This past weekend I attended the River Rally in Portland Oregon; this annual event draws hundreds of hard working river activists who gather to discuss policy, tactics, and science, and to celebrate rivers. This was my first time attending the event in over ten years, and I was proud to return with the special goal of helping to host a delegation of environmentalists from China. Most of the delegates, including several Pacific Environment partners, had never been to the US, let alone Oregon. It was fun to show them around my home state and share in the excitement of Oregon’s lush green forests and pure, clean air!

The conference was highlighted by a noontime rally in downtown Portland’s Pioneer Square, to protest a proposed coal export terminal along the Columbia River. It was an unusually warm day, and spirits were high as a diverse lineup of speakers took to the stage, culminating in a speech by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. of the Waterkeeper Alliance. In addition, Xin Hao of Green Zhejiang gave a passionate talk, where he told the crowd, “China should not become the dumping ground for your coal industry. Our people need clean air, not dirty U.S. coal.” Xin Hao was met with high fives and hugs as he left the stage, and the entire Chinese delegation was energized by the warm welcome they received at the rally.

Xin Hao of Green Zhejiang at Coal Rally

But one Chinese colleague continued to ask me throughout the day, “Why do these American environmentalists care so much about coal?” I explained that coal pollutes the air and contributes to global warming, that coal pollutes rivers and wastes water resources, that coal extraction destroys mountain ecosystems which are headwaters for drinking water sources; and besides, there are better, cheaper ways to meet our energy needs. Yet my colleague still did not seem satisfied, as he recounted the many other serious forms of pollution that he faces in his region of work in China. Even though China is the world’s largest coal consumer (the US is the second largest), the industry’s impacts have been largely ignored, even by the Chinese environmental movement. Yet as the March protest against a coal fired power plant in Hainan shows, this could be changing.

A part of the reason coal has yet to become a hot issue in China is that powerful, state-owned companies largely control China’s coal industry and are difficult for environmentalists to target; but more and more, international corporations are getting involved in exploiting coal in China. And with US and Canadian companies now seeking feasible markets for their dirty coal in China and other Asian countries, a platform for global cooperation to stop the coal industry is needed more than ever. As one next step, some of our partner groups in China are interested in developing informational materials that expose the risks of coal dependency in terms of public health; Waterkeeper Alliance and Pacific Environment are seeking ways to support and foster these efforts.Coal Rally Against Exporting Coal Through Pacific Northwest

The Three Gorges Dam Corporation celebrated their completion of the world’s largest hydropower project by announcing that over 100 engineering innovations had been created during the course of construction. And they boasted breaking several world records to get the dam built, such as the record for the amount of concrete poured at any one time. Engineers clearly learned something from building the Three Gorges Dam, but what about the rest of us? What have environmentalists, geologists, social scientists, biologists, and others learned from the Three Gorges Dam? This was the topic of a two day symposium that I attended this past weekend, hosted by the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Design at UC Berkeley, and Probe International.

Robert Goodland, former World Bank environmental advisor and Dai Qing, Probe Internationall

The inspiration for the symposium came when Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao issued a statement in May of 2011 admitting the Three Gorges Dam has had its share of problems, both foreseen and unforeseen. This official expression of concern seemed to open the doors wider for public debate on the project.  Symposium organizers did an incredible job gathering a broad lineup of Chinese experts, who perhaps because of the May declaration as well as the “neutral” setting of UC Berkeley, were willing to take part in an a rare interdisciplinary discussion on what the world’s largest hydropower project has taught China, and the world.

Yet many of the government-funded scientists from China presented a view of the project as one that, while not without its faults, had largely contributed to the good of the Chinese people. Weng Lida of the Yangtze Valley Water Resources Protection Bureau gave the dam high marks for its flood control benefits, though he admitted the dam “weakened the gorge feeling” and that “the main structure is finished but many other aspects are not finished yet, including many things proposed in the Environmental Impact Statement.” The representative of the Yangtze River Fisheries Research Institute, Chen Daqing, declined to pin the severe demise of Yangtze fisheries to Three Gorges Dam itself, instead citing overfishing, water quality decline, and many other dam projects as equal contributors.

One of the strongest criticisms of the project was made by Ren Xinghui of the Beijing-based think tank the Transition Institute, who presented a disheartening story of his repeated attempts to use China’s new information disclosure laws to reveal details of Three Gorges Dam project funding. Later in the symposium, laughter and consternation alike filled the hall when the nature of the Three Gorges Dam funding was compared to the US government bailout of private banks.

