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Stephanie Danielle Roth.

Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize.

The Apuseni Mountains of west-central Romania are rich in gold, iron, and history. The area's gold once supplied the Roman Empire, and it is home to Rosia Montana, the country's oldest documented mining settlement. But this past is threatened by the present: five years ago, the Romanian government granted rights to a Canadian mining company to build a massive gold mine on top of the ancient town -- a project that would force the relocation of 2,000 people, destroy 900 homes and 10 centuries-old churches, and threaten the region's most important water source.

The people of Rosia Montana -- and Romania as a whole -- have fought back. Thanks in part to the organizing efforts of Stephanie Danielle Roth, a French and Swiss citizen and former environmental journalist, Romanians have staged large public protests and organized an effective coalition of mine opponents. In 2002, the World Bank withdrew its support for the project, and the European Parliament recently expressed concern that the project "poses a serious environmental threat to the whole region."

Roth, 34, was awarded one of six 2005 Goldman Environmental Prizes in a ceremony in San Francisco on April 18. She spoke to Grist from San Francisco.

How did you first hear about the proposed gold mine in Romania, and why did you decide to devote yourself to fighting it?

When I heard about the gold mine, I was working in a town in Transylvania, where I was helping organize local opposition against a Dracula theme park. I met a journalist who had just been to Rosia Montana, and he told me that there was a Canadian proposal to construct the largest open-cast gold mine in Europe -- the sheer scale of it would be incredible, he said. So 10 days later, I packed a backpack and hitchhiked to Rosia Montana, where the very first day I met the leaders of the local opposition group.

The group consists of property owners who oppose the mine on social, environmental, and cultural grounds. They call themselves Alburnus Maior, which is the old Roman name for Rosia Montana -- the Romans mined gold there 2,000 years ago. After I left, I wrote a piece about the proposed mine for The Ecologist magazine, and I stayed in contact with people in Rosia Montana. When the campaign in Transylvania ended successfully, the group contacted me and said, "Hey Steph, do you have any plans? How about coming to Rosia Montana and helping us organize a campaign?" That was three years ago, and now I live and work in Rosia Montana.

You were an environmental journalist before becoming a full-time activist. What led you to change your course?

Roth helped kill plans for a Dracula theme park here.

Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize.

I was sitting in my chair at The Ecologist, writing about these incredible campaigns, and I decided to take a holiday. I went to South America, and everywhere -- in Peru, in Chile -- I saw environmental problems. I met opposition groups, but they were fighting on the local level, and often these projects are supported by the local governments. These groups were desperate to reach out to more people, to spread out to a larger audience. So I went back to The Ecologist, and I wrote stories about what I had seen, and they were great stories, but I thought, I would like to do this kind of work to empower local communities -- I would like to do it for the rest of my life, and I would like to start now.

I understand you were able to organize the first large-scale protests in Romania in more than a decade. What do you think inspired people to fight this particular mine proposal?

What is really incredible about this campaign is how it has mobilized people in Romania. This project embodies the old regime, the injustice and corruption, the development from above. It is the best metaphor for all the things people would like to change in the country.

Under [former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was executed by firing squad in 1989], thousands of people were involuntarily resettled to make way for the great industrial effort that Mr. Ceausescu had in his mind. So people are saying, "Hey, look, we have a democracy now, but you can still involuntarily resettle people." The only difference is that in the past, they did it for the great industrial effort, and now it's in the name of money. In Rosia Montana, we have 10 churches and nine cemeteries -- religion is very important to the people of Romania, and they don't want to accept that these places can be destroyed in the name of money.

What effect have these protests had on the protesters themselves?

It's been a very liberating experience. Here we have a lot of self-censorship -- though we are told Romania is a democracy, the Romanian secret police are still very powerful, and the mining company is exercising intimidation. People in Romania are afraid to express their opinions, so to stand up with a banner in their hand, to say, "We don't want this," is very, very liberating. In Bucharest, we organized a forum where locals from Rosia Montana took the microphone. One woman said, "My name is Morgit, I come from Rosia Montana, and my husband and son are buried in the cemetery there -- I would like to be buried next to my husband and son." She was very scared to speak, and afterward she cried. But now that people like her have started speaking, nothing is going to stop them. It's very liberating for them, and it's very moving to see.

The World Bank has withdrawn its support for the mine project. What does this mean for your campaign?

The journalist-turned-activist in Rosia Montana, scene of the proposed mine.

Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize.

