Support Letter from Ashley Reis

April 15, 2019

Dear Mr. Beckwith and Shift JH team:

My name is Ashley Reis and I am Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at the State University of New York at Potsdam. What’s more, I am a “Jackson Local,” who has lived and recreated alongside you in the Tetons — unceded Shoshone, Bannock, Cheyenne, and Sheepeater lands — since the early eighties. My research focus is in environmental justice, and while I am away in New York during the academic year, I teach courses on environmental inequity and inequity in outdoor recreation and the outdoor industry. My Equity Outdoors class illuminates for students the reality that individuals hailing from marginalized communities are underrepresented in outdoor recreation, the outdoor industry, and associated media, and asks students to interrogate the ways in which majority communities have excluded marginalized individuals from the arena of outdoor and adventure recreation. Moreover, the class attends to shifting trends in contemporary outdoor recreation, wherein minority recreationists and athletes are narrating their experiences recreating within the white-male-dominated realm of outdoor recreation. As you are no doubt aware, these recreationists are utilizing newly-available digital mediums, telling their stories on social media and podcasts, and in articles and blogs alike. Accordingly, popular outdoor media magazines, brands, and organizations like yours are responding by addressing these historical inequities.

Given the strides Shift JH and the associated Emerging Leaders Program has made towards addressing inequity in the outdoor industry, I was horrified to learn of the traumatic, harmful, and inequitable experiences of 17 BIPOC participants in your 2018 ELP program. What’s more, I am equally dismayed as I watch the ED, Board of Directors, and new ELP Director unabashedly prop up a white-, male-centered agenda in a way that is harming and traumatizing more than just the 17 brave and resilient individuals who originally spoke up despite fears of retaliation, harassment, gas lighting, and more. These 17 individuals deserve for you, Mr. Beckwith, the Board, and the new ELP Director to hear and see them. And they deserve the respect of your resignation, Mr. Beckwith. Without it, you and your supporters at Shift JH are sending a message to BIPOC within the outdoor and conservation industries as a whole that the industry centers whiteness and white people’s feelings — as well as maleness and male feelings — over the daily, lived experiences of BIPOC and non-males, who face discrimination, marginalization, and tokenization in this white-, male-dominated, cisheteropatriarchal microcosm of our larger society, that you yourself, Mr. Beckwith, admit in your “apology” you cannot begin to understand. If you cannot understand the experiences these folx endure, why not listen to them when they tell you what they need from you? Why not trust them to advise you in regards to best practices going forward?

By ignoring the clearly-outlined needs of the 17 BIPOC leaders, Mr. Beckwith, you and the Board are, furthermore, targeting a much wider BIPOC community, which must now engage in emotional labor, relive trauma, and exhaust themselves attempting to educate individuals who haven’t done the

adequate work to engage in their own continued education about what equity and inclusion mean and why equity and inclusion are critical to improving BIPOC lives first and the environment second, as an added bonus. Mr. Beckwith, your own “apology” sheds light on your disconnect from the value of DEI work and supports the 17 BIPOC leaders’ claim that you are unfit to lead Shift JH in its efforts to enact DEI initiatives. Your letter, after all, suggests that your desire to include BIPOC in conservation efforts is not about improving BIPOC lives but is about prioritizing nonhuman life. You

write of your organization’s origins that concerns “that the conservation movement was in trouble” led you to develop “a way to invest as many people as possible in the outcome.” Your intent, as you outline it, is to advance the cause of classical conservation efforts — BIPOC lives and lived experiences are a tool you sought to harness and utilize in this effort. This line of decision-making demonstrates the harmful nature of your own mindset. DEI work tackles inequity in order to better vulnerable human lives; better environmental decision-making, which shakes out to look like conservation and sustainability, is the exciting, even desirable result. Your intent, as professed, is indeed off the mark then, despite the underlying premise of your argument: that your intent was noble. Accordingly, it’s unsurprising that you would center your own “learning experiences” over the trauma and harm you inflicted on BIPOC participants in ELP and are now inflicting on BIPOC outdoor community members who have shown up to support them because you, a professed champion of equity outdoors, will not.

Mr. Beckwith, as the ED of an organization that purports to be interested in perpetuating DEI in the outdoors, you write that wanted to recruit a broader demographic to your cause. “Young people were not joining mainstream conservation organizations, and if they did they were not reflective of the breadth of the country’s demographics,” you write. This perspective illuminates your ignorance, however, and the white, Western, Euro-centric, settler-colonial lens through which you view conservation. As Latria Graham has tried to explain to white folx, “We’re out here. You just don’t see us.” And BIPOC folx like Latria, have been “out here” for centuries. Indigenous peoples, captive Africans brought to the US in the name of chattel slavery and their descendants, Mexican-Americans, and other non-white folx have been practicing “conservation” for centuries prior to first contact. White people do not own “conservation,” as your perspective — which reads like, “the white man needs to invite BIPOC into the conservation conversation” — suggests. White people were, for lack of better terminology, the last ones to the party, and we haven’t been able to see beyond ourselves, to see that non-white folx have been doing this work for ages. This is why there was no word like “environmentalism” prior to colonization or even hyper-industrialization: there wasn’t a need for one. White folks don’t have much to teach BIPOC about conservation, then — instead, we have a lot to learn from BIPOC in this regard.

The course of events as it unfolds in Jackson currently is familiar for BIPOC folx to have to witness, this practice on the part of white folx: showing up after the fact, owning the work, taking credit for the work, being called out, and refusing to step aside. I hope that you, Mr. Beckwith, and those propping up the settler-colonial, white supremacist, patriarchy from which you and I benefit and which we perpetuate given our very identities, can step back, consider this context, and reevaluate the decision you have made to ignore these 17 BIPOC leaders’ calls for action — these leaders are also a majority female-identifying so this blanket dismissal reads as misogynistic, you should know, a dismissal of women in an era where women have truly had enough of being dismissed by men. These 17 leaders’ recommendation is the right call. It centers the most vulnerable among us and we know that decisions that serve those in our society who have traditionally been underserved always lead to more holistic, ecologically-sound action — your goal! After all, all oppression is interrelated. Accordingly, the environment’s mistreatment emerges from the same cisheteropatriarchal, settler-colonial, white supremacist mindset we see at play in Shift JH’s decision-making, in the decision for

you, Mr. Beckwith, to continue to serve as ED, and to be afforded the privilege to oversee the transfer of power you claim you’ve been working towards.

While we know that intent matters not in the face of egregious impact, by outlining your intent you have in fact illuminated the root cause of what is at issue within your organization: its Executive Director prioritizes conservation efforts over DEI and justice work. How can the organization be expected to revamp itself if the individual at the helm, who espouses such values continues to direct the organization’s course?

I hope you can understand why I am writing you today to ask that you not only step down as Executive Director of Shift JH in accordance with not only the wishes of the 17 BIPOC leaders you yourself recognized for their leadership capabilities, but that you also cease to profit from perpetuating a fallacious narrative that suggests Shift JH and ELP is a safe place for BIPOC until you vet your participants for DEI training/train your staff in DEI. I understand that you have invested time, energy, and passion into creating Shift JH. I hope you can understand why it stands to be best served as an organization by individuals who are prepared to adequately and empathetically listen and respond to those upon whom its creators and organizers have inflicted pain, trauma, and hardship.

Thank you for your time,

Ashley Reis, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Environmental Studies
Department of Interdisciplinary Studies
The State University of New York at Potsdam