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Sleeping comfortably outdoors is the secret to having a better time outdoors. It’s something people spend years of effort and thousands of dollars trying to nail, and it’s by far the most frequent thing readers ask for my help with. So allow me to make it easy for you: this is the ultimate outdoor sleep system, offering the most comfort possible. 

I’ve been doing this whole camping thing for 38 years now. In that time, I’ve slept on everything from the bare ground to mattresses in expensive rooftop tents, and I’ve done that everywhere from my backyard to the Australian Outback. Because I get to call all that a job, I’ve also had the opportunity to try a massive range of sleep-related gear. Based on that experience, this is my money-is-no-object, total sleep solution. It’s what makes my camping trips comfortable and what enables me to spend so much time outdoors. To the best of my knowledge, there is nothing better—so long as you’re using a vehicle to haul it. 

A good tent is one that’s a pleasure to spend time in and also one that’s quick and easy to set up and take down. For those reasons combined, it’s the Nemo Wagontop 4P that’s become my go-to shelter. Its external-pole, single-wall configuration keeps rain out as I erect it, which I’m now able to do in just a couple minutes. 

Once it’s up, the Wagontop forms a cube whose interior is 6.5 square feet. Unlike most other tents, that means you can stand in it as easily as you can lay down in it. Ventilation windows around the top perimeter keep the tent cool on summer nights and eliminate condensation issues that typically plague single-wall designs. They also retain privacy while open.

Given its size and vertical-wall height, you’d think the Wagontop would be vulnerable to wind. But when I got caught in a windstorm during a group camping trip to Baja two years ago, my Wagontop was the only tent that survived the event unscathed. In those conditions, it actually fared better than smaller two-person backpacking tents, as well as traditional dome-style car-camping models. I still use the same tent today; it’s stood up incredibly well to both regular use and severe weather. 

It’s remarkable, then, that the Wagontop packs down into a small duffel bag and weighs less than 20 pounds. It provides substantially more space and comfort than rooftop tents, at a fraction of the weight, packed size, and price. 

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Adding a floor atop your tent’s base will insulate your sleeping environment from the ground’s temperature and moisture. It’ll also protect your tent from all the debris you and your dogs will track in—and make cleaning all that up as easy as possible. It’s easy to dismiss this as unnecessary, but a floor really will add a significant degree of comfort to your shelter. 

I’ve seen people use everything from foam tiles to wool army blankets for tent floors, but inside the Wagontop, it’s Nemo’s own Victory blanket that works best. It fits the interior shape and size of the tent perfectly, and its flannel top layer adds cushion and insulation, while its waterproof bottom serves as a moisture barrier. 

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Your mattress at home is tailored to provide a perfect amount of both cushion and support. So why don’t we ask the same of our camping pads? The big air beds most people use while car camping serve only to get you off the ground. Once you’re there, they sag in the middle, bending your back into uncomfortable shapes. The problem gets worse if you want to sleep next to someone, let alone with them. 

Outdoors, a mattress must also provide significant insulation in order to prevent the cold ground from sucking the heat from your body. Counterintuitively, more insulation doesn’t make camping mattresses less comfortable during warmer temperatures, it just adds weight and cost. 

The incredible Exped MegaMat tackles all of the above issues by wrapping an air chamber inside a thick layer of memory foam. That solution provides a custom level of cushion (it gets firmer than any other mattress I’ve ever slept on) and excellent support for the body. It’s also the most insulating sleeping pad I’ve ever seen, with a claimed R-value of 9.5. 

I use the long-wide Exped MegaMat Duo, which at 78 inches long and 52 inches wide offers roughly the same dimensions as a full-size bed—ample space for both my fiancée, Virginia, and I to sleep on comfortably. It’s also by far the most ideal surface I’ve found (outdoors or in) upon which to have sex. The degree of bounce and cushioning provide both good energy return and solid support when things get vigorous. 

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I’ve been camping on that MegaMat since 2015, and in that time I’ve experimented with various types of bedding in a hugely wide range of weather conditions. I’ve found that the restriction created by even a two-person sleeping bag simply fails to take advantage of the full comfort and space benefits offered by the pad’s generous, totally flat sleeping surface. The MegaMat is as comfortable as my bed at home, so I decided to treat it the same way. 

A fitted sheet set made from polar fleece wicks moisture and adds a small amount of insulation. As temperatures drop, I add layers of heavy fleece or surplus wool blankets, then throw a heavyweight down quilt over the top. A queen-size Rumpl is large enough to seal off the sides of the bed, even with two people in it, and provides a substantial degree of warmth. Just like with your outdoor clothing, layering this sleep system enables you to respond to varying conditions. The top sheet from the fleece sheet set is plenty on hot summer nights, but with two fleece blankets and two of those big Rumpls on top, we’ve slept in temperatures as low as 10 degrees in total comfort, while retaining the ability to roll around and spread out. 

Taking a lesson from mummy bags, I also employ a throw-size Rumpl to insulate our heads on cold nights. I just tuck its edges under the top and sides of the mattress, drape it over the pillows we brought from home, and our heads and faces stay toasty.

Together, this setup is so warm and so comfortable that Virginia and I have, on multiple occasions, emerged from it in the morning fresh from a full night’s sleep and blissfully unaware that our friends have struggled through an unexpectedly cold or rainy night. With the days of risking discomfort behind us, this system enables us to spend more nights outdoors, in more extreme weather, more enjoyably.

For sure, this whole setup is expensive, but it’s also the single most empowering gear system in our arsenal. 

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I’m totally satisfied with the level of comfort achieved by this sleep system, but I’m also always looking to maximize campsite convenience or take the ridiculousness of this setup to a new level.

After the MegaMat was abraded by a bundle of firewood in the back of a truck, necessitating a field repair that’s held solid for the last two years, I wanted to find a way to better protect the mattress while it rides in or on vehicles. I found that a large ARB duffel bag perfectly fits a deflated and totally compressed long-wide Duo. That heavy-duty rubber-backed canvas sack then protects the mattress from both the weather and foreign objects, enabling us to transport it on a roof rack or in a truck bed. 

And there are two other upgrades I’d like to try this year. In need of an extra guest bed over Thanksgiving, I ordered a portable metal bed frame from Amazon, sized to fit the MegaMat Duo. It’s heavy and bulky, but for a long-stay camping trip, it might justify its hassle by raising the mattress off the ground, giving us storage space for all our other stuff, and thus freeing up room inside the tent. I was also sorely tempted by the Kickstarter project that Rumpl ran a couple years back for a battery-powered heated blanket with all-night run time. The brand no longer sells those, so I’m searching for an alternative. We’re warm enough in our existing setup, but a heated blanket could boost the system’s luxury quotient even more. 