From a money point of view, this is very important. If the World Bank's IFC -- the International Finance Corporation -- had become involved, then other banks would have gotten involved and there would have been money for the project. So [the World Bank withdrawal] is very good for us. But truly, the greatest victory for the local people was when, for the first time in history, all the churches of Romania united and made the official declaration that property in Rosia Montana was not for sale, and that they would refuse to relinquish their property for the mining project. The church is a symbol of the living community, so that was very important to the locals.

You've received death threats as a result of your work. What's given you the courage to keep going?

People like Morgit, who I mentioned earlier -- she gives me hope. The leader of the NGO in Rosia Montana is a young farmer, and he's very wise -- he also gives me hope. The locals -- how they have reacted, expressed themselves, done things together -- give me the strength to keep going.

What's the greatest challenge still facing your campaign?

Since the World Bank pulled out of the mine project, the mining company is like a dead person being kept alive by its shareholders. It's time to pull the plug. We have intensified our efforts to convince shareholders of this -- we have started some good court cases, which we hope will force the mining company to apply the law, and show its shareholders that the company has been lying to them.

What does this award mean to you?

I feel as liberated as the locals from Rosia Montana when they express their minds. Many times when I do my work, the Romanian government or the mining company will say, "You are a nutcase," or other [discouraging] things. So for me as a human being -- as a woman -- this award is a great encouragement for my work.

What do you plan to do with the money?

The prize money will be invested in a fighting fund for the campaign -- we will use it to start more legal actions, the kinds of things that are difficult to attract funding for. A very small part of the money, maybe $5,000, I will use to pay my debts -- because I work as a volunteer, I have a few debts. So my bank manager will be very happy.

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Monster of God
By David Quammen
W. W. Norton &
Company, 384 pages,
2003

What this world needs," opined the nature writer David Quammen in a 1984 column for Outside magazine, "is a good vicious 60-foot-long Amazon snake." He was kidding, thankfully; the rest of the column goes on to describe the human tendency to massively exaggerate the size of anacondas in the Amazon. Now, though, 19 years later, Quammen has written Monster of God, a book arguing that precisely what the world does need is very large, very predatory animals.

I do Quammen a disservice by calling him a nature writer. To the extent that he is one, it is only because he -- along with the likes of Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez, and Terry Tempest Williams -- has turned the genre upside down by allowing science, economics, politics, and culture to tromp all over its pastoral pages. By reinventing the content, these writers also reinvented the style: In Quammen's work you will find no trace of the adjective-laden, sunset-stained daydreaming with which nature writing is, justly or unjustly, associated. Instead, you will find foul-mouthed Australians, baleful Siberians, frostbite, dictators, petty bureaucrats, history lessons, ethical impasses, crocodile blood on your glasses, and the occasional terrifying quadratic equation.

Crocodile blood notwithstanding, Monster of God does not belong to the genre Quammen characterizes as "predator porn." Quite the contrary: In his last book, The Song of the Dodo, Quammen managed to turn the arcane field of island biogeography into a best-selling page-turner; in Monster of God, he reverses the trick, transforming stories of man-eating tigers and 20-foot crocodiles from tabloid perennials into a thoughtful exploration of the ecological and psychological roles of the beasts that eat us.

Lone shark.

Photo: NOAA.

A veritable ark of animals kill people -- elephants, cobras, scorpions, spiders, malarial mosquitoes, the odd pit bull -- but Quammen is not concerned with most of them in Monster of God. He's interested strictly in those animals to whom we humans are meat, a group he denotes "alpha predators": lions, tigers, bears, sharks, crocs, leopards, and a handful of others. All told, it's a small group, and rapidly getting smaller. Exploding human population growth and related habitat loss are creating a vicious circle for vicious animals: With less territory to roam and fewer non-human prey available, alpha predators are increasingly likely to stray into populated areas, eat a person or two, incur the wrath of the locals, and be hunted in response -- sometimes to local extinction. As Quammen observes, "man-eating is the most fatal of indiscretions, in that it often provokes retaliatory eradication."

As a result, Quammen envisions a not-very-distant future -- 2150, to be precise, although precision is a famously dicey hobby for prophets -- in which the last viable wild populations of human predators will be extinct. The bulk of Monster of God is dedicated to explaining why, using case studies of four predators: the lions of the Gir forest in western India, the crocodiles of northern Australia, the grizzly bears of Romania, and the Siberian tigers of you know where. Quammen also looks at those predators that can't be found on the Red List but stalk the forests of the imagination: Grendl (the bad guy in Beowulf), Humbaba (the nemesis of Gilgamesh), the biblical Leviathan, and, most oddly, Ridley Scott's Alien.

