The Anthropology of Toxicity

I haven’t gotten a chance to re-watch the footage yet, but about a week ago I filmed my interview with Dr. Richard Gibbons, the expert for my digital storytelling project. Dr. Gibbons is the conservation director at the Houston Audubon. We met in a cabin at the Edith Moore Nature Sanctuary, a patch of tree-covered greenspace off I-10 that Houston Audubon maintains. Sincerely, it’s the most “nature” I’ve seen so far in Houston, and once we got far enough back from the nearby highway it felt like we could have been in the middle of a forest hours away from the city.

We walked along some of the sanctuary’s walking trails and chatted before we sat down for the formal, taped interview. Dr. Gibbons paused and identified birds by their chirp for me, and then quizzed me on them later. He explained to me a study they were about to start running on the impact of light pollution on birds using the stadium lights at Rice, and I agreed that this was something I would definitely want to be involved in after the end of this class. (Honestly, here I’m feeling a bit better about being kind of “selfish” about the person I chose to interview because of his work’s relevance to my project. I was a bit worried before about doing a somewhat-extractive class project where I just go and get an interview and leave, but this potential enduring connection puts me a bit more at ease.)

We sat down in the cabin for the interview. I had completely dropped the ball on reserving a proper tripod, and had been intending to use my iPhone as a camera from the start, but I brought a dachshund-shaped letter holder with a coil spring from my apartment, balanced my phone in there, and placed it on top of a stack of books. I’m still very proud of my DIY tripod.

We chatted for about half an hour in total. Dr. Gibbons and I had spoken on the phone a few weeks before this, and I had prepared some more general questions to discuss which I sent to him beforehand. The interview was super conversational, and though Dr. Gibbons was worried about “sounding like a doofus,” I thought he gave really clear and enthusiastic answers. There are so many interesting things about his work (like the ways that weird Texas land ownership politics make it tough to do conservation work, and how the Trump administration’s reinterpretation of the Endangered Species Act is especially garbage) and I’m bummed I don’t get to highlight all of them within the constraints of this video.

As I transition towards editing mode, I’m excited to get to play around with video editing software and find what feels right! As I start to put this together, on a technical level I’m not super sure what I’m going to use for b-roll footage. I don’t want it to all be talking head, but all of the b-roll I’ve gotten so far was just the forested area outside of the cabin we spoke in, and I didn’t even film any birds. I may edit it down to the kind of story I want to tell, and then find b-roll based on what that illuminates.

On a story level, the main thing that I want to emphasize is the way that bird wellbeing and human wellbeing are interconnected. Environmental harm crosses species lines. That seems like a pretty basic takeaway, considering all the other things we’ve discussed in this class so far, but getting more complex than that in a 3-5 minute video intended for the public would be a significant challenge. Plus, that was a takeaway Dr. Gibbons wanted to stress as well, so I’m happy with that.