What have we learned from the Three Gorges Dam? Data presented at the symposium points to several lessons:

• Project costs were far higher than anticipated.
• Landslides in the reservoir area and reservoir-induced earthquakes have been greater in number and more severe than anticipated.
• The number of resettled people was far higher than anticipated (nearly double, and growing!)
• The negative impacts of resettlement on people (such as their ability to resume former livelihoods) were greater than anticipated.
• Water quality in the reservoir was worse than anticipated.
• The impacts on fisheries, hydrology, and sediment (and probably many other issues) can probably only be adequately understood through river-basin wide impact assessments, which were never completed, and are not being undertaken now.
• Lack of consensus on primary project purpose (hydropower versus flood control) may have limited the dam’s ability to fill either function very well.

Those who continue to build mega-dams around the world may want to take note not only of the world record innovations, but also the world record headaches caused by the dam.

But could another Three Gorges Dam ever be built? I don’t think so. In a presentation on the human costs of the project, Chen Guojie, Institute of Mountain Disaster and the Environment, pointed out that the Chinese government had clearly decided early on that “the value of one million people [was] lower than the value of the Three Gorges Project.” But China is a different country than it was in 1992, when the Three Gorges Dam was approved. And though bad dams continue to be built in China and around the world, the days of forced relocation on the scale of the Three Gorges Dam are hopefully over for good.

Pacific Environment recently hosted a group of four Russian environmental activists for a really great exchange program which brought them to eastern Washington and northern Idaho to meet with a spectrum of groups that are in varying capacities involved in agricultural burning and wildfire management. Over ten packed days, we met with community advocacy groups, farmers, state air quality regulators, tribal smoke managers, and United States Forest Service fire specialists and smokejumpers.

(Photo credit: Anton Beneslavskiy, Greenpeace-Russia) Washington State Department of Ecology’s Air Quality Program staff explain the decade-long negotiation process between farmers, regulators, and communities.

For a little over a year, Pacific Environment has been supporting several pilot projects in Russia aimed at reducing agricultural burning in Siberia and the Far East through a combination of public outreach and education, fire-fighting, and policy advocacy. The four participants all represent these interesting projects, and traveled to the US to discuss with their counterparts strategies for expanding and replicating the successes these groups have seen in changing field burning practices.

Agricultural burning is widespread across Russia – commercial and subsistence farmers alike set fire to their fields in the spring and fall, as this is the quickest and cheapest way to get rid of stubble and extra straw. Control over the practice is poor to non-existent, and intentionally-set fires that accidentally escape field perimeters cause the majority of forest fires in Russia. In addition to public safety and forest conservation concerns, agricultural burning in Russia(pdf) has a considerable impact on global climate. These fires are significant contributors of black carbon, or soot, in the Arctic: smoke columns from massive burning in Siberia carry the carbon north, and where it eventually settles on Arctic ice, darkening the ice and lowering its reflective potential – causing the ice to melt faster. The pilot project efforts will hopefully result in considerable reductions of black carbon from agricultural burning in the Arctic.

(Photo credit: Anton Beneslavskiy, Greenpeace-Russia) Wheat farmer Jeff Schibel gives participants a tour of his farm near Odessa, WA, explaining the permitted burning process and fire safety protocols.

Wheat farmers in eastern Washington State and northern Idaho also burn intensively after spring and fall harvests, and have for decades, but this practice is now very strictly regulated through a state-run permitting system, while bluegrass seed farmers may not burn at all. In the 1990s, the Washington and Idaho departments of ecology created the current burning regulations after a multi-stakeholder coalition led heated campaigns to ban wheat and grass straw burning because of the public health impact of the heavy smoke it sends into nearby communities. A decade of litigation and negotiations between state lawmakers, farmers associations, and communities produced field burning which favors public health over farmers’ frugality.

In Spokane, we met first with activists from Safe Air for Everyone/Save Our Summers, who led much of the local coalition-building and media efforts during the anti-burning campaign, and we were joined by one of the lawyers that helped argue the citizens’ case in court. Of greatest interest to the Russian guests were local organizing tactics and communications strategies. From here, we went to the Washington State Department of Ecology to learn about the state’s burning regulation system and the agency’s role as coordinator between all involved parties. The participants noted that the intensive coordination was time- and resource-intensive, but seemed to balance the goal of increasing burning safety with farmers’ needs.