Fearful Asymmetry

In literature and myth, monsters prey on the vainglorious, the impious, or the foolhardy; when all is said and done, there's generally a moral written in the blood. In real life, predators prey on whatever -- or whomever -- is nearby, with brutal amorality. As it happens, those who are nearby are typically poor rural dwellers lacking either the material or political resources to protect themselves from predation. Thus, as Quammen notes, the hardships of living with alpha predators are borne largely by the world's poorest and most disenfranchised people, while it is the wealthy who enjoy the lion's share (so to speak) of the spiritual and aesthetic benefits of such animals. Not coincidentally, it is also the wealthy who most ardently advocate preservation.

When the cat's away ...

Photo: USFWS.

This unequal relationship to alpha predators is frequently overlooked by impassioned conservationists in the developed world. But Quammen never lets it recede too far into the background, thereby preventing the book from straying near sentimentality or self-righteousness. He asks: Can we have alpha predators if we're unwilling to suffer and die because of them? And then: "Whom do we mean by 'we'?" If the answer to the first question is to be "yes," he says, the costs and benefits of alpha predators must be more evenly distributed.

To date, the only truly viable way to effect that redistribution is to offer financial incentives to locals to help conserve endangered species. Generally speaking, that means making a commodity of some small percentage of the animals -- inviting foreigners to pay top dollar for the right to hunt bears in Romania, say, or creating a controlled global market for legally obtained crocodile skins or tiger pelts. If local people are involved in these transactions and receive a percentage of the profits, the logic goes, their livelihoods will depend on the continued existence of the animals and they will become highly motivated preservationists.

As Quammen shows, that theory is borne out in case after case, from Australia to Siberia. Yet however effective such programs may be, they generally receive a chilly reception from environmentalists, due to "popular resistance, based on principle or emotion, to the idea of killing so much as one tiger, one lion, one bear for someone's profit." Even Quammen, who is so wary of dogma that one suspects he fails his knee-jerk test at the doctor's office, can't help but balk at this Babbittry: "No matter how often I hear [this commodities argument] applied to one or another magnificent species in their various corners of the world, each time I find it tedious afresh. But, beyond quibbling over details ... I can't rationally disagree."

A grizzly situation.

Photo: USFWS.

As both the cost-benefit conundrum and the commodities solution demonstrate, the logic of large-animal preservation does not cleave to moral law as closely as one might like. At times, indeed, it's enough to make even the most philosophical of environmentalists squeamish. Perhaps nowhere is this more clearly illustrated in Monster of God than in its brief history of Nicolae Ceausescu, under whose brutal dictatorship Romanians suffered appalling human rights abuses -- and grizzly bears flourished. Quammen notes "a peculiar correlation between ursine abundance and autocratic oppression: positive." More paradoxical still, Romania's grizzlies flourished precisely because Ceausescu was a bloodthirsty hunter, single-handedly slaughtering some 400 bears during his reign -- and thereby creating a very good incentive for forest managers (who were responsible for guaranteeing the dictator a successful hunt) to make sure bear populations thrived.

But not all political enterprises that have been devastating for humans have been kind to alpha predators. In Monster of God, Quammen offers a theory ("really only a notion") that colonialism and the decimation of predators go hand in hand. Motivated by "detachment and ignorance and fear," colonial powers destroy native predators to assert "their sense of cultural superiority, seize hold of an already occupied landscape, and presume to make it their own." That hypothesis, he says, goes some way toward explaining the ongoing hatred many Westerners feel for the grizzly bear: "[A] war of territorial seizure that began with Lewis and Clark ... won't be over, not quite, until the last individuals of the animal ... have been eradicated from the northern Rockies and the forests (on public land as well as private) are safe for white people and their cows."

It's Lonely at the Top of the Food Chain

These kind of side trips -- to Ceausescu's Romania, to the white Westerner's id -- are among the best things about Monster of God. In this book, as in Song of the Dodo, Quammen's M.O. is the anecdote; he excels at finding the telling story, and at telling it. Who else would illustrate the relationship between market demand and endangered species conservation by introducing a taxidermist in the Australian outback who earns his living by preserving crocodiles for the local chapter of the Hell's Angels? Trust me, you do not want to miss Quammen's four-and-a-half page deadpan account of memorizing the recipe for pickled crocodile head.

