Partnering to Protect Human Rights by Protecting Our Planet with Brad Adams

Episode Notes

Transcript

Brad Adams:

Everybody I know who made a genuine longtime commitment to working in public interest ended up doing it. They found their path. Follow your dreams and your heart. It’s a very trite, but don’t let the system or other people beat you down and you’ll find your way if you really stick with it. That’s my message.

Announcer:

That’s today’s guest on SideBar. Brad Adams, founder of Climate Rights International SideBar is brought to you by Monterey College of Law, San Luis Obispo College of Law, Kern County College of Law, empire College of Law, located in Santa Rosa and the colleges of Law with campuses in Santa Barbara and Ventura. Welcome to SideBar featuring conversations about optimism in action with lawyers and leaders inspiring change. And now your co-hosts Jackie Gardina and Mitch Winick.

Jackie Gardina:

For two years we’ve been doing this podcast and really focusing on educating people about issues going on in the United States and elsewhere and alerting them to problems and at the end of every podcast, we would always ask somebody, what can people do? What’s the call to action? It was always focused on engaging with your community. We’re trying to focus now on people who have actually done that, what we’re calling optimism in action, focusing less on the problems that are in our society and more on what’s being done by people on a day-to-day basis to address those problems.

Mitch Winick:

Jackie Brad Adams. Our guest today founded Climate Rights International and serves as its executive director. He previously was the executive director of the Asia Division of Human Rights Watch. Prior to human Rights watch, Brad worked in Cambodia for five years as the senior lawyer for the Cambodian Field office of the United Nations High Command for Human Rights. He was the founder of the Berkeley Community Law Center, now the East Bay Community Law Center where he worked as a legal aid lawyer. He teaches international human rights law and practice at the University of California Berkeley School of Law. Brad, welcome to SideBar.

Brad Adams:

Thank you very much,

Mitch Winick:

Brad. The work you’ve done both individually and with the nonprofits that you’ve worked for locally, nationally, and internationally is exactly the kind of work we want to highlight this season of SideBar, tell us how you got started.

Brad Adams:

I went to law school in the middle of the Reagan administration and I had been involved in a lot of social activism as a volunteer, as a door to door canvasser for campaigns, both for political campaigns and issue campaigns. I had gotten a master’s degree from the Lemon School of Economics and saw that the world did not have to look the way it did to me during the Reg Administration. There were parts of the world that were engaged in progressive politics, so I went to law school to either do one of two things, one work as a legal aid lawyer to work in communities addressing poverty, which I think then and still think is the biggest human rights problem facing the United States. The richest country in the history of the world should not have 15 to 20% of its population living in poverty, and those are the official numbers.

They probably are low or to work on international human rights because I was really interested in addressing the US wars in Latin America and I grew up at the tail end of the Vietnam War era, but was immersed in all the literature about that, really admired all the activists and protesters who played a role in bringing that war to an earlier conclusion than it would’ve when I was in law school. I found that I was not interested in contracts law, property law or civil procedure, the kind of boring things that you have to learn to be a lawyer. I kind of became famous for not going to class very much. One of the problems was that the faculty at Berkeley Law had kind of fossilized. There were a bunch of old white men who just were thinking in groupthink and not in a very progressive way and alienated a lot of the students and so there’s a lot of student activism.

We started the National Student Diversity Movement at Berkeley in the mid eighties because we had more than 50 white male tenured professors and two women. A lot of professors thought that was just okay, but what I did with most of my time was to address the problem that was right at our doorstep. I thought going to Berkeley, that Berkeley would law school and the university would be very involved in community efforts to address things like homelessness. We had tons of Vietnam vets on the streets and you could not walk from the law school and go have lunch without stepping over people. People think homelessness is a problem now. It was much worse than, and so we wanted to do something for the community and we tried to start something called the Berkeley Law Students Organizing Group for legal services. We had some terrible acronym. By the time I graduated law school, we had formed a 5 0 1 C3 and I created what was called the Berkeley Community Law Center.