But by far the most effective thing I’ve done to this system is simply to take care of it. Everything here adds up to $1,300 or more. By being careful to unpack and unfold everything at home, dry it out, and store it properly, this stuff is working as well today as it did when I first got it four years ago. And all of it has years of regular use left. It’s a big up-front investment for sure, but with proper care, it can give you hundreds of great nights outdoors. 

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The Land of Enchantment: our state motto perfectly captures New Mexico and its sacred Zia, a harmonious symbol of friendship that originated in the Zia Pueblo.

The four words evoke a stunning landscape of mountains, rivers, deserts, forests, and Native American communities. The Land of Enchantment has sunsets that take your breath away, with skylines sketched on a canvas of reds, oranges, purples, and pinks.

The Land of Enchantment promises summers spent hiking, biking, and fishing along the Rio Grande, in the Sandias, or within the Organ Mountains. Winters are spent on the snowy slopes of Angel Fire, Ruidoso, Santa Fe, and Taos. October brings valley skies dotted with 1,000 hot-air balloons gliding across the horizon, while November sunrises attract early birds—thousands of sandhill cranes and snow geese rising above the marshes of Bosque del Apache.

The Land of Enchantment is the written and lived culture of New Mexico, forged among the distinct and unique cultures of our pre-Hispanic, Spanish, and Native American ancestors.

But for many of our state’s youth, the Land of Enchantment is none of these things. It is not rafting, skiing, fishing, hiking, or wildlife watching. The barriers to access these opportunities are too numerous and too ingrained within their communities to overcome.

Our state’s kids have to contend with a whole host of issues that prevent them from getting outside, from a lack of transportation to a lack of resources to a lack of access to outdoor-education programs. Maybe they don’t have anyone in their lives who cares enough to introduce them to this enchanting natural world. The problems are endemic to the whole state: New Mexico ranks last in child well-being and education, first in childhood hunger, and second to last in childhood economic well-being. 

The two of us feel fortunate to have grown up in southern New Mexico, in communities where the outdoors was an integral part of our culture, from the Gila Wilderness to Organ Mountains Desert Peaks National Monument. And our respective upbringings, challenging in their own rights, still provided us with opportunities to see, value, understand, respect, and love the outdoors.

We are now also privileged to have been elected to positions to represent the people of New Mexico and trusted to make the right decisions for current and future generations. That commitment to our constituents drives our action in the state capital of Santa Fe. It drives our will to create and implement public policy that will impact the lives of all New Mexicans.

That’s why we’re championing efforts to create a state Office of Outdoor Recreation and—more importantly—a first-of-its-kind Outdoor Equity Fund.

The Outdoor Equity Fund, supported by more than 50 state and national organizations representing social, environmental, immigration, and health justice, will make the Land of Enchantment more accessible to everyone. All of our state’s youth deserve an opportunity to take advantage of the outdoor recreation and education opportunities our state so bountifully offers. We believe that access to the outdoors is a human right.

Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham has promised to create an Office of Outdoor Recreation this legislative session within the Department of Economic Development. If passed by legislators, the Outdoor Equity Fund would also be created—the only fund of its kind in the nation that would be designed to spur the development of New Mexico’s next generation of conservationists.

The Outdoor Equity Fund would live alongside the Office of Outdoor Recreation and be administered by the Youth Conservation Corps for the sole purpose of serving underserved youth up to age 18 in our urban, rural, and Native American communities. 

The Fund asks for an initial appropriation of $100,000 from the state, and it invites private industry, foundations, individual donors, and outdoor retailers to pitch in, too. From there, microgrants would be disbursed to local governments—cities, counties, villages, and towns—as well as nonprofit organizations and Native American communities to help power programs that serve at least a 40 percent low-income youth population.

These microgrants, although small, can have big impacts on underserved groups. They can mean the difference between buying 20 tents for a camping trip or having to sleep outside. They can mean the difference between buying kids fishing poles or having them stand on the dock watching other families fish. They can mean the difference between visiting a local park or national forest or staying home because there’s not enough transportation money in the family budget.

The Outdoor Equity Fund can help transform the youth of our state. We can create communities with leaders who care about our climate, air, water, environment, wildlife, and natural resources. But first we must get them outside.

Outdoor-recreation careers are numerous in New Mexico, with more growth expected with the creation of the Office of Outdoor Recreation. Kids from Deming, Española, Farmington, and Santo Domingo Pueblo can be our future forest rangers, wildlife biologists, soil scientists, and fishing guides. But first we must invest in the next generation as much as we’re investing in tourists and retailers.

The benefits of going and playing outside are many—from mental and physical health gains to building community to learning outdoor skills to understanding the natural world and the impacts of a changing climate.

When New Mexico takes care of its youth, it takes care of its future. When we see the hands of many colors, communities, and income levels raised to those pink, purple, and orange skies and truly see the Land of Enchantment reflected on the horizon, then we can be proud of what the Zia symbol represents and all that it means for our kids.

We strongly encourage leaders in other states to create their own Outdoor Equity Funds. Come visit us here in the Land of Enchantment to see how sustainable, ethical outdoor recreation really gets done.

Stephanie Garcia Richard is the commissioner of public lands for New Mexico. Angelica Rubio is a representative for the state. Both women are from southern New Mexico.

He’ll win anyway, but we should also hope that Eliud “Boss Man” Kipchoge runs a world record

The fall road racing season is off to an early start this year. The Berlin Marathon, which typically takes place on the last Sunday in September, is this weekend. Once again, the question leading up to the planet’s fastest marathon is: Will we see a new world record? After all, the last six times that the men’s mark was set, it happened in Berlin. 

In the past, I’ve argued that too much to-do about fast times is not a winning formula when it comes to getting people excited for a race. I still feel that way, but this weekend, I’m also rooting for a new world record. This isn’t because I have a speed fetish, or because I’ve guzzled the marketing Kool Aid. No, I want to see a world record because I think it’s the only way that Eliud “Boss Man” Kipchoge, the Kenyan who is the greatest marathon runner in history, will ever run another competitive marathon in the U.S. 

Kipchoge won the Chicago Marathon in 2014, when he was still solidifying his claim to the 26.2-mile throne. It was his first win in a Marathon Major and, after that, he never looked back, winning six consecutive Majors and counting. However, so far, Kipchoge has shown little interest in racing the two marquee marathons on this side of the Atlantic, Boston and New York. It’s no mystery why this is. Kipchoge wants the world record and that’s not going to happen in hilly, un-paced races like we have on the East Coast. (Boston, as running nerds will be quick to point out, isn’t a world record-eligible course anyway.) But if he can run faster than Dennis Kimetto’s current mark of 2:02:57 this Sunday in Berlin, there’s reason to hope that Kipchoge will be more inspired to run a victory lap through the five boroughs, or to take on the world’s oldest annual marathon. 

