Hope Is A Verb - The Largest Dam Removal in U.S. History: Indigenous Leadership, the Klamath River & Lessons in Repair

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

The battle to restore the Klamath River lasted generations. When the dams finally came down, salmon returned within three days - far faster than scientists expected, marking a turning point for Indigenous rights, ecological restoration and cultural survival. Meet Amy Bowers Cordalis - attorney, activist and member of the Yurok Tribe - who helped lead one of the most significant river restoration efforts in modern history. Amy shares the story behind America’s largest dam removal project: from growing up alongside the Klamath River and witnessing the devastating 2002 salmon die-off, to becoming the first General Counsel for the Yurok Tribe and helping navigate a long fight against political, legal and corporate interests that many believed was impossible to win. This isn’t just a conversation about dams or conservation. It’s about what comes after victory - and what repair truly means for ecosystems, communities, culture and our collective future.In this episode:How Amy blew up a dam on her birthdayWhy salmon returned to the Klamath River in just three daysThe cultural and spiritual connection between the Yurok people, the river and salmonWhat the 2002 mass death of 70,000 salmon meant for Indigenous communitiesHow grief and anger led Amy to law school and environmental advocacyWarren Buffett - and why his team ended up on the banks of the Klamath RiverThe surprising economics of dam removal and river restorationFinding the joy in advocacyWhat the Klamath story teaches us about hope, persistence and ability of nature and communities to healTimestamps:00:54 - Introduction to the Klamath River story02:26 - Meet Amy Bowers Cordalis03:59 - The Yurok's relationship with the Klamath and the salmon07:05 - The turning point in 2002 10:59 - How Amy's great-grandmother told her to take action12:53 -  80,000 salmon died, no media showed up 13:38 - What a decades-long battle felt like on the inside?15:13 -  When Warren Buffet's team came out to the Klamath19:02 -  Midpoint reflections20:43 - How the Klamath restoration changes the story of environmental activism22:55 - Why restoration and economics can go hand in hand23:49 - What it's like to blow up a dam, on your birthday25:04 - How the elders have responded to the Klamath flowing again27:32 - How salon beat scientific predication and returned after three days29:23 - The myth of the lone hero32:11 - Other river restoration projects happening in America34:26 - What comes after victory? Healing.38:21 - What the Klamath story tells us about what's possible40:22 - Final reflectionsWant to dive deeper?👉 Find out more about Amy and her book 'The Water Remembers'👉 Amy's non-profit Ridges to RifflesAbout Fix The News:Fix The News is a solutions-focused media platform sharing stories from the frontlines of progress - exploring what’s working in the world and the people making it happen.Subscribe & follow:If you enjoyed this episode, follow the podcast and leave a review - it helps more people find these stories.Production credits:Hosted by Angus Hervey and Amy Davoren-RoseProduced by Fix The NewsAudio production: Anthony Badolato, Hear That! This episode was produced in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung peoples.

I don't remember a time where fish was not a part of my world. I can't tell you the first time I saw salmon. I can't tell you the first time that I saw the Klamath River because it was always a part of my universe. It was like seeing your hand. You know what I mean? You don't remember when you first noticed your hand. But that's what it's like for us.

And even to this day, our life cycle revolves around, the salmon. Welcome to Fix the News. I'm Amy. I'm Gus and these are stories from the front lines of progress. Gus, I feel like we have been waiting a long time to have this conversation. We have been thinking about and writing about and talking about the story of the Klamath River and the dam removal on the Klamath for four or five years at this point, maybe even longer. I think it goes all the way back to 2020. It is one of my favourite conservation stories of the decade and something that we have spent a lot of time at Fix the News Covering. I think it was one of the first environmental stories that I wrote about

and it just captured my imagination. It felt like it had everything in it. It was the largest dam removal in, was it US and world history? At that time it was the largest in the world. I think subsequently that's been superseded by a dam removal project in China. But back then, it was the largest damning project ever. I think what really got me were all the stories that started coming out of the people behind it. I mean, this is the ultimate story of people power, right? Yeah, and one of the people who was right at the centre of that was the lead attorney for the Urock tribe, Amy Bowers called Dallas.