It’s now called the East Bay Community Law Center, and I was the first employee. I got a grant Princely Sum, the $20,000 when I left law school for my first year. It is now the biggest legal services organization in the Bay Area. As far as I know, it’s huge and it’s addressing all sorts of legal aid problems for the community. Our original goal was to work on homelessness and so we had a housing and welfare component when we started, but now it works on immigration, hiv, aids, the whole range of things, economic development and it’s fantastic, and so that was really exciting. I did that for five years and I loved every minute of it, but since you guys are law school deans, you’ll know that the ritual is that you take a trip after law school and everyone else in my world did. But I went to work the next day after taking theBar to start this law center. After five years, my partner and I decided we would take this kind of dream trip and we never came back. We ended up in Cambodia and thought we’d stay for two weeks. I got hired by the un, worked there for five years as a human rights lawyer, and then was hired by human rights watch where I spent 20 years as the Asia director for starting my current thing, which is Climate Rights International.

Mitch Winick:

Before you leave your Berkeley Community Law Center work, it strikes me that the story you just told is no different than the one that’s going on today. The issues are so similar. The needs for young lawyers and law students to do this is no less great. What would you say to those students that are thinking about their career? They go, wait a minute. You’ve been doing this for 30 years and we have the same problems. Why should we do this?

Brad Adams:

Well, I think that one of the fallacies, and this is kind of an American thing that my observation since I’ve now worked all around the world is to think that we are going to solve problems that are perennial and that are intrinsic. There will always be poor people who will need support. It turns out, and we’re seeing this right now in front of us and turns out that we will always have to fight for our rights. We will always have to fight for democracy. We thought that we had reached a subtle state that democracy was just a fact of life. It is not. There are very strong, powerful people who want to tear it down and not just in this country. We look at the rise of the far right in Germany, they may do well in the next election. Marine lap pen may become the next president of France, Modi in India.

There are people who want to attack the things that we take for granted. So it is a constant struggle. You do not get into this work if you think that you are going to reach some nirvana end state. That’s not the point. But we can make progress and while I think things are very bleak right now on many, many indicators, the work that we have collectively done have made a massive difference to huge numbers of people. Just to give an example, in this country, the attack on transgender people are disgusting, and yet we probably have a baseline on LGBT rights. We probably are not going to go below a certain level. And if I think back to my childhood, I grew up in New Jersey and I don’t want to besmirch new Jerseyans because we actually have a mutual friend who’s from New Jersey, but the gay slurs I heard growing up all the time that were just not in private, but in public discourse are way beyond the pale, no unacceptable.

I mean, look, gay marriage may be challenged by some on the far right, but I think there’s no chance they’re going to succeed. And so some of the things that I think young people have to learn, understand, talk to people who’ve been through these struggles before to realize how much progress we’ve made on things. Disability rights is another really good example in Berkeley was this unusual place that had ramps at street corners and there was a huge debate about the expense of it. Like, oh, we can’t afford that. It’s standard everywhere. So there’s a lot of progress. Internationally has been huge progress, fighting, poverty, the number of people living in extreme poverty is much lower. What we see in the news makes us think that much of the rest of the world is fighting wars all over the place. War is actually at a relatively low level compared to historical trends.

The number of people who are actually in the middle class in their own society is much higher. Their purchasing power parity is much higher. And last month in Thailand for example, they passed a law allowing gay marriage, which 10 years ago if you said Thailand was going to pass that law you had been laughed at. So there is progress. We just have to keep fighting and we have to pocket and value our successes. Sometimes we’re not good at that in the progressive community. We always want more and we should, but we also have to realize that we’re in a constant fight. This is a struggle for rights and progress.