There’s a precedent here, and his name is Haile Gebrselassie. Like Kipchoge, the two-time Olympic gold medalist is a top contender for the title of “best-distance-runner-ever.” At various points in his career, Gebrselassie held the world record in the 5,000-meters, the 10,000, and the marathon. However, it wasn’t until he had set two world records in the latter distance (in Berlin, of course) that Gebrselassie finally decided to run the New York City Marathon in 2010. 

It didn’t go so well. Gebrselassie was 37 years old when he made his NYC debut, and he ended up dropping out of the race. Kipchoge, meanwhile, turns 34 in November. The best-case scenario is that he manages to sustain his already astounding level of dominance for two or three more years. The guy is so good, and it’s so much fun to watch him race—it would be a waste if we only got to see him compete in rabbited races on flat courses for the remainder of his career. Sure, there’s always the Olympics, but Tokyo 2020 is a long way off. 

We never got to see what Gebrselassie could really do in New York. He was only lured over here by what must have been a princely appearance fee at a point in his career when his powers were clearly on the wane. It would be a shame if Kipchoge’s story followed a similar script. (To be fair, Gebrselassie still threw down a couple of insane performances after that DNF in New York, including an over-40 half-marathon world record that still stands.)

So here’s to hoping that the marathon gods are generous in the German capital. A few days out, the weather looks decent—around 60 degrees at the start. With any luck, Kipchoge will have some competition to push him late in the race, perhaps from ex-world record holder Wilson Kipsang, or a surprise challenger like last year’s Guye Adola—the Ethiopian marathon debutant who nearly pulled off the upset of the decade in 2017. 

Of course, even if he does manage to break the world record on Sunday, there’s another factor when it comes to getting Kipchoge to run an American marathon: when your name is “Boss Man,” you don’t race for free. The BAA and the NYRR should be prepared to splurge in an effort to coax Kipchoge to our shores. You know that saying about how you only get so many chances at the marathon? It goes both ways.  

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When I come across someone I haven’t seen in a while, they often ask me, “How’s your health?” They are asking about the genetic defect that causes muscles throughout my body to continuously disappear. If you want to know more about my weakness, google FSH muscular dystrophy, and you’ll learn how this progressivedisease sometimes leaves me too weak to even close my eyes, smile, or kiss the people I love. But I prefer to focus on my strengths. Like my ability to adapt equipment or discover new techniques to accomplish tasks like raising sails or moving around a boat.

For example, I used to get stuck while taking off a T-shirt because my arms were too weak to lift it over my head. I’d end up walking around with the shirt half over my head, my arms pinned inside like a straightjacket, banging into furniture and walls until my wife, Nicole, or a friend would free me. Now I bend forward, fling my arms up to catch the bottom of the shirt, then let gravity pull my arms down and the shirt off. I use a similar trick for washing my hair. It’s half yoga and half Houdini.

Seven years ago, when Outside named me its Reader of the Year, I wrote that “I’m screaming within, like a captured animal slamming itself against the walls of its cage.” Now I’m in my mid-forties, and since then, a few things have changed. Nicole and I got a small sailboat in 2012, and in 2014, we set off from San Diego to sail across the Pacific Ocean. Four years and 15,000 miles of open-ocean adventures have flung the door to my cage wide open and let me discover some profound truths about myself.

For example, I like watching goats.

Nicole and I once spent five months anchored in a tiny secluded bay of one of the most remote Polynesian islands in the South Pacific. The island was a rugged paradise with steep cliffs and mountains, heavy vegetation, and not much else. The bay was exposed to open-ocean swells, so our boat was always rolling, pitching, and bobbing. It was far from comfortable, but the movement reminded us that the ocean is alive. When those swells reached the head of the bay, they unleashed upon a shallow reef and formed an incredibly fun wave. The cliffs surrounding the bay had dozens of feral goats who spent their days skittering around from rock to rock, happily living uncomplicated lives.

For three of the five months we were anchored in the bay, I did not set foot on land, simply because I didn’t see a need to. We would wake up, practice yoga, meditate, watch goats, surf, eat, do boat work, read and write, make love, and sleep. Not necessarily in that order.

It wasn’t easy. The days were intensely hot that close to the equator. We ate fruit and fished near the boat, but if we couldn’t catch anything, our diet was reduced to canned food and rice. Our only source of fresh water was what we made from the sea. To power the desalinator, a machine that makes drinking water from sea water, we had to maintain a robust solar-electrical system, on a moving boat, in a salty environment. We had no internet access, phone service, television, or AM/FM radio. Our only connection to the outside world was via our long-distance high-frequency radio, and that only worked when atmospheric conditions allowed our signal to propagate. There were no doctors, no police, no stores, no anything.

While we were there, Nicole flew to the U.S. for a month to visit family for the first time since we sailed away. At first I was terrified. I was alone on a small boat without the strength to get back on board if I accidentally fell in the water. There was no easy way for me to swim to shore. The year before, 50 percent of the indigenous population in these islandshad contracted dengue fever, and when you’re alone and have muscular systrophy, dengue fever is an almost certain death sentence. There were big sharks. And sharp coral. And relentless heat. And constant rolling. And palpable isolation.

But the more time I spent alone in that bay, the more I came to realize that discomfort and fear can be a gift. They kept me sharp, and that helped keep me safe. I soon understood my excessive fear was fueled by endless thoughts of what-ifs instead of what is. Rather than focus on the countless ways I could suffer and die, I chose to focus on the fact that I was alive and well. My mind became calm and clear. Each moment became an intense celebration of life. While I watched the goats I realized I was not actually alone but part of something infinite and incredible. It was the happiest I have ever been.

The ocean is a powerful filter. Every sailor we met in those remote places had made a choice and crossed a massive body of water. Despite our different boats, levels of experience, personal beliefs, financial worth, genders, ages, or languages, every one of us faced our fears and decided to untie the dock lines and sail into the unknown.

Fear can be a gift, but it can also be a cage. Ultimately, it is your choice. There’s no going back once you understand that fact. For some people, that’s an incentive. For others, it’s an excuse.

But how is my health? It’s pretty good, thanks for asking! I’m starting to stumble when I walk. I swim more slowly than ever. When our boat leans to one side, I end up with my face smashed against the hull because my arms are too weak to check my fall. Every day I become less physically able to live this lifestyle with a modicum of safety or comfort. But my skin is clear, and I don’t have any cavities. Whether you’re dealing with carbon fiber or coconuts, we’re all going to die. So let me ask you something: How is your health?

We recently bought a boat that is bigger, faster, more powerful, and more stable than our old boat, all traits that make the new vessel better suited for my remaining level of physical ability so we can continue our adventures in the South Pacific. I’m looking forward to getting back out there among the waves and goats, with my hot wife and fellow sailors, to places where life is something to celebrate, not just survive.

There might be food poisoning and potty-training emergencies. There will be tantrums. There will also be some magic.