And I recently had the privilege of working with Amy and helping her bring that story to the TED stage in 2026. And so we are lucky enough today to be joined by here where we get to understand how the whole thing went down, quite literally. I want to start with Ayakui, Neknow, Amy Bowers, Cordalis, Nuwak, Brekoy, Numitewa, Waqlau, Wau, Wau, Wau, Wau, Wau, Wau, that is an introduction in my own language,

from Yurok, from Northern California in the United States of America, or what is now known as the United States of America. And my story has been an adventure that has taken me through blowing up dams, watching and witnessing fish kills and acts of ecocide, enjoying loving a river, learning more about my family legacy, but now also victory. And so the timing of it is important.

And of course, the victory is the work that we've done on the Klamath River, which is the largest salmon restoration project in history around the world, the largest U.S. Dam removal project. I feel really grateful to have the privilege to tell that story and then also grateful to be the generation that got to witness this massive victory for nature, for indigenous peoples, and really for humanity. One place I thought might be interesting to start kind of hear this all the time

but there is a relationship between the salmon and the Uruk people what does that mean? How could you be in a relationship with the fish? When you said or when you asked me talk about the Urock relationship to fish like instantly my heart warms There's that warm kind of good feeling in my heart which is a reflection of the relationship that I have with the salmon.

So first off for context, my family and many other Uruk families or indigenous families from the Klamath have been there since time immemorial. And we have been fishing these same runs of salmon since the beginning of time. And so we don't know in existence where the fish don't exist. and we exist. One thing my dad always jokes about is like we've been fishing these same salmon runs for so long that they carry our DNA and we carry their DNA. And I was just at a conference where there was a fish geneticist.

And she was like, it's true. You know, from a scientific perspective, that's actually true because we've been in relationship for so long. I guess I would ground it in my own experience, which is, I don't remember a time where fish was not a part of my world. I can't tell you the first time I saw salmon. I can't tell you the first time that I saw the Klamath River because it was always a part of my universe. It was like seeing your hand.

You know what I mean? You don't remember when you first noticed your hand. But that's what it's like for us. And even to this day, our life cycle revolves around, the salmon. The biggest run in my lifetime is the fall Chinook run, and that comes home to the river in August and September. And we have, for multiple generations, been fishing that run. And so in order to to fish and to be there, like, you need to be on the river and you need to be sort of ready to go whenever the salmon go. And sometimes the salmon run at night. And so in August and

September, I have a hard time sleeping because I think genetically I am so trained to be like on the river fishing. It's almost like I get this superpower of, okay, it's time to go harvest the salmon so that you can get enough salmon to prepare for the winter. So I get this like elevated, I don't know, energy or something. But that's what I mean is like we, it's so, yeah, it's like inextricably tied. And what I I would say too is like the flip side of that is now that the salmon runs are still in bad shape, it's going to take a couple years for them to regenerate, a couple life cycles. We feel that in a very, very deep way and it feels like trauma. It feels like you're witnessing a family member sort of slowly

pass from a chronic illness. That's how we experience that. 2002 really was kind of of this turning point, right? Because it was this huge fish kill. If you close your eyes and take yourself back there, can you tell us like how it smelt or sounded? Try and help us understand what that was actually like. Yeah. And I wrote about this in the book and really spent a lot of time laboring over my words because it was such a profound experience. that motivated, you know, me, but then also thousands of other people to save the river. And I'm closing my eyes right now. The Klamath is this place that is, it's your home.

It's a place that when you want to recover and you want to like rejuvenate, you go to. And it's usually pretty alive and strong and healthy. You come to rely on certain things. happening at certain times. So think about how we rely on the sun to come up in the morning and the moon to rise in the evening. You anticipate that the salmon are going to come home and they'll go up the river and everything will be fine. So then imagine water lows are lower than you've ever seen it in your whole life. There's exposed rock and you can see where the have been on the rocks in certain places.