Jackie Gardina:

I may know the answer to this based on what you’ve just described, but I think one of the issues that comes up in any attempt to make forward progress on poverty or L-G-B-T-Q rights or anything like that is compromises that are sometimes made in the political arena or even the legal arena regarding who gets left behind in order for movement to be made. And I think specifically about the don’t ask don’t tell repeal movement where trans military service members were specifically left out of that discussion and it was an intentional decision made because of what it may have done to move the lesbian and gay question forward. I’m curious what you think about talking to people about progress, but with compromise versus no stick to your number one principles and don’t compromise.

Brad Adams:

I don’t have a one size fits all answer for that. I think it really is case by case and involves a lot of judgment and a lot of strategic thinking, understanding the world that you’re facing, who your allies are, who your enemies are, what the chances of success are, and then who gets to make the decision about compromise. And that’s the last point is actually the one that I find hardest because whatever challenges that you or I may face in our lives, we’re privileged people and the people that we’re representing often don’t have a voice. It’s one of the reasons I do the work I’ve done, always have done the work I’ve done and trying to discern what they would think, what their voice would be is really difficult and there’s no almost never a monolithic community, so you end up making decisions with but also on behalf of people.

So don’t ask kind of turned out to be a step on the ladder of progress, but it might not have been. I remember being absolutely appalled and arguments with people who were more pragmatic than I was. I think they were right. Basically you had to swallow your principles to try to get from the start to the finish line. So it’s really hard and this by the way is something that comes up every day in my professional life. There’s almost no way to avoid trade-offs in the decisions you’re making. It’s hard. I will never criticize someone for being a purist on an issue where there’s values, morality and rights at stake. I won’t criticize ’em. I’ll disagree with them sometimes, but I won’t criticize them. I will criticize people who sell out their principles and that’s where it gets back to a case by case.

Jackie Gardina:

What’s the difference between, because I think a purist would say compromising is selling out your principles, so what’s the distinction between a compromise and selling out your principles?

Brad Adams:

Well, that’s why I said I wouldn’t criticize someone who sticks to their principles because we don’t know whether that’s actually both principled and pragmatic until later. And some things are just so core to people, they can’t make compromises and we can understand that there’s this kind of concept that I hear from American diplomats all the time, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I hate that because that’s your get out of jail free card for making a compromise on anything, but there’s some truth in that sometimes you have to go for what you can get as a marker. So I don’t think there’s any way to have a universal approach to this. I think if you have values, keep those values at the forefront and make sure that if you’re making compromises, that your values remain mostly at least intact.

Mitch Winick:

Jackie, I want to take a moment to reflect that as we’re talking about optimism and action. Many of our guests say that they first started thinking about a career in public service while they were still in law school and schools like yours and mine, Monterey College of Law provide an affordable, convenient way for working adults to attend law school and pursue these interests. Classes are taught by practicing lawyers and judges who prepare our students to serve their community in many of the same areas that we are discussing here on SideBar. For more information, go to monterey law.edu. Brad, one of the things your career points out is that many of our law students start out and they see a very small box of what to do as a lawyer and they think, oh, I’m going to be licensed in California and that’s what I have to do. And without that ticket, there’s very little else I can do. You took that ticket and traveled globally. Talk a little about the potential of being an American lawyer and having international impact.

Brad Adams:

Well, it’s a horizon I didn’t know existed. I kind of wanted it to exist and hoped it did and sort of thought it did, but I didn’t know anything about it. There are a lot of ways to do this. My advice to people if they are leaving law school and actually meant what they said, that they were going to law school to work on justice matters or human rights because a lot of people say that but don’t, and they apply for jobs and haven’t been able to get them right away, go outside the us, go to someplace where there’s an active NGO community and active legal community. Everyone who’s taken my advice that I know of has ended up having a fulfilling career because there are so many opportunities. One of the things I discovered about the United Nations was that it is a really mixed organization.