When I first dreamed up a monthlong road trip—hiking a bunch of trails from my new Hike It Baby book with my husband and five-year-old son—it seemed like a really great idea. That was more than 3,000 miles ago, and did I ever learn a lot about traveling with kids.

The itinerary took us from Wyoming to Wisconsin. We traveled through the Rockies, where we saw the Tetons and Devils Tower, then hopped over to the Midwest on a monthlong hiking adventure. (Full disclosure: The trip was sponsored by Subaru.) Everywhere we went, we met up with parents from the Hike It Baby community who’d helped me crowdsource kid-friendly trails for the book. Mark joined us for part of the trip, but when he had to return to work, Maura Marko, a friend who runs the blog We Found Adventure, joined me with her kids: Jack, 4, and Rowan, 2.

How people with more than three kids under age five travel regularly, I’ll never understand. While my son’s emotions can be big, if you add in two other little kids’ emotions, a long road trip is like turning on a popcorn machine and forgetting the top as the popcorn begins to explode and fire all around the room.

I’m sure I made much of my well-documented trip (if you were following on Facebook or Instagram) look like an Instagram-perfect walk in the park: all pretty lakes, jagged mountains, and slot canyons. In between, however, were miles of highway, heaps of crying, full-blown temper tantrums, a day spent in a hotel while Mason threw up thanks to food poisoning, poopy pants due to potty-training regression, rainstorms hammering down on camp, giant bugs like prehistoric-looking cicadas, itchy mosquito bites, and way too much road food.

There were also the magic parts of road-tripping: seeing fireflies in Wisconsin, huge thunderstorms in Wyoming, a moose and a roadside grizzly bear munching on berries. We watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind in a campground’s outdoor theater at Devils Tower. We negotiated down a wood ladder into a slot canyon in Indiana and went to the largest children’s museum in the country, where we got to touch real dinosaur bones. We played on huge sand dunes in Michigan at Sleeping Bear Dunes.

If I have learned one thing about being on the road with a baby, then toddler, then pre-K kid over the past few years, it’s that nothing will ever go as planned. This is already life with a five-year-old. When you add in the instability of a road trip, it’s important to remember to be in the moment and roll with whatever is happening, because it will all pass quickly. The great thing about a road trip is that there are always shiny bright things to shift the moment, if you keep your eyes open.

These are the top ten road-trip tips I learned.

Don’t Plan Long Driving Days

These become increasingly harder as your kid ages. You will find yourself quickly frustrated when you have to stop every two to three hours just so you can keep your kid in the car longer.

Add Buffer Time and Then Some

If you are traveling with more than one child, add 15 minutes to every planned stop. You will never get back into the car as quickly as you thought.

Road Games Are Key

Figure out which games play well in motion. Legos will be challenging in a moving car, so think about what kids can do besides just watch movies on an iPad. They will eventually tire of the same four movies, especially on a long road trip.

Keep Everyone Fed

Keep a little cooler handy that you can pack with fresh, easy-to-grab food. Inevitably, you will all get burned out on road food, and it’s nice to have something fresh to offset the garbage you find at all the quick potty and gas stops.

Consider the Potty

If you are potty training, bring a potty that’s easy to put out anywhere. We have gone poop in the back of the car at Walmart, in parking lots of hikes, and on the side of the highway in a wildflower field. Make sure you have nice sealable scented bags in case the poop needs to travel with you for a bit.

Prepare for Messes

Keep waterproof bags (ideally reusable, washable bags) handy so when the messes happen, whether a potty accident or spilled milkshake, you have clean clothes ready to swap out and can seal away the soiled clothes until you get to a washing machine.

Rethink Your Changing Table

Bring a waterproof blanket or mat that’s easy to lay out so you have a surface available for a quick picnic or a diaper change in the middle of nowhere. It’s good to get out of the car and lay the little one out versus going into public bathrooms, both for the germ factor and just to give everyone some outside time after being in the car so much.

Plan Park-and-Play Stops

Look ahead at your route. Ideally, finding somewhere you can grab food and go down the street to eat in a park will win out over trying to drag kids into a restaurant after hours in the car.

Update Classic Road-Trip Games

Remember those road games you played as a kid, like “I spy with my little eye”? Look online for good road games and songs, and add these to your arsenal. We played many games of “I spy” on this trip to alleviate boredom and break up the long drive. It kept the kids entertained almost every time they had ants in their pants and were sick of being in the car.

Embrace the Chaos

Above all, bring your sense of humor and patience fully intact. Road trips are fun, and they are hard. While you may have planned that July summer trip in January—when you had a really easy baby who, by summer, has become a wiggly, not-so-easy toddler—you will be able to do it.

A few years ago, more than 60 percent of the country fell under some level of drought. The worst thing? These warm, dry conditions tend to lead to even warmer, drier ones.

Long-term drought doesn’t engender snappy headlines, but it’s one of the most damaging, stressful, and dangerous weather disasters we deal with. You can escape rising water and prepare for hurricane-force winds, but there’s little you can do when the skies clear out and the ground dries up. The old saying that “drought begets drought” isn’t just a saying—there is truth to the idea that a severe drought can sustain itself for long, long time.

A drought occurs when an area goes without its normal amount of precipitation for an extended period of time. A drought can have short-term effects—turning your lawn brown—or long-term effects, like decimating a region’s crop yield and running reservoirs dry. The severity of a drought depends on the affected area. It’s easier to break a drought and recover from its effects in the eastern United States than it is in the western United States. But in the West, it’s easier to slip into a drought. The water from heavy rain doesn’t last forever, and a hot summer can parch the ground fast in, for example, the parts of southeastern Texas that were swamped by Hurricane Harvey’s historic rains. This area returned to a moderate drought just 11 months later.

We’ve seen our share of devastating droughts across the United States in recent years. The U.S. Drought Monitor found that more than 60 percent of the country fell under some level of drought conditions by the end of September 2012. Over the past ten years, exceptional droughts in the Southeast, southern Plains, and West Coast have cost farmers billions of dollars, brought local water supplies to the brink of failure, and allowed wildfires to spark and burn millions of acres.

It takes a broken weather pattern to lead an area into exceptional drought. The recent years-long drought in the western United States was in large part driven by abnormally warm waters in the northeastern Pacific Ocean. The warm water allowed a near-permanent ridge of high pressure to build across western North America, keeping this part of the world warm and dry for months.

But it’s not just the large-scale patterns driving drought conditions. One of the dirtiest tricks of a drought is that the drought-stricken land can actually help keep the weather warm and dry, leading to a situation where the drought prolongs itself.