And so imagine the flow is two, three, four feet lower. There's hardly any spots for you to take your boats up the river. So you just know something's wrong and it's hot. And then the water smells, a rotten, putrid kind of smell. And the water quality is, it's like a thick, and it's green and there's lots of algae in there. And then the salmon started dying, right? And what happened, and the salmon, the clam of salmon,

they range anywhere from 12 to 30 pounds. So they're big, and usually they're a very bright silver color. But that year, the salmon would come up, and they didn't have that bright color. And it was almost like they would come nose up out of the water, and you would see their mouths open like they were gasping for air, and then they would dive back down into the water. And then a couple minutes later,

you'd see that same salmon floating up from the depths of the water dead. And then gradually through it all, it was anywhere between 70,000 to 80,000 salmon died in that fashion. And so their corpses just started floating down the river. and it lasted for two weeks. And so then eventually their corpses started lining the banks of the river, three, four layers deep. And that's when the smell got even worse. Think about if you have salmon or other kind of fish that goes bad in your refrigerator times that by infinity.

And the hard thing is there had never been a story in Eurach's tenure on the Klamath. so time immemorial or something like that had happened. And so that's told us this wasn't natural. So we knew something was obviously gravely wrong, but we really didn't know what it was and we didn't know how to stop it. So it felt like the world was ending. Thank you for sharing that. This is more an observation than a question,

but we have spoken to so many incredible people in this podcast, Amy, but I don't think I've ever experienced somebody who embodies the story of the change as much as listening to you. So in that moment, how did you know what to do next? What was the thing that moved you forward from that absolute devastation into some kind of action? It was my late great-grandmother. I was in a tribal fisheries boat and witnessing all that. And I felt her really just move through me.

And it felt like electricity going through my body. And she told me, it's your turn to fight. Those were the words. And then my next thought was I was going to go to law school and try to present that kind of ecocide from ever happening again. Yeah. So it was profound. You know, I look back on that and, you know, the river itself is such a powerful place.

And for Uruk people, it has always been in our culture to be in relationship with the river, which means you're communicating with the river, you're experiencing the river. And in our culture, too, we listen and receive guidance from our ancestors. So, you know, now that I'm a little older, it makes sense to me that that happened in that moment of great tragedy that the ancestors came and the river spoke, right? They both spoke and said, here's what you need to do. But one thing I did want to share is right after the fish kill, my aunt was chairwoman of the Urock tribe at the time.

And she, along with the whole tribe, notified the... media and no one came. No one came. Yeah. And, you know, talk about feeling marginalized, right? It was like no one cared about the river, no one cared about the salmon, no one cared about our culture, and then also recognizing like we didn't cause that. It was something else. And if we were going to fix it, it would have to involve other large, powerful industries and corporations and government, and if no one even heard about it or no one cared about it, how were you going to do that? I mean, Amy, what you just outlined there was what you were up against, right? You were up against powerful corporations. You were also up against a media cycle that

wasn't working for you. From the outside looking in, this was a David and Goliath story, a long fight against big systems that are really, really, really. powerful. Did it feel like that on the inside of this? You know, it felt like we were fighting for our survival. It was an existential crisis that we were fighting against. And in that effort, there was no, we did not have the privilege of acknowledging that. Because if you acknowledge that, then it meant you had to be like, oh, you know, I'm fighting one of the richest men in the world. But we didn't have that privilege because we just had to focus on the fight. And I don't think that in that moment, it was, I mean, obviously we had to figure out how to work with those companies.