It’s an essential organization. It has a lot of people who are deadweight and they tend to be the more senior people. So how does the UN get its work done? Well, a lot of younger people, I was one of those people when I first went to Cambodia who show up, have a lot of energy, are capable and they make their bosses look good. There’s this conveyor belt of bringing young capable people in to organizations like the un, but also to big NGOs around the world, and suddenly you’re doing this really important work on things like freedom of expression or LGBT rights or defending journalists or helping them write some new laws that create paths for them to receive external financial assistance. Depending on your specialty and your interests, there’s a lot of stuff that you can do. I think that doing internships in law school, talking to as many people as you can who are involved in fields that you’re interested in, people will respond to emails and phone calls. There’s a lot more opportunity now than there ever was to think outside the box instead of feeling like you have to go straight from law school and take a job that you don’t really want.

Mitch Winick:

Brad, one of the things folks love to hear is a personal story, something that just sticks in your mind, and I’m sure you’ve got thousands of them giving your experience in your work with the United Nations Commission for Human Rights. Tell us a story that really sticks with you as to what made you feel that that was a truly meaningful part of your career.

Brad Adams:

My strongest memories are getting to know Cambodians, hearing their stories, my translator, I had a full-time translator and pretty much the whole time I was there, we would share hotel rooms when we were out doing human rights investigations and he would start screaming in the middle of the night and he’d wake up in the morning and I’d say, are you okay? Yeah, I’m fine. Why? I said, do you know that you talk in your sleep and scream? He said, no idea. So then he started telling me about his experience of walking 500 miles to escape the Khmer Rouge, walking over dead bodies around landmines, losing his father, seeing his father killed by the KH Rouge. He’s an example that the kind of people that I’ve now made lifelong friends with, he now lives in the United States. I helped him move to the US because things were not safe for him because he had been involved in human rights work in Cambodia. There are so many Cambodians who we worked with who ended up being killed, arrested. I have a number of friends who are in prison right now. What I took away from Cambodia was this incredible opportunity and privilege to work with people who were facing the grimace of circumstances and getting to know them and understanding them and supporting them as much as we could.

Mitch Winick:

Thank you for that because I think sometimes those of us don’t work in that area. We look at these big names, the Human Rights Commission, the United Nations, and it seems more processed than personal, and I think what you do is remind us when it comes right down to it, it’s very personal to the individuals that you’re working with.

Brad Adams:

That’s the most important part of the work. What you come away with are the human connections.

Jackie Gardina:

Brad, you start a legal aid program right out of law school. Well, actually while you’re in law school, you end up working for the UN and then for Human Rights Watch and instead of retiring after 20 years from human rights watch, you come back and decide to start a new organization. What prompted you to start the climate organization that you’re currently running?

Brad Adams:

Human Rights Watch is one of the two biggest human rights organizations in the world. As the Asia director at Human Rights Watch, I routinely met prime ministers and presidents and foreign ministers and our work ended up in major media, New York Times A-B-C-C-N-N-I one TV all the time, press conferences, and it was incredibly satisfying and incredible colleagues, some of the smartest people I’ve ever met, really passionate, committed, but climate change was not at the heart of the work of human rights watch. And as I watched my kids growing up and thinking about their future, the destabilization of the climate system, the climate crisis became to me the most important issue in the world. And then as a human rights lawyer and activist, it’s also going to be the number one human rights problem in the world. It is interconnected with so many others. And so I became convinced that if I’m going to make a contribution, it needs to be fully focused on climate change. There was this gap in addressing climate change of the human rights problem and seeing how human rights problems can sometimes exacerbate the climate crisis. And I couldn’t quite find an organization that was doing that. I set up a five one C3 and tapped into some very generous donors who are just as concerned about climate change as I am.

Jackie Gardina:

So when you’re thinking about climate change action, it’s something that we hear about most of us try to recycle or do other things like that. What are the actions that your organization is taking on a community level that others can engage in or try at their own community?