In the United States, we get most of our rain from pop-up showers and thunderstorms, like the ones we’d see on a hot summer day. Thunderstorms that form in the humid air of a hot afternoon can drop a quick inch of rain, no problem. One of the requirements for those daily pop-up storms is humidity—not something you get much of in a drought. Stubborn ridges of high pressure in the atmosphere foster warm and dry conditions across areas stuck beneath them. These daytime thunderstorms also rely on humidity provided by the land—sources like croplands and bodies of water. One of the major reasons it’s so humid in the central United States is that crops give off tons of moisture into the atmosphere. When the crops are dead and the ground is so dry it starts to crack, there’s that much less moisture to feed thunderstorm development.

This drought-driven lack of humidity also allows air temperatures to grow hotter than they would under normal conditions. Moist air warms up and cools down more slowly due to the high heat capacity of water. This is why it still feels miserable on a July night in Miami, but it can hit 100 degrees in Las Vegas during the day and get so cool at night that you need a jacket. The hotter air in drought-stricken areas can dry out the land and local water sources even more quickly, speeding up the feedback cycle that makes a drought even worse.

If drought begets drought, then how does a drought end? It usually takes a major shift in weather patterns to get the rain going again. Seasonal shifts can do the trick—the jet stream moving south for the winter can help kick-start a rainier pattern in some cases. We’ve also seen droughts broken by landfalling tropical cyclones. As we’ve seen in extreme examples over the past few years, a storm’s legacy begins only when it hits the coast with intense winds. Storms can bring many inches of drought-busting rains hundreds of miles inland, helpfully ending drought across areas in the path of the storm.

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When confronted with problems, Teresa Baker seeks solutions. 

The founder of the African American Nature and Parks Experience recognized a need for increased work around issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the outdoor industry, so she sprang to action. Inspired by similar efforts in other industries, Baker began working on a pledge in early 2018 that would create a framework of accountability for CEOs, who would receive mentoring and develop an action plan for more equitable hiring practices, workplace training, and marketing strategies. 

In spring 2018, Baker approached Deanne Buck, then the executive director of Camber Outdoors, to suggest partnering on a pledge or updating Camber’s existing CEO Pledge to explicitly include people of color. The existing onefocused solely on women and had already faced pushback for not approaching the work with an intersectional lens. Baker says that Buck told her Camber’s membership was “not ready to take on racial diversity.” (Buck, who stepped down from her Camber post last month, did not respond to interview requests.)

Undeterred, Baker and Chris Perkins, formerly of the outdoor leadership festival SHIFT,launched the Outdoor CEO Diversity Pledge, hosted by Diversify Outdoors, at Outdoor Retailer in July 2018. It was a surprise, then, when Buck took the stage during January’s OR show to announce Camber’s new CEO Outdoor Equity Pledge, a revision of its original initiative that she said was the “first of its kind” to address broad issues of DEI in the outdoor industry.

When Jaylyn Gough, founder of Native Womens Wilderness, heard about the announcement while at the show, she was shocked. Gough, who is Navajo, serves on the steering committee for Baker’s pledge. “It was like, OK, we now know where we stand in the industry,” she says. “It felt like all of our hard work was just completely plowed over.” 

While Buck apologized for using the “first of its kind” language, other criticism emerged. Some industry stakeholders felt that an organization with a mostly white staff shouldn’t claim to lead DEI efforts in the industry and saw Camber’s pledge as co-opting Baker’s work.

Others felt its content was disingenuous. The wording of Camber’s new pledge isn’t terribly different from the original; DEI is discussed in broad strokes, and there are still no explicit references to race, ethnicity, or other identifiers that can lead to marginalization in the workplace. This was a red flag for Aparna Rajagopal-Durbin and Ava Holliday, founding partners of the Avarna Group consulting firm. When they offer guidance to organizations on what they call JEDI work (they include justice as a component of DEI), they are very intentional about using specific language to define issues and name the actions organizations will take. Rajagopal-Durbin doesn’t see evidence of that here. “It felt like nothing had changed, and it was just literally repackaged as an equity pledge.”

The backlash gained momentum as conversation spread across social media. Some of the most vocal critics, including Melanin Base Camp and Diversify Outdoors founder Danielle Williams, were accused of bullying when they called for Buck to step down. “That is not surprising in an industry that isn’t accustomed to accountability, that recoils at the suggestion,” says Williams. “They are deeply perturbed by the concept of marginalized people, mostly women of color doing unpaid work, having a voice that is disproportionate to our level of funding. Who are we to tell powerful white people how they should run their majority white nonprofit?”

Buck resigned in mid-February. In a press release, she indicated that this had been planned the previous summer, when Camber expanded its equity mission beyond gender (the organization was founded in 1996 as the Outdoor Industries Women’s Coalition, or OIWC), but that it was fast-tracked amid the controversy. Board member Diana Seung, former executive vice president of merchandising at Backcountry.com, was announced as Buck’s interim replacement.

Seung is receptive to concerns about the organization’s path moving forward. “We failed to recognize our contribution to—and part in—the reinforcement of inequitable systems. We were complicit in exclusion,” she says. “We needed to hear the criticism and feedback around how our approach ignored the voices, experiences, and contributions of people of color and communities who have not had a seat at the table.”

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“Sometimes mistakes are leapfrog moments as much as they are recognitions of failure,” says Sue Rechner, president of Merrell, who has pushed issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion to the forefront during her nearly two-year tenure at the company. “I think the industry needs to use this moment, and the energy surrounding this moment, to unify and solve the problem.”

In that spirit, we interviewed a dozen industry stakeholders to find out what they’d like to see moving forward. Here’s what they had to say.  

Every organization should examine its internal culture to identify blind spots and room for growth. This includes hiring consultants to provide training on topics like unconscious bias and guidance on achieving DEI work across its operations, including within its supply chain and during product development.

Organizations should also examine their motives for pursuing DEI efforts. Marinel M. de Jesus runs Peak Explorations, a guiding company that advocates for a more responsible and inclusive trekking industry. She created a survey about workplace discrimination in the outdoor industry. She also serves in Camber’s Workplace Equity Working Group, a think tank that’s developing a voluntary set of DEI guidelines for the industry, and she’s on the steering committee for Baker’s pledge. 

As part of her responsibilities for the latter, de Jesus offers guidance and mentorship to pledge signatories. This includes presenting a list of 15 questions that ask, among other things, why diversity, equity, and inclusion matter to the organization, why they haven’t yet taken action, and how doing this work might impact their organization. Her goal is to help them learn to approach the work of DEI more intentionally. “I think we need to go back to the basics and start with ourselves,” she says. “If you actually know your personal connection to it, then it makes it more important for you to do the work.”

In addition, Rechner says that companies need to “create paths and save places for diverse groups of people,” not only to promote jobs but to offer leadership advancements.

Christian Weaver, founder of Eastwoods Brand, a gear and apparel company that spotlights indigenous design, believes this requires a proactive approach. “I work in Native communities 90 percent of the time, and a lot of the jobs that are [generally available to] these communities aren’t jobs that you would see in the outdoor space,”says Weaver, who is an enrolled member of the Shinnecock Nation. “We have to go to people, share opportunities, and be willing to invest in communities.”