It didn't feel like it was a strategic choice to acknowledge that because then maybe it would have felt like we were up against impossible odds. And I'm always a person, too, that especially with advocacy, it's like keep your face to the sunshine and you'll never see the shadows kind of person. So I just leaned into like what was actually working. When you look back on that whole process, are there any moments that just really stand out? Yeah. Oh, yeah. In 2020, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which had jurisdiction over approving the sort of order that was required to start dam removal. and they issued an order that required the power company to stay on the dam license through removal,

which was inconsistent with the settlement agreement and the power company threatened to pull out. So Urock leadership called up Warren Buffett and also sent emails to like Warren's number two, three and four executives and invited them to the Uruk Reservation to talk about the dam removal agreement. And the brilliance of that, and it was complicated because it was the beginning of the COVID pandemic. And so, you know, we had sent this invitation for these guys who are based out of Omaha to come out all the way to Northern California to the Urock Reservation, which is extremely remote. We are about six hours north of San Francisco, which is still California, and many people don't know that. So, you know, we were asking them to travel. And to their credit,

the executives came. And we took him for a boat ride up the river. They were met by protesters who had actually blocked off the whole river. And there was a big sign that said something along the lines of sign the damn deal. And it was a good one because it allowed a place for the protesters, and some of them were people who had been protesting for 20 years, to speak directly to these executives. And they just said, we will never stop. We will never stop protesting. So take this deal or else, like we're going to just keep going. And then we get up to this place called Blue Creek, which is one of the first tributaries to the Klamath. It's a really powerful place for Yurok. It's a salmon sanctuary.

It's one of the first places that the salmon go and they rest. It's very cold water. It's still relatively clean and wild and undeveloped for the most part. So we take them to this place and we had set up a meeting space on the banks of Blue Creek and the Klamath. And our tribal leaders basically reiterated the grassroots leader's message of if you pull out of this deal, we're just going to keep protesting. and we will never stop. And that had a lot of teeth in it because at that time in the United States, Standing Rock Sioux had just launched these really effective and powerful protests

over the LNG pipeline in the middle of the states. And it was really bad media for the company. And that was lurking in the minds of these executives, and they didn't want that. I think the river really spoke for itself. And so that following Monday, I get a call from one of the executives and he says, you have a week. And I want a briefing on all the liability concerns, all the insurance, the whole settlement agreement, all of it. And that's really when we got to dam removal. And even Warren Buffett issued a statement, something along the lines of, we're so happy we could work with our tribal partners to remove dams.

And so it was a big turning point And that's really how we got to Dam Removal as we know it You know Gus, until I started following this story of the Klamath I was one of those people that would scroll past river restoration stories Because it just on the face of things I didn't seem to think there was a lot that was interesting in them But this in particular, this just changed the whole way I see this kind of work.

I had no idea of the impact, both environmental and human, but also like the ripples that lead out into even, you know, economic factors. Yeah, it always says river restoration, but these are incredible human stories. Yeah. You know, the rivers contain communities

and tendrils that's spread out to communities for hundreds, sometimes thousands of kilometres outside of that basin. And river restoration doesn't happen by magic. It happens because people decided to do something about it. I think it's worth pointing out that the whole project was delivered under budget and ahead of schedule. So there's something about, they say that never happens with construction,

but it possibly can happen with deconstruction. This just completely rewrites the rules of environmental advocacy and restoration, right? Absolutely. And the key there is that they did it because they were able to find a way where all sides benefited. I mean, it's a cliche, but it was a win-win for all parties involved. And if we can somehow get that message across, I think it could be incredibly powerful. One of the things I love about the Klamath story is that it kind of goes counter to the way that we think things work when it comes to environmental activism. that there is a fight, that there is a good guy, that there is a bad guy,

then the good guys beat the bad guys, and then everyone wins. I don't think that's what this story is, right? Can you just explain to us a little bit more about why this is a different kind of approach and why it could be so powerful in being applied into other places? Very good question, and I think it speaks to the status of humanity through the lens of politics and the environmental crisis and the economy, there is a powerful majority of people who have common interest in wanting to be able to afford sort of basic things for their families,

take care of their families, have access to clean water, to clean land, to clean air. And at least in the state, right now our politics are so divided and are, you know, there's a whole, what would you even call it, segment that seems to be in power now that would seek to lead with fear and divide us and to say, oh, well, farmers are against indigenous people, ranchers are against indigenous peoples. But what we found on the Klamath is that we have so many commonalities. And one of the things that brings us together is the Klamath Basin itself.

