If all the world’s a stage, then Michelle Medeiros ’88 is its stage manager.
She’s worked behind the scenes in Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, China and Denmark. She’s made certain that the dialogue went as planned in Copenhagen, London, Munich, Japan and Paris. And she’s ensured light was shed on her subjects and that their voices could be heard in Liberia, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Fortunately, she still remembers a lot from her theatre management studies – and, though the productions she’s overseen for Greenpeace are hardly theatrical, they certainly make use of her background in stage management.
“I remember the first time I was directing an activity, and how much it was like putting on a show: You had to coordinate all the actors, you had to get people to hear what you’re saying, you were trying to figure out how to rehearse to get everything ready for the live audiences,” recalls the senior forest campaigner with Greenpeace International. “There’s so much going on in the background that you don’t want your audience to see or even know about. It’s the same when we’re working with the different governments. You have to make decisions immediately, to react quickly under pressure. That’s something I learned working in theater.”
Medeiros’ seven-year theater career started directly after graduation, when she worked as a stage manager first for the award-winning Alliance Theatre in Atlanta and then for the prestigious Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre in New York City.
“That was great, but when I asked myself, ‘What’s the difference I’m making in the world?’ I couldn’t really be proud of what I was doing. I wanted to do something more.”
She was still restless eight years later. By then, she’d worked for public-access television, a postproduction video company and an international e-business, for which she’d established and managed offices in Munich, Paris and London. Eventually, however, she cashed in her stocks and enrolled in American University’s Global Environmental Policy Program.
“I didn’t even have to think about it. All of a sudden, I just kind of knew,” says Medeiros, whose parents ingrained in her a deep love for nature. While at American University, Medeiros also began working at Greenpeace USA, where she led policy work on Liberia’s conflict timber and developed a watching brief on the dispute resolution organization. “There was no looking back at that point. That was it.”
Indeed, she’s been focused on forest protection issues in Africa ever since – coordinating work in Ghana, Cameroon, Liberia and the Congo – first with Friends of the Earth, then with ForestEthics and finally with Greenpeace International, where she has worked since 2008.
“I spent that year in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and it really humbled me. It really made me realize that we’ve won the lottery of life being born in the United States,” says Medeiros. “But, they don’t let not having roads that go to their house, not having Internet or sporadic electricity sometimes get them down. That they can still fight the environmental fight: Man, that’s amazing!”
Medeiros herself took the environmental fight to Copenhagen for the United Nations Framework Convention on Change in 2009, and, in 2010, to Beijing, where she served as Greenpeace East Asia’s climate and energy campaign adviser. Since the earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear reactor meltdowns at Fukushima in Japan last March, however, Medeiros has been at the Greenpeace International headquarters in Amsterdam, where she has been coordinating the on-site team as it collects data to be used in prompting the Japanese government to be more transparent.
“We try to offer a different perspective– a more global perspective: How does the global organization leverage the situation to change its policies and its response for the best of the whole world?” she says. “The only way we’re going to move toward renewable energy technology is if we learn from these lessons.”
It’s this kind of big-picture thinking that Medeiros applies to all her work.
“I just want to work toward some kind of understanding that gives civil society enough space to work to protect nature,” she says. “And I want to take it to the global level.”
Because, in the end, all the world is her stage.
Photo by Jeroen Bouman