Brad Adams:

My answer is not going to be the community that you might be thinking of. We do not work at a community level in the United States. We work at the community level wherever we do our projects. So maybe I’ll give you an example of our first project. Our first project was on how the avocado industry in Mexico is causing mass deforestation and connected to that is a lot of violence against people in the community who are opposed to the expansion of the avocado industry because of its consequences on deforestation and because avocados, it turns out are very thirsty creatures. And so if you plant avocado trees in mass numbers, often it ends up drying up the water table. And so there’s some local communities in Mexico who’ve had access to water problems in addition to other things.

Mitch Winick:

And Brad, in fact, we’re very aware of that in California because we’ve almost discontinued growing avocados here, counting on Mexico being the source.

Brad Adams:

That’s right, and the trade numbers show that 80% of avocados in the United States come from Mexico. It’s a three to $4 billion annual industry. It’s growing dramatically. It’s located mostly in Michoacan and Jalisco states in the west of Mexico. These are very, very poor states with a lot of rainforest, and that rainforest is being chopped down so that we can have guacamole in the US to put it B bluntly, and I don’t blame consumers because we don’t know. People don’t know that. So the community, to answer your question, the community that we are working with and supporting in this case is the community of people in Michan and ska who were having their land taken from ’em, their patrimony destroyed because the people feel very attached to the land there. They were suffering violence because the cartels were trying to push their way into the avocado industry probably as a money laundering exercise.

And so we were asked by some community members to get involved. The result of this is that violence has decreased. Deforestation has almost stopped. Our method here was to go and do fact finding. We published a 250 page report. We made sure that we quoted a lot of local people. We captured their voice. We took the New York Times to the field and they ran an exclusive and they ran a front page story on this. We gave the Washington Post the information. They ran an editorial before National Guacamole Day, a k, a Super Bowl the day before the last year, super Bowl. They ran an editorial quoting our recommendations in our report. We worked with the governor of Michan, we’ve worked with Civil society in Michan, we worked with indigenous communities, and we’ve now stood up with a deforestation free certification program that we’re getting all the major exporters, importers of avocados to sign up one after another.

And we’ve sponsored lawsuits. I can’t share the results because we’re in settlement negotiations, but I think we’ll be announcing soon settlements where these companies cease and desist from further deforestation and the community there is obviously very happy. What they’re going to see is hopefully an end to the deforestation, but also there’s no longer be an incentive for there to be violence against these communities. So many people that are facing threats and intimidation for speaking out. And if you have no incentive to cut down trees, there’s nothing to oppose, and therefore that tension hopefully goes away. That’s an example of how we work with communities.

Jackie Gardina:

I think it goes back to the roots of what you’re talking about, which is you’ve always represented people and causes where voices were silenced and gave them their voices back, and so your amplifying stories. I love that storytelling is such an important part of the activist work that you do.

Brad Adams:

It’s central to it. When I started working at Human Rights Watch, when we did a really thorough report like this one and we published it, there was shock horror that was genuine for a lot of people. The information world we live in now, most people, even young people, I have a 25-year-old and a 20-year-old, but when they were 15 and 10 and yeah, they grew up around me, but still, you would tell them things or they would read stuff in the paper and they’d of like, yeah, okay. That’s how the world is. There’s so much information. People expect bad things to be happening, and so you can’t move the State Department or the European Union or the UN with the facts as easily anymore because we all know what the facts are. We may not know the granular detail. So you have to tell stories and you have to do it in various media. We are going to do a podcast someday. I think this is an incredibly important medium that you guys are involved in, and you just have to keep trying to tell stories. And we also all know that attention spans have really decreased. So that’s the technique, but the guts of it, the most important part is telling authentic stories and giving people the microphone and the camera. It’s also harder to reach the audiences you want. We want to reach policymakers and people can make a difference. That’s the big challenge we have right now.