If the Klamath Basin is in ecological crisis, it can't support anybody's way of life, not even farming. And so if we as the people can come together and at least acknowledge that common interest, that then brings people together to this place where you can start leaning into your commonalities and working towards uplifting the things that you need in order to support those commonalities. And I want to be clear that the reason the power company came along was because of the economics.

We got to a place in the project where there was a legal order that in order to continue to operate the clammy dams, the power company would have had to install fish ladders, and it was cheaper to remove the dams than to install the fish ladders. And so the economics comes into play. And that's what led to essentially a $500 million settlement agreement that equally valued the rights of nature, business, and indigenous peoples. It was a profitable project. And I raised that to say that oftentimes there's this perception of like, oh, well, we can't save nature.

We can't uplift indigenous rights and still be capitalists or make money. And on the clamet, that wasn't true. Like, a dam's a big thing, right? Like, can you describe what blowing up a dam is like to us? I have no context. Yes, I got to blow up a dam on my birthday. Talk about the, yeah, exactly. What do you mean?

I mean, I pressed the detonator. Really? Really? Oh, you know, there's like a red detonator. I got to, and it was actually on the ground, and they told me, you have to stomp your foot hard on that thing. So I stomp my foot with the oppression and the aggression and all of the like historical trauma of five generations and just nailed that thing. And then, boom. Like, you know, a dam blowing up.

There's rebar and concrete in the air. It's, you know, it's like this massive cloud of dust and all the things. And then gradually it's settled. and a big part of the dam was gone. It was remarkable. It was out of this world. I mean, I guess the question is, what did you do for your next birthday?

Nothing even memorable. There's like a whole other podcast conversation in that alone. But I remember there were so many amazing photos that came out after those dams were blowing. up, especially of a lot of the elders. And I was wondering, what was their reaction to finally seeing that water flowing again? Disbelief, but also deep healing. I think for all of us watching the river reconnect was such a healing moment because it meant that we could have a future. And it's everything to us.

And we can't be Urochs if the salmon or the river is gone. And so to see that river reconnect meant that we as Uruk people could have a future. And I think for the elders, it's almost incomprehensible. But what's really been resonating is there was a group of indigenous youth who did the first descent of the free-flowing Klamath, and many of those are the grandkids or the great-grandkids of the elders. And so now to have those youth have gone through this experience and developed a completely different relationship with the river. That relationship is based on recreation and joy and subsistence and, like, health.

And that is so different from the experience of the elders, right? Like, the elders, sadly, really had to watch the demise of the salmon runs and the river just sort of getting sicker and sicker. And hearing the kids talk about the river now, I think that's really powerful for the elders. And I'm thinking about my own grandma, her mother, experienced a healthy river. And so I think for the elders to hear the youth talking about a more healthy river

reminds those elders of what their elders told them about the river. And so it's this really, like, it's so powerful. And deep within that also is that the river has healed so quickly. Three days after we removed the lowest dam, Iron Gate Dam. salmon jam past that former dam where they hadn't gone in a hundred years and went into spawning grounds. You know, there are historical spawning grounds. Three days.

For 20 years, the brightest minds in, you know, fisheries biology and salmon folks studied how long it would take for the salmon to pass and return to those historical spawning grounds after dam removal. And they said 20 years, 10 years, three days. The salmon remembered exactly where to go. And then the people, we also remember what it was like to be in relationship with healthy ecosystems. And now the river smells sweet. It just has this like sweet, joyful, clean smell to it. And the water itself is visibly cleaner and colder. And then the river. river itself feels so much stronger. I remember like jumping in the river for the first time post dam removal. And it was like the water just told me, I'm different. I'm different. And so it's just

been remarkable how quickly the river has begun to heal and how much progress it's made. And we still have a ton of work. And we should talk about that. But I do want to acknowledge. Like we've made a lot of progress really quickly. I know you've got a ton of work and there's still so much further to go in this story. And maybe that's a good place to kind of point to us how important that is in your own story and the way you tell these stories.

