Grant Gutierrez

As an activist anthropologist, I ask: how are concerns about global climate change catalyzing new configurations of energy production and consumption? This curiosity compels me to learn through action and to understand the possibilities of living ethically in a precarious world. I work with river defense networks in Chile to investigate the social life of water, emergent forms of environmentalism, and the practice of ecology and science within social movements. My ethnographic fieldwork flows from a personal-political love affair with water, the product of being raised by the American River watershed in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas in Northern California. I carry these and other experiences with me as I engage in collaborative work with communities reclaiming their waters.