When writer and educator Amanda Jameson joined Camber as its program manager for DEI, she was excited at the prospect of collaborating with others already doing similar work across the industry. Instead, Jameson found that DEI was viewed as a business strategy, and her suggestions for pursuing it more deeply went unheeded. 

Jameson, who resigned in response to Camber’s handling of its pledge, considers this a missed opportunity. “I think the organization needs to reevaluate its priorities because they do sit at the intersection of social justice and business,” she says. “And in some ways, I don’t know that the mission can be accomplished within a purely business framework.”

Rajagopal-Durbin says that every company should recognize the importance of DEI work beyond its impact on the bottom line. “The work of equity is not just about diversifying, it’s thinking about power dynamics, thinking about values, talking about barriers, and dismantling them,” she says. “Unless the industry is able to shift from that sort of myopic transactional business case to a more values-driven business case, I think they’re going to keep hitting walls in terms of actually making change.”

Like Jameson, Elizabeth Train was excited to join Camber in expanding its equity efforts. She discovered the organization during a networking event in 2005 while it was still OIWC. She was new to the bike industry at the time, and was so inspired by the experience of meeting other women, especially those in leadership roles within the outdoor industry, that she began volunteering for the organization. Train later worked as a brand strategist, and OIWC hired her agency to help it rebrand as Camber in 2015. When a marketing position opened up within the organization, she jumped at the opportunity.

Train arrived at her new job armed with ideas—but like Jameson, she felt they went unheard. She says that Camber positioned itself as a leader in DEI, instead of operating with what she terms a “curiosity” about the work. “Just because you’ve been in the industry for a long time doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing it right,” Train says. “The companies that are constantly questioning how they’re doing things, and keeping themselves accountable and honest, are the ones that are making the biggest change.”

Holliday suggests that doing the latter simply requires reframing. “Camber has an opportunity to shift from seeing itself as the organization that is leading all of these efforts to the organization that is convening all of these efforts,” she says. “They have a lot of connections, financial support, and name recognition, so they can use that cultural capital to convene a whole bunch of people who are really deep in doing the work.”

“I think people are really bad at listening,” says Vasu Sojitra, an adaptive athlete and program director for Eagle Mount Bozeman, a nonprofit that provides outdoor recreation for people with disabilities and cancer. He also serves on the steering committee for Baker’s pledge and cofounded Earthtone Outside, an organization that promotes equity in Montana’s outdoors.

Sojitra suggests that companies listen to and learn from marginalized communities. “Especially black, indigenous, women of color, and nonbinary folks of color—they’re the ones really affected by silencing,” he says. “I definitely don’t know everything about race, racism, and ableism, but there are educated folks out there that do know a lot, and I try to reach out as much as possible to learn about those resources.”

Beyond just listening, companies should also actively support the work already happening in these communities. “Reach out to grassroots-diversity, equity, and inclusion organizations,” says Williams of Diversify Outdoors. “Instead of asking them how to make your own organization more diverse, try asking what you can do to amplify their work.”

Elyse Rylander, partner at the Avarna Group and founder of Out There Adventures and the LGBTQ Outdoor Summit, says that her most effective partnerships have happened when others seek to support her efforts instead of using the connection to draw attention to themselves. “That authenticity piece is something that needs to be figured out with every new relationship, just like it is when we have new friends or partners,” she says. “There’s no one size fits all—but it needs to be a key component of the work.”

Rylander, Williams, and others also emphasize that it’s important to pay people for their time and expertise, especially given the work’s personal toll. “What a lot of people don’t understand is this is extreme emotional labor for us,” says Gough. “We don’t get a break. We don’t get to turn it off.” 

De Jesus is unsure whether she’ll remain in Camber’s Workplace Equity Working Group, because she feels that the group continues to avoid crucial topics. “If we want to talk about discrimination and race, we need to actually specify those words, even though they’re uncomfortable,” she says. “The majority of the people in that group were very uncomfortable with being uncomfortable.”

Seung recognizes that Camber will need to embrace this discomfort. “We believe we can help make positive change, but we definitely have blind spots. This work is challenging, and we recognize that we need help and are committed to earning trust by proceeding respectfully, learning from our mistakes, and taking action to improve,” she says. “Simply abandoning the effort would not advance the cause.”

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For now, Camber will continue with its existing initiatives, including the Workplace Equity Working Group and the CEO Outdoor Equity Pledge, which it’s not planning to revise further. It will also retain a DEI consultant and seek more input from impacted communities on how best to proceed with the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

There will be other missteps on the road to creating a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive outdoor industry, but this shouldn’t hinder future efforts. “Progress can be imperfect,” says Merrell’s Rechner. “The good news is the conversation is happening. I really encourage everybody to lean in.”

As for Baker, she’s been in conversation with Camber’s board of directors since January’s announcement and hopes that it can come to an agreement on combining the two pledges. She’d also like to see the Outdoor Industry Association support a gathering of CEOs, perhaps during a future OR show, to discuss a collective path forward in regards to DEI work in the industry. 

Whether or not those things happen, Baker will keep looking for solutions. “I don’t have all the answers. I’m still searching myself as to how we do this. But I think we do it by genuinely coming to the table with ideas,” she says. “I’m just ready to move forward with the work, because after all of this, the work remains.”

Expert Essentials

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Sep 24, 2018

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Sep 24, 2018

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Perform your best with these top picks

For female athletes, the sports bra is an essential piece of the training and competition uniform. But even with a plethora of bra options available, finding the best fit for different activities can still be difficult. We asked five professional athletes to share their favorite sports bras for training and competing at their best.

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DeAnna Price considers her favorite sports bra lucky, and for good reason. The 25-year-old received the Nike Rival with Dri-Fit in her 2016 Team USA Olympic kit, and it has supported her through several breakthrough moments, including setting the U.S. record and winning the USATF national championship in the hammer throw. “Every time I’ve worn it, I’ve thrown well. When I put that thing on, it holds me tight, holds me well, and I’m able to do what I do best,” Price says.

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On the day Binsa tried to end her life, it took two hours for her cousin and sister-in-law to walk her to the emergency room in Dolakha, a remote, mountainous district of Nepal just east of Kathmandu.

Binsa, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, was 24 when her husband died in an accident. After her in-laws took away her young son to raise him in India, Binsa’s life felt empty and meaningless. When she reached the hospital, she met with doctors hired by the New York– and Nepal-based nonprofit Possible Health, who referred her to its peer mental-health counselors, located just down the hall.

Every morning and afternoon, Sunita Jirel, a counselor who told Binsa’s story through a translator, worked with Binsa on calming techniques including deep breathing, meditation, and progressive muscle relaxation. With the help of another counselor, they addressed the reasons Binsa went to the hospital—trauma, anxiety, and suicidal ideation, among others—and the ways she might begin improving her mental health. The counselors also recommended that doctors prescribe two medications for anxiety and depression. After three days, Jirel says, Binsa was well enough to return home. She came back in a week to follow up and has returned every month or so for therapy sessions forthe past year and a half.