Like I remember Ted, you kept on coming to me and you're like, oh, this can't be about me. Like there was so many people involved in this. You know, I've got to talk about these people. Then I've got to talk about these people. I've got to mention those people. And I was like, there's no time, Amy. You can't do all those people.

And there's something, there's something kind of deeper in that, right? Like, we need avatars for our stories. And you are an avatar for this story. You know, whether you like it or not, that is the role that you're playing. And I think that there is an acceptance from you that that is what you're doing. How do you kind of reconcile this, right? Like, people want individual heroes, but actually change never comes from individual heroes. comes from groups of people. How do you fix that? How do you solve that?

What you do matters. As an individual, what you do matters. And we are so powerful when we lean into our individual life force and personal sovereignty. And when we believe in ourselves and when we choose to pursue whatever is in our heart, it leads to complicated. yet very powerful life experiences. And that's what I've witnessed. But it requires cleaning out of your mind of all the distractions, right? We're so on our phones

and the algorithm is producing all this blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like put it down, go outside, breathe. And I don't care if you're in a rule or a city area. breathe and go explore and be curious about who you are and what is really like in your heart and in your belly and believe in yourself. And I think those narratives of like, oh, well, there's one hero tends to suggest that, well, what I do doesn't really matter and I'm never going to be that one hero. And what I've witnessed on the Klamath is like we're all heroes when we really dive into what motivates us at a deeply human level.

And everybody, whether you are processing permits or answering the phone or, I don't know, signing the contracts or passing the bill or just fishing on the river, whatever it might be, all of those little incremental steps add up towards a big effort. And all those steps are necessary in order for us to sort of change the time. tied and accomplish these massive projects. You said you've been traveling around the United States and you're starting to hear other stories about like how change is happening. Can you share some of those?

Yeah. Yeah, it's actually so exciting. We don't necessarily hear about maybe those local champions or the smaller projects. But through my, through climate dam removal and the work getting the book out, I have met remarkable people who are doing remarkable work. I think about the Snake River in northern Idaho, which is a tributary to the Columbia, one of the biggest salmon producing rivers in the U.S.

It's been dammed. They've been working for some time to try to get the dams out because the dams are killing salmon, as dams do, and hurting the river. And they're making remarkable problems, Of course, the Trump administration is up to its shenanigans, but I think the key thing that they're doing right now is just continuing to keep working, right? In these hard moments, and that's what we learned about on the Klamath is like, you can never accept no for an answer and you just keep working. So there's great work happening on the snake.

Another example in California on the Eel River, they just finalized a dam removal agreement. The L.A. River. This is a fun one. The L.A. River has been what they call concretized. They basically port concrete over 51 miles in order to support the development of Hollywood and movie making. And obviously that hurt the river. And so there's multiple people in the L.A. area that are working to remove the concrete or restore, you know, other parts of the river to build its resorts. resiliency. And it's really, it's just remarkable. You know, I think that with humanity at this point in time, there's like this deep ache to reconnect with nature and to heal it. And so

these expressions of that feeling are coming out around the world. So often with these stories, we see the victory as the end of the story. But once you get to that victory, the next phase of the story is actually healing. And can communities heal in the same way that rivers and ecosystems heal? Beautiful question. And my answer is yes. So one of the reflections from the elders when he first witnessed the free-flowing river where the largest dam used to be

was he said it was like the dam was never there. And it really does feel like the dams were never even there. And when you think about the lifetime of a river, those dams were there for maybe 100 years, and that's like a blink of the eye in the context of the river's life.

And what that means is that when that dam is a, gone. When the river starts to heal, we also start to feel this internal healing because we don't have that deep harm or that deep hurt in our heart because of how the river is hurting. And then what that allows is us to start person by person, this healing process. And then that brings the community back together. And to an example of that is at my nonprofit, Ridges to Riffles Indigenous Conservation Group, we're leading a, it's called an IPAC.

