle-testimony-6-14-23/
GROUNDWORKS travels from traditional acorn gathering spots to the studios where the “Groundworks” performance was rehearsed before being shared at sunrise on Alcatraz—nearly 50 years after the Indians of All Tribes occupied the island and brought attention to Native American rights. Originally initiated by contemporary dance company Dancing Earth Creations, the “Groundworks” project was designed to amplify the oft-forgotten Native presence everywhere in the Americas.
Groundworks weaves together four artists’ stories and their contemporary ways of sharing traditional Indigenous knowledge. By exploring their creative practices, it highlights these Native artists’ contemporary relationships to the Pomo, Ohlone, Tongva, and Wappo/Onastatis territories, languages and traditions. Their efforts to “re-story” the land through creative reclamation are important facets of the Land Back movement.
Bernadette Smith is a Pomo singer, musician, and playwright from the Point Arena Manchester Band of Pomo Indians. She is an activist leader involved with Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and brought her whole family to Standing Rock to protect water rights. She is currently working on reclaiming land traditionally used by her tribe for their acorn harvest, and on protecting the source of those acorns—the tan oak—from hack-and-squirt clearing to make way for managed redwoods.
Profiled in the documentary are Ras K’dee, Pomo, a musician with ties to multiple bands in Sonoma and Mendocino Counties; Bernadette Smith, singer and dancer from the Manchester-Point Arena Band of Pomo Indians; Kanyon Sayers-Roods, a multidisciplinary Ohlone artist from Indian Canyon, a sovereign Indian Nation outside of Hollister, California; and L. Frank, a Tongva-Acjachemen artist, tribal scholar, canoe builder, and language advocate.
We spoke with director, producer, writer and cinematographer, Ian Garrett, about his film, GROUNDWORKS, via Skype on May 16, 2023.
GROUNDWORKS will be screening at the Mendocino FilmFestival on June 4 at 3pm in the Festival Tent. A special program with Coastal Pomo dancers will open the program and a panel discussion will follow.
As a nation, we are in the throes of a re-examination of history, but whose history, and who gets to tell it, and how do we live today with various versions of our history, that were memorialized in the past? How do we best evaluate and live with the impacts of different versions of history and the potential harm and even re-traumatization that a particular version creates?
What role does art play in this process? whose art? and for whom?
These are among the questions addressed by the filmmakers, Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman, in their documentary, TOWN DESTROYER, which screens on Friday, June 2nd, at 1:00 PM at The Coast Cinemas.
You may recall the furor over whether or not to destroy or cover up the 13 panels of the 1930s murals by Popular Front artist, Victor Arnautoff, THE LIFE OF WASHINGTON, at San Francisco’s George Washington High School. Snitow & Kaufman film students, parents, Native American activists, artists of different ethnicities, scholars, and museum directors, all against a background of vivid cinematography of the controversial panels, as well as many other relevant works of art, both at the high school, and elsewhere across the country.
Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman’s films include the award-winning “Company Town,” “Between Two Worlds,” “Thirst”, “Secrets of Silicon Valley”, and “Blacks and Jews.”
Alan was a producer at the KTVU-TV News, the Bay Area Fox affiliate, for 12 years. Before that, he was an award winning News Director at KPFA-FM. He has served on the Boards of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, Film Arts Foundation, California Media Collaborative, Food and Water Watch, and much more.
Deborah Kaufman founded and for 13 years was Director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the first and largest independent Jewish film showcase in the world. She has been a Board member of the California Council for the Humanities, the New Israel Fund, and Amnesty International USA. She has been a consultant, programmer, lecturer, and activist with a variety of human rights, multicultural and media arts organizations.
We spoke with Deborah and Alan on May 8, 2023 via Skype.
“Early Days” Pioneer Monument by Frank Happersberger, Installed 1894 in SF Civic Center Plaza
The documentary, BODY PARTS, traces the evolution of “sex” on-screen from a woman’s perspective, uncovering the uncomfortable realities behind some of the most iconic scenes in cinema history and celebrating the courageous individuals leading the way for change. It’s an eye-opening investigation into the making of Hollywood sex scenes, shedding light on the actors’ real-life experiences, and tracing the legacy of exploitation of women in the entertainment industry, as well as recent hard fought changes in that industry.
On May 1, 2023, we spoke with Director, Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, and Producer, Helen Hood Scheer, about BODY PARTS, which will be screening at this year’s Mendocino Film Festival at Crown Hall on Sunday June 4 at 1pm.