In Nepal, the poorest country in South Asia and home to only a handful of psychiatrists and psychologists, mental health care is vanishingly rare. The Nepalese government set aside roughly $500 million for all health care in 2019—compared to the U.S. government’s $1.5 trillion health budget—with less than 1 percent dedicated to mental health.

Yet psychological conditions afflict Nepalis at higher rates compared with the rest of the world. Researchers analyzing several recent studies on mental health in Nepal for the scientific journal The Lancet found that more than one-third of Nepalis experience some issues with mental wellness, including anxiety (28 percent) and depression (30 percent). In comparison, about 7 percent of people worldwide haveanxiety disorders, and an average 3.2 percent of men and 5.5 percent of women experience depression. Nepalis also have a “high burden” of PTSD—nearly one-third of the country suffers from the condition. In discussing these high rates, researchers pointed to a decade-long civil war that tore the country apart and a magnitude-7.8 earthquake that rattled it once more in 2015, as well as a lack of mental health care throughout the country.

But despite the high prevalence of mental-health issues, there is still a stigma against seekingthe appropriatecare in Nepal. “People with mental-health problems are generally poorly treated, pitied, and even despised in Nepal,” says Kul Chandra Gautam, former assistant secretary-general of the United Nations and author of Lost in Transition: Rebuilding Nepal from the Maoist Mayhem and Mega Earthquake (he also formerly served on Possible’s advisory committee). “They are often seen as a burden to families and are ostracized by their neighbors.”

Possible Health, which now has more than 350 employees, launched in 2008 with a focus on chronic diseases, malnutrition, and maternal and child health in Achham, a region hit hard by the civil war. It later added mental health care, in 2016. Immediately after the 2015 earthquake, the nonprofit expanded primary-care offerings to another hospital, in Dolakha, where the majority of health-care facilities were damaged or destroyed by the quake. Although Possible always plannedto add mental health care at the hospital, the earthquake made this need more urgent, and it started offering services in 2017, shortly before Binsa arrived.

According to Gautam, the nonprofit opened at a time when mental health in Nepal was still being neglected. “It is a completely unaddressed issue we have to conquer. We simply don’t have enough mental-health specialists in the country—even in urban areas and major hospitals,” he says. “Mental health has not been a government priority, given other pressing priorities.”

While the World Health Organization and other nonprofits recommend integrating mental health care into primary care, that often means physicians simplyprescribe medications for anxiety and depression. Possible’smodel is unique for the country because it offers psychosocial counseling under the same roof. And those counselors speak with psychiatrists every week about each case, to help them catch mistakes or something they might have missed. No other program in Nepal does that, says Bibhav Acharya, a psychiatrist and cofounder of Possible.

Acharya says that improved mental-health services have been a “silver lining” of the 2015 earthquake, with the event bringing international attention—and some funding—to the gaps in Nepal’s health care. There are only 54 psychiatrists and psychologists in the entire country, which has more than 28 million people, he says, and many doctors in Nepal receive no psychiatric education at all. But experiencing the quake themselves helped improve the doctors’ empathy. “They finally realized how scary it is to have anxiety, how scary it is to be traumatized, to witness death and loss,” Acharya says. A crisis like the earthquake—or, before it, the Maoist civil war—can uncover previously hidden and untreated mental issues, he says.

Addressing mental health as part of overall health care makes it easier for patients to find relief and for Possible toskirt around the difficulties associated with discussing mental-health problems in the country. For example, counselors avoid talking outright about depression, which is still a taboo subject; instead, they focus on symptoms, like sleeping problems or headaches. From there the counselors can explore treatment options such astherapy and medications.

Typically, the two Possible counselors in Dolakha each see between seven to tenpatients per day. Peer counselors undergo a six-month psychosocial training, and they keep in close contact with a regional psychiatrist, calling every week to discuss each patient’s case. The psychiatrist visits every three months for training and observation, but both of Dolakha’s counselors are from the region, which is helpful to understanding patients’ backgrounds and building trust.

In the future, Possible will train more community health workers, especially those able to go to patients’ homes and villages, to recognize and begin treating mental-health issues alongside physical issues. This year it began operating a third hospital, in Achham. “The overall goal is to develop a blueprint for what remote health care delivery looks like,” Acharya says.

The counselors continue to work with Binsa, who has changed dramatically from the day she checked into the hospital. “She’s totally improved,” Sunita Jirel says. Binsa still has not been able to see her son, but recently she was able to speak with him on the phone. At her most recent appointment, she told the counselors that she now has a reason to keep living. “She thinks that, no matter what the shortcomings are in her life, she will fight through them,” Jirel says. “She feels stronger.”

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“It’s like love,” Andrea Crosta says, looking over the Pacific as an early mist parts and the California sun creeps between clouds. The 49-year-old motions to Argos, his pit-Lab rescue from Tijuana, Mexico, named after the dog in The Odyssey, and they turn down the jetty. “When people ask why I care [about endangered species], I tell them it’s like love,” he says. “They have a right to exist.”

I can’t say where exactly we are, because Crosta’s work has made him more than a few enemies. As the founder of the Elephant Action League, he’s spent the last five years infiltrating and surveilling networks in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, where he and a team of ex-FBI and CIA agents, informants, and law-enforcement partners investigate wildlife crimes. Using hidden cameras and digital eavesdropping, he’s exposed the link between Al Shabab selling ivory to support jihads, found Chinese navy ships shuttling ivory, and gathered evidence that influenced how wildlife traffickers are prosecuted in Thailand and Africa.

To say this isn’t the norm in buttoned-up academia is a colossal understatement. In 2013, after two decades in the shadow world of security—protecting ships from Somali pirates and consulting with governments—he started the EAL. His work eventually caught the attention of Hollywood heavyweights like Leonardo DiCaprio, who executive produced his 2016 documentary, The Ivory Game, a look inside the world of elephant poaching in East Africa.Crosta’s new film, which was financed by Terra Mater Factual Studios and recently debuted at Sundance, is even more ambitious. Sea of Shadows depicts the last days of the world’s rarest and smallest dolphin, the vaquita, and the role of Mexican cartels and Chinese mafia in its imminent extinction. Vaquitas happen to live in the same waters as another lucrative and endangered catch, the totoaba. As cartel-supported poachers in the Sea of Cortez hunt totoaba with massive nets, they incidentally catch vaquita, which numbered less than 30 as of 2016. Sea of Shadows follows Crosta and his team as they go undercover, exposing the corruption throughout Baja California that’s led to violence and crime beyond wildlife.