It's an intertribal advisory group for the restoration of all those lands within the former dams. And it's people, leaders from the different tribes that are using traditional knowledge in order to restore those lands. but what that does is put our leaders in a place where they can start talking and planning and implementing their vision for the future. And the salmon reunite us, right? They bring us all together because they travel over 400 miles, river miles, from the mouth of the river where I'm from all the way up to the very top.

And so they bring the tribes all back together in that way. And for 100 years, the salmon were blocked mid-year. way and the Klamat tribes, for example, at the top of the river didn't have access to salmon. And so now the Klamath tribes have access to salmon. And so we're working together to figure out like how do we improve habitat up at the top of the basin? How can we like, you know, work together to facilitate this, this coming home? But here's the other point about this, is that when you heal ecosystems, so in the Klamath, we have, and it's not totally over, but dammit. removal is a big step in recovering from the ecological crisis in the basin. Because the basin

was in ecological crisis, we were also in economic crisis. And also there was the social justice, the environmental justice crisis because of the essentially killing of the tribal culture. So when we rebuild the ecosystem resiliency, you bring certainty back to the communities dependent upon it. which is good for democracy. It's good for economy. It's good for basically building a more equitable future because you're bringing certainty to the people that I'm going to at least have this baseline environmental condition

that can support my way of life. And sure, there will be contingencies, but at least I'm not an ecological collapse. If the Klamath story tells us anything, What does it tell us about what's possible? We can heal the world. I really believe that this is a model that could be applied anywhere around the world. And it's a model that we desperately need in this time of political, cultural, ecological crisis.

And again, it starts with that, like, individual decision that I'm going to work towards something I feel passionate about. And I'm going to know that I make a difference towards something bigger than, myself. But it's a beautiful life. It's a beautiful way of living. I think that's what I've always really loved about you and this story. There is a joy and an excitement about this that you don't often get with environmental stories. I think so many people have been beaten down in the environmental space. Understandably, I mean, understandably. Like there is so much horror and, you know, and anger and people have to hold it. those emotions. But I love

speaking to you because there is a joy and an excitement there. And then I think that is a big part of the story. I think it's a big part of how change happens. The only other thing I would say is get outside and go have some fun. 100%.

Yeah. Go outside and hug a tree. Breathe in the air. Put your toes in the grass, on the dirt, in the riverbed, whatever it is. and just reconnect. There's so much power in our routines

and where we put our attention, where we put our bodies. So choose to put it in a healthy place, which you can never go wrong when you lean into, you know, the natural world and the environment. When you meet Amy, the joy that you can hear in her voice

and that you can see on the screen, it comes through, person 10 times over. She exudes this spirit of openness and gratitude and a joy in being alive that that I think is quite rare. And I really am going to be thinking about that for a long time going forward and wondering about whether there's something of that that I can bring into my own life and whether there's more of that joy that I can bring into the work that we do here. It's so powerful and it is transformative. I floated through the rest of the day. I mean, we did this interview really early in the morning and it just, it just changed the whole way I approached the day. And you know, like we,

we talk a lot about changing the world and we meet so many people and we know that these feats are really hard and they're time consuming and they're complicated and they can seep into your everyday life. And there is so much sacrifice involved. But I think what Amy reminds us so beautifully is that there can also be so much joy in this. And that we have to keep finding the joy in this. That's the secret ingredient. And the ripples will keep on going. I cannot wait to see where this project is going to be in five years' time.

We know there are a lot of podcasts out there. It means a lot to us that you chose this one. It's made possible by our paying subscribers. So if you're one of them, a big thank you. And if you want to support what we do, you can find us at fixthenews.com. This show was produced by Amy Rose with audio by Anthony Badalasso from Here That.

It was made in Australia, on the lands of the Guttagal, Wurundry and Woiwurong peoples. If you liked it, hit subscribe. Leave a review. or send it to someone you love who needs to hear it. Thanks for listening.