Kristy Guevara-Flanagan is an Associate Professor at UCLA’s School of Theatre, Film and Television, where she heads the MFA Directing Documentary concentration. She has been making documentary films that focus on gender and representation for nearly two decades, starting with a 1999 experimental documentary about a blow-up doll (which screened at the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, among other venues). Guevara-Flanagan’s documentary and experimental films have screened at the Sundance, Tribeca, SXSW, and HotDocs film festivals and the Getty Museum. Her work has been broadcast on PBS and the Sundance Channel, received numerous awards, and been funded by ITVS, the Sundance Institute, the Tribeca Institute, Latino Public Broadcasting and California Humanities.
Helen Hood Scheer is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, freelance producer, and associate professor at California State University Long Beach, where she spearheads the creative nonfiction track and serves as the internship advisor for students in the Department of Film and Electronic Arts. In 2023, she won CSULB’s Distinguished Teaching Award. Throughout her instruction, service, and professional work, Helen is a strong advocate for students. In 2020, she received the Advancement of Women Award from the CSULB President’s Commission on the Status of Women, and both Helen and her students were featured in Claiming the Director’s Chair, an article expressing the CSU’s commitment to preparing the next generation of female filmmakers for California’s multi-billion dollar entertainment industry.
You may recall the horrifying news that hit the airwaves on March 26, 2018 about a van that had driven off the 100 foot cliff on HWY 1 just south of Juan Creek between Rockport and Westport on the north coast of Mendocino County, CA. Bad as the initial reports were, as more was learned about what had actually happened and what led up to it, the horror only grew.
CA Highway Patrol
Texas based journalist, Roxanna Asgarian, began investigating the tragedy within a day. Her investigations since have resulted in her book, WE WERE ONCE A FAMILY: A STORY OF LOVE, DEATH, AND CHILD REMOVAL IN AMERICA, published in March, 2023 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction for books published in 2023.
She writes it as the true crime story that it certainly is, but her primary goal was to uncover the untold stories of the birth families of the six Black children taken from their families, who did NOT want to give them up, and who were making efforts to keep them, when the deeply flawed child welfare system thrust them first into the foster care system, and then fast tracked them into out of state adoptions.
Roxanna Asgarian reports about courts and the law for the Texas Tribune. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, New York Magazine and Texas Monthly, as well as other publications. She received the 2022 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for WE WERE ONCE A FAMILY: A STORY OF LOVE, DEATH, AND CHILD REMOVAL IN AMERICA. It goes well beyond the earlier, sensationalist reportage by the mainstream press and delves into the systems and history that allowed this murder/suicide to happen. We spoke with her via Skype on April 10, 2023.
Devonte Hart, seen in 2014 hugging a police officer at a Black Lives Matter protest. (Johnny Huu Nguyen/AP)
Tragic as this story of innocent children taken from their birth families by a Child Protection Service system which purports to protect children, it is but one aspect of our society that does NOT protect innocent children.
Once again, another mass shooting at a school ended in the murder and traumatizing of children, this one at the Covenant School in Nashville, TN, which led to protests at the State Legislature, the expulsion of two young black representatives, their unanimous reinstatement to represent their districts, and more diverse voices calling out the politicians only too happy to maintain the status quo.
One mourns the loss of the Hart children, particularly Devonte Hart, whose famous “hug heard around the world” – showing Devonte’s tear streaked face at the age of 14 hugging a white police officer during a tense demonstration protesting the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. He, with his “Free Hugs” sign, would have been 20 years old now. What might he have become, had his life not been cut short, his body never found?
The broadcast ended with Cheryl Wheeler’s song, “If It Were Up to Me,” which you can hear using this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op7agdIFOGY. It is sadly even more relevant than when she first recorded it in 1997.
In this edition of Radio Goes to the Movies, we inquire about a new documentary from Bozeman based Grizzly Creek Films with director, Eric Bendick, PATH OF THE PANTHER.
Drawn in by the haunting specter of the Florida panther, it follows a wildlife photographer, veterinarians, ranchers, conservationists, and Indigenous people, who find themselves on the front lines of an accelerating battle between the forces of renewal and the forces of destruction that have pushed the Everglades to the brink of ecological collapse.
Once ubiquitous in North and South America, but now perched on the edge of extinction, this perilously small, sole remaining population of the panther east of the Mississippi is an emblem of our once connected world. A vision of what could be again.
We spoke with the Emmy Award winning director of Path of the Panther, Eric Bendick, about his work and this powerful new film via Skype on April 5, 2023.
It will be premiering on the National Geographic/Disney+ channel on April 28, 2023.
Source: FloridaWildlifeCorridor.org; Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission.
Forthright Radio 