Crosta takes viewers to Mexico, where we follow a government-supported vaquita rescue that ultimately fails. We learn alongside Crosta’s team how the totoabatrade mirrors drug networks in sophistication and value. Wildlife crime is often just one touchpoint of organized crime, Crosta says. “It’s all about money.”

The film centers on the small Mexican town of San Felipe. Since local fishermen cannot legally work due to a government ban on fishing to restore marine environments, they’re forced to do the bidding of the cartels and go after totoaba, a fish that looks sort of like a bass on steroids. More specifically, the poachers are after the fish’s swim bladder, the organ that keeps the fish buoyant. When dried, it sells for up to $100,000 a kilogram in China, where it’s a delicacy for the wealthy, believed to have medicinal qualities.

In this part of northern Mexico, fishermen get around $3,500 per totoaba, which is then sold for $5,000 to traffickers, who resell it to Chinese traders for $7,000 to $8,000. Traders work in safe houses and often dry the swim bladders by placing them between laundry-drying machines. When ready for export, the bladders travel via air routes and transit hubs like Japan, Hong Kong, or Vietnam. Individual smugglers might pack them in checked suitcases to avoid airport controls or load them onto cargo ships, tucked in containers marked as legal seafood. In 2015, a shipment of 1,200 pounds of totoaba was seized in Venezuela on its way to the States. Over 800 totoaba swim bladders were seized at the Mexico City airport last April, valued at $16 million. In December, China arrested 16 traffickers with $26 million worth of totoaba.

Because fishing nets run $4,000 each, cartels bankroll them, a debt poor fishermen work off by catching totoaba. They know that this work is killing other species, most notably the vaquita, but there are few economic options and almost zero police intervention. Crosta detailed the whole process in a 100-page report last year, which included video footage of a top poacher killing a Mexican marine with an AK-47 on a San Felipe street. It’s dangerous territory, and the film reflects that. Groups of locals battle the poachers by cutting their nets and freeing lifeless vaquitas, which generally weigh about 90 pounds and are so rare that scientists know next to nothing about them. 

Crosta calls his work with vaquitas “extinction in real time. When you have the involvement of Chinese traffickers and narco traffickers, you have much more than a conservation problem.”

Director Richard Ladkani told me he was nervous for the safety of his 12 filmmakers. “I was responsible for the crew, so the hardest part was assessing the daily threat level.” Ladkani also shot The Ivory Game, but said Sea of Shadows was an even more dangerous experience. While he spent a year embedding with investigators, fishermen, and scientists, he had to hire armed bodyguards and at one point was caught in a violent mob between locals and Mexican marines over an arrest of illegal fishermen. The melee became so dangerous—and the mob so big, with around 300 people—that the marines ended up abandoning their position and their injured colleagues. They freed prisoners and retreated as they shot live rounds to disperse the crowd, who were throwing rocks and boarding navy vessels with impunity.

“It was a real clusterfuck,” remembers Marc Davis, a former FBI agent with 30 years of undercover experience, a key to Crosta’s operational safety and strategy. “One thing I’ve found dealing with civilians, I think some people don’t realize the ‘Oh shit’ situations.”

Many times during the shoot, Ladkani told me, he didn’t think he could pull off the film. “I wasn’t sure if we were ever going to see a vaquita.” That was in question because vaquitas have never before been filmed in the wild, and, until now, they’ve only been found dead. But before San Felipe became untenable, Ladkani did manage to film what he claims is the first video of a living vaquita. Sadly, that animal suddenly died during a failed capture, an emotional moment caught on celluloid.

That’s the kind of film this is—one step forward, three back—a documentary-cum-spy flick with handheld point-of-view shots that make you feel like you’re there. The team is onboard a Sea Shepherd boat when activists are chased by poachers as apathetic armed marines look on; they’re with destitute pescaderos speaking in hushed tones about the cartel; they’re reporting with Mexican journalist Carlos Loret de Mola, a premier reporter for Televisa who has spent the last few years asking authorities hard questions. “The movie is going to be a boost to the issue,” reckons Loret, who told me he received so many death threats that he had to travel by bulletproof car. 

With at least 42 journalists killed in Mexico in 2017, it’s one of the most dangerous countries for the press. Like Crosta, Loret took a major risk to get the story to his viewers, which number 35 million daily. His role in the film, he said, was to find out “Who is the El Chapo of totoaba?” He traveled to San Felipe, sparring with locals who question the existence of vaquitas and deplore the fact that they can’t legally work. It’s this very irony that Loret calls a solvable problem—if there’s political will. “The University of Baja has totaba farms. If you provide totoabas legally, you can control the whole thing and create a legal market. That would be an easy way out.”

But the only way to get this issue to the fore, Crosta and his team contend, is by taking major risks themselves.   

“Scientists cannot do law enforcement,” Crosta states over a double espresso back in Southern California. “If you give responsibility to scientists, of course they cannot do much. For the government, it’s an environmental problem, but it’s not anymore. The problem is criminal in nature.”

Crosta calls this a conservation failure that even Unesco dropped the ball on, with implications beyond Mexico. If you can make 100 times what you would fishing legally, and you can’t fish legally, what would you do? “They keep hitting and hitting the fishermen, and most of them are very poor people, so they’re almost being forced to become poachers,” he says. “This is the last chance we have. I don’t think the vaquita will last another totoaba season.”

The world’s population of vaquitas has dropped 40 percent annually since the 2016 official count of 30. By that math, there could be fewer than ten left. Mexico’s government ended its recovery program in late 2017. In December 2018, scientists issued an appeal to the new president to ban the possession of illegal gill nets but enforcement remains scant.

Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho, who leads marine-mammal conservation for Mexico’s National Institute of Ecology and Climate Change and appears in the film, confirmed there could be as few as seven to ten. But he wouldn’t give me a number as an assessment is ongoing. Formally declaring a species extinct, he adds, takes years. “If they stop killing vaquitas, they will recover. Here we are at the last minute, a quarter to midnight, trying to do everything possible.”

Back in California, Crosta gets me up to speed where the film leaves off: his scope has expanded to Hong Kong and China, while the Sea Shepherd crew and some locals are still pulling illegal totoaba nets, removing 800 to date. But as in the film, there have been other steps in the wrong direction: a fishermen who was interviewed was murdered for not paying debts, he says soberly. And in Crosta’s own personal life—money, marriages, friends—there have been many sacrifices. 

Recently there’s been an arrest of a major trafficker, the El Chapo of totoaba who Loret and Crosta were looking for, and Mexico has opened a criminal investigation against the Chinese traffickers cited. But with totoaba season beginning now and lasting into the spring, by the time the film reaches audiences, it may be too late to rally the international community, Crosta says grimly. “The problem is that this story takes too long. The right time is now, but it will take months for distribution. We’ll broadcast at the end of the totaba season, and by then, there may be no vaquita left. It’s a pity.”