Jackie Gardina:

So many of the guests on this show, I went to law school because I wanted the tools to create change. If you have that same passion and you want to develop the necessary skills and knowledge in a nurturing environment built especially for working adults, join us at the Colleges of Law with both in-person and online learning options. Take that first step to building a better future for you and your community. You can visit colleges of law.edu.

Mitch Winick:

Brad, I’d like to end by where we started. Someone could listen to your story. A young lawyer could listen to your story and say, this is impressive, but it’s somewhat imposing. You’ve built all these contacts, you’ve talked to prime ministers and presidents to move these issues forward, and I’m still just a beginning lawyer thinking about, is this an enriching career? Looking back to talk to the Brad Adams at the beginning and the one who’s now thinking about a career path next year, what would you say to them that would help them understand what that future is like if they choose to dedicate their career to these types of issues?

Brad Adams:

Well, it’s incredibly fulfilling and enriching. I had nothing when I went to law school, I had no connections. I’m the first person to graduate from university of my family. I worked through law school. So I think one thing people often think is like, oh, that guy or that woman was privileged and had connections, and I don’t have that. No, that’s not, at least in my case and cases of lots of other people I know. Although there’s still a lot of that, and it’s unfair. My experience has been that people who want to do some kind of public interest work make the world a better place, and there’s lots of ways to do it. I’ve had one experience. There are so many different ways to do it, and they can involve economics. I’ve had this conversation with people. Maybe the thing to do is to go out and establish yourself as a lawyer who works in finance and then work to bend that system in favor of poor people.

That’s a really honorable thing to do and really important thing to do. And sometimes I think that would’ve been a better use of my time. So don’t feel disempowered. Guess what I was trying to say there? Even if you don’t feel like you know anybody or have any connections, the other thing I would say is that everybody I know who made a genuine long time commitment to working in public interest ended up doing it. They found their path. And sometimes that means you leave law school and you go back doing some kind of job you didn’t really like. While you are waiting for positive responses from all the applications you’re sending out, sometimes it means moving to some other place. These are hard choices and trade-offs. You have to make. Follow your dreams in your heart. It’s a very trite, but don’t let the system or other people beat you down and you’ll find your way if you really stick with it. That’s my message,

Jackie Gardina:

Brad. I think that’s a great message to end on. So thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your story.

Brad Adams:

Thank you very much, and really nice to meet you,

Mitch Winick:

Brad. Great to have you. And good luck with climate rights International. Jackie, I thought it was great to listen to someone who had an entire career in public service. He started in law school as many of us did with the idea to be a lawyer and help people, but then has spent decades in a variety of organizations that help people in different ways, but always with the issue of public rights, whether it was human rights, climate rights. It’s really inspiring, and I felt that it lived up to optimism and action because Brad takes some of the most difficult, almost impossible situations, still rolled up his sleeves and said, there are things we could do to help these individual people. And I think that’s the message that I took from talking with Brad today.

Jackie Gardina:

One of the things that really stood out for me, and especially around his story about Mexico and the avocado farmers, sometimes especially new attorneys, think we’ll file a lawsuit. But if you look at the steps they took in that community, amplifying the stories of people there, creating programs to disincentivize, chopping down the trees, it wasn’t necessarily a lawsuit that they won, that forced change. It was working within the community to create the change that was going to work for the community. And it started with storytelling, and everyone can tell stories. You don’t need a law degree to amplify the voices of those who perhaps don’t have a voice of their own

Mitch Winick:

SideBar would not be possible without our producer, David Eakin, who composes and plays all of the music you hear on SideBar. Thank you also to Dina Dowsett, who creates and coordinates sidebar’s. Social media marketing.

Jackie Gardina:

Colleges of law and Monterey College of Law are part of a larger organization called California Accredited Law Schools. All of our schools are dedicated to providing access and opportunity to legal education to marginalized communities.

Mitch Winick:

For more information about the California accredited law schools, go to ca law schools.org. That’s ca law schools.org.