Season 2, Episode 2: Inafa’maolek - Jen Cole
Hey, Everyone! Welcome back to Brym - it’s Season 2, Episode 2! A quick note before we dive into this new Season and how it’s a bit different !
First of all, huge thanks to my friend Nicolas Vivas Nikonorow for his genius music in our podcast episode !!!
In Season 2 of Brym, we will be highlighting stories from changemakers across the world - inviting those folks to tell their own stories in their own ways in the spirit of Citizen Journalism. In addition to a written piece that they write themselves, we’ll also be doing interviews so you get to hear from their own voice as well!
In this week’s podcast episode, we interviewed both our writer this week, Jen Cole, and Arijit Reeves, who shared his ‘Climate Autobiography’ last week! Both are a part of Brym’s new Global Working Group, an advisory team dedicated to re-imagining our world systems and building global climate solutions together.
As always, feel free to follow along on Apple Podcasts as well! Hope you enjoy…
Inafa’maolek
Author: Jen Cole, November 3, 2022
Standing in just two feet of water, I glimpsed a dark shadow from the corner of my eye. Shifting my feet on the coral sedimented floor to avoid any balate’ (the CHamoru word for sea cucumber), I turned and saw an eagle ray for the first time. It looked too big to be this far inside the channel – we were at least a quarter mile from the open ocean, and in my 23 years of swimming here I had never seen a ray or any other marine creature so large.
In part, the ray I saw – and the increased fish and coral populations that drew it in – was a likely byproduct of the marine preserve that covered the waters behind our home, and was put in place when I was only a child. For a little over a decade, I watched the corals become more abundant every summer I visited. At the same time, the indigenous CHamoru fishing knowledge that had fed the island over thousands of years was declining. When the preserve was established, it restricted fishing access and impacted many villages. While some villages were able to continue subsistence activities through a loophole with the government, many – such as my own – were not. A process designed to protect the waters we loved also served to alienate us from it.
Piti, Guam. Taken by the Author
I first came to love the ocean during my family’s summer visits to Guam - Guåhan in native CHamoru. “Come swim in my backyard, it’s better than the pool” my grandma would tease during our calls. Every other summer, I would. In the mornings, I would go for a swim just to hear the sound of fish nibbling on coral and spot a bright blue sea star. Occasionally, I would go fishing with my uncle, learning about where and how my grandma’s family used to place nets to catch dinner.
Because of those summers spent by and in the ocean, I studied marine biology in school. In fact – when I saw the ray – I was visiting Guam for the first time in five years, fresh from receiving my masters degree in marine biology. Occasionally, I would recite my fisheries management lessons from my Stanford professors to my mother, especially those about sustainable coastal fishing and island communities. “Yes, of course,” she would tell me, “I know that from growing up.”
Bangkok, Thailand. The author and a migrant worker rights activist during the SeaWeb Seafood Summit, 2019
Beginning my career in ocean conservation and sustainability, I knew I could not work in a way that didn’t focus on sustainability holistically. Any path that did not see a world in which people and nature are inextricably intertwined would not be my own. And in my career, I’ve been able to prioritize people and how their lives intersect with the ocean and fish around them. First, through work on human rights in the seafood industry, and now with companies that provide technology that can be used by coastal communities to fish sustainably (Pelagic Data Systems) or increase marine biodiversity (Reefgen) through the venture studio Good Machine.
Guam. Taken by the author.
When I began to study the ocean over a decade ago, my dream was to approach issues with a mixture of analysis and big picture thinking. To “look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again” (John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez). Now, especially as I think of the future of our planet and our people, my dreams are tinged with creativity, hope, and people instead. As Julian Aguon, the CHamoru author, lawyer, and activist, says in a 2021 Vox Interview, “I’ve never felt more robustly alive than when I’m in community with other people who believe that they can change the world. Solidarity and community-building and building power in and across our communities is the work we have to do.” In CHamoru, this spirit of mutuality and harmony with each other and, by extension, the land and food we rely upon can be expressed in a single word - inafa’maolek.
Huge thank you to Jen for sharing her beautiful story! Our next Climate Autobiography will come from Andrew Banda of Zambia on November 17th… along with a revamped website! :)
Have a great rest of the week everyone and a safe weekend!