In Song of the Dodo, Quammen used such anecdotes to breathtaking effect. Each tale on its own was gripping; pieced together, they eventually yielded a stunningly clear big picture, a sobering depiction of the workings of biogeography and its implications for our modern, crowded, all-too-human planet. I waited in vain for the same gratifying illumination in his new book, the a-ha! that punctuates the reading of a convincing and carefully wrought work. But Monster of God is more slideshow than jigsaw puzzle; each individual picture is lovely, but the effect is of repetition, rather than accumulation.

Lion in wait.

Photo: USFWS.

I suspect that this problem has more to do with the subject than the author. With his prodigious intellect, Quammen was right at home explaining some of the more obscure aspects of evolutionary theory. Monster of God doesn't grapple with anything quite so dense. Habitat loss, the disappearance of prey, conflict with humans -- these are the major factors that threaten alpha predators, and, as Quammen himself acknowledges, their inexorable interplay is obvious to even the most casual dabbler in ecology. As a result, there's simply nowhere for him to go once he's gotten started; one suspects that he needed, well, meatier material.

The potential impact on the human psyche of the wholesale disappearance of alpha predators should have provided just that kind of rich fodder, and Quammen makes a go at it with his forays into literature, myth, and moviemaking. It's greatly to his credit that he can converse intelligently about ecology in one moment and about third century Babylonian literature the next (he frets that studying Gilgamesh, with all its translation and fragmentation issues, is like having "an important conversation on a cell phone while driving the freeway"), yet here, too, he comes up short. These forays are like blind alleys in a maze; they're fun to explore, but they don't lead anywhere and they don't connect to one another.

That's a pity, because there are truly important questions to be asked here. Once we human beings have ascended to the top of the food chain by lopping off its upper reaches, what will happen? Will some collective atavistic fear of ours be put to rest forever? Will we feel liberated? If so, what will that sense of liberation mean for the rather tattered notion that humanity is embedded in rather than above the natural world? And if that notion follows lions and tigers and crocs to extinction, what will that mean for efforts to protect the environment?

On the other hand, what if, instead of feeling liberated, we feel somehow bereft when alpha predators are gone? Quammen suggests that will be the case, and points to our appetite for movies like Alien as evidence that we yearn to be reminded of our fundamental edibleness. That's interesting, but it's hardly a strong case for the protection of species on this planet. Granted, arguments for the protection of species based on their psychological importance to humans are risky anyway, since they inherently promote the protection of charismatic megafauna at the expense of obscure (or noisome, or icky) microfauna. Still, I wish Quammen had done more to convey the sense of loss we may feel if we extinguish all our predators -- and thus made the need to protect them more compelling.

Yet even with Monster of God's shortcomings, I finished it asking myself the same questions I ask virtually every time I read anything by Quammen: How does anyone land such an impossibly fantastic job? And: When is his next book coming out? Even when he fails to live up to the rather high bar of class-A nouveau nature writing he helped set, Quammen makes for such an able and entertaining wilderness guide that you're happy simply to be along for the ride. The vicarious thrill of skiing in Siberia or going nose-to-snout with crocodiles in Australia never pales, and nor does the delight of learning (sometimes in passing) things you never even thought to wonder about.

Nor, finally, does the sheer pleasure of his language. If Monster of God lacks the a-ha! of insight, it doesn't want for the straight-up ha! of literary dazzle. This is a writer who pauses to note that important people get lionized, not tigerized; who characterizes Darwin, Australia, as "the capital of croc schlock"; and who describes the colors of homes in a Siberian village thusly: "What once may have been chartreuse now looks more like wasabi. Some sort of vivid cerulean has faded to cheery but flat shades of blue, the hue of wilting party balloons and elderly parakeets." Wasabi? I'm glad ecology got him before J. Crew could. Given the dire state of the global environment, we're lucky to have a voice in the wilderness this erudite, and this fun.

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Britain's Prince Philip (you know, the queen's husband) warned today that the Danube River is on a path toward ecological disaster unless European governments rally to save it. The prince, who is an honorary president of the World Wildlife Fund, said, "Pollution, scouring, and disturbance are slowly killing the natural balance of the whole river system." He spoke at an environmental conference in Bucharest that was attended by nine presidents. The Danube, which flows through 11 European countries, has had a tough run of it lately, what with NATO bombs knocking bridges into the river during the war in Kosovo and a huge cyanide spill in Romania killing hundreds of tons of fish in a tributary of the river.

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