We also met with the Air Quality Program managers at the Idaho State Department of Environmental Quality in Coeur d’Alene to learn about the state’s very similar burn permitting program and the agency’s work to balance environmental concerns and farmers’ residue management needs. The participants and agency staff talked in great detail about programs to train farmers in safe burning practices and monitoring protocols. In the following days we also visited staff from the Coeur D’Alene Tribe Air Quality Program and then the Nez Perce Tribe Air Quality Program; these agencies collaborate closely with WA and ID air quality managers to control smoke levels within the respective reservations and the shared regional airshed.

(Photo credit: Anton Beneslavskiy, Greenpeace-Russia) US Forest Service hotshot crew leaders give participants a tour of the agency’s aviation equipment and Smokejumper base.

The clear priority of our hosts in WA and ID is to protect community health during agricultural burning seasons, while the Russian participants and their organizations are less concerned with this aspect – the majority of large-scale field fires in Russia occur in areas that aren’t very densely populated. It is the local organizing, strategic media outreach, and state agency-coordinated negotiations that effectively changed burning behavior here that were of greatest relevance for our guests.

Other interesting and useful meetings included a visit with an agricultural researcher (born and raised on a wheat farm) from the Washington State University Dryland Research Station, where he shared his findings on the impact of burning on soil health and wheat crop yield. As it turns out, burning is not as unambiguously beneficial, as wheat farmers in both countries attest – science-based arguments such as these will add further merit to the pilot projects’ campaigns to promote non-burning alternatives in crop residue management. A few of the alternatives offered are no-till farming or plowing stubble back into the soil, but hopefully farmers will soon be able to capitalize on their straw by turning it into an energy resource. The owners of Gady Farms and the director of their NGO FarmPower gave us a tour of their unique facility that converts grass straw into synthetic gas. This project is still in the research phase, but it has great potential to further reduce burning practices while offering a clean, renewable energy resource!

(Photo credit: Anton Beneslavskiy, Greenpeace-Russia) Washington State University agricultural researcher William Schillinger explains crop studies on crop stubble utilization at the Dryland Research Station in Lind, WA.

Our visit to the US Forest Service offices in Missoula, Montana were equally educational – experts in forest fire management and community fire safety answered participants’ questions on forest fuels management, inter-agency coordination, and positive incentives to stimulate public participation in fire prevention and community fire-safety programs. Afterwards, the Russian participants – all volunteer firefighters at home – met with USFS Smokejumper hotshot crew leaders to talk about suppression tactics and team managements, then were treated to a tour of the aircraft and heavy equipment hangers.

Since going back home, exchange participants have stayed in touch with several of the groups they met during the tour, sharing more detailed information about aspects of their respective work, and discussing potential for future advising or trainings.

Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu Province in north-central China, has some of the worst air quality and traffic jams I have seen, even for China. But the city has an optimistic feel. When I visited a few weeks ago, the parks and green spaces were prodigiously adorned with spring festival lighting; and bright silk flowers had been painstakingly attached to the dormant shrubbery.  Even the traffic jams seemed friendly and patient.

Anti-Chopsticks Man, Lanzhou

This optimistic mood also could be felt at the offices of our long-time partner in Lanzhou, the grassroots environmental group Green Camel Bell. The group has steadily grown since we helped start the group in 2004 and now has seven staff members working on rural sustainable development, green transportation, water resource protection, and advancing environmental information disclosure. I went to Lanzhou for a week to in early March, 2012 to conduct trainings on fundraising planning, and solutions to non-point source water pollution, and to check on progress on Green Camel Bell’s water project.

During my visit, we ventured out from Lanzhou one day to look at hydropower development on a tributary to the Yellow River, the Tao River. We spoke with a farmer who had a portion of his land taken for one of the projects. Most of Gansu is characterized by yellow, crumbly hills made of Loess – a fine, silty soil that is difficult to cultivate. Farmers in the Tao River basin are better off than in other areas because of the river’s broad floodplain provides easier terrain and more fertile soil.

The farmer we spoke to said he willingly sold land to the hydropower plant, but on reflection he felt the power plant got too good a deal. Farmland is increasingly scarce, and farmers in this arid region often have to compete for clean water with new factories and hydropower plants. Climate change also seems to be decreasing water availability, and mining, landfills, and the country’s largest nuclear waste depository threaten groundwater security.

Hydropower Plant on Tao River

Though these challenges are daunting, the trip left me feeling energized by Green Camel Bell’s enthusiasm, and their skill in carving a niche for their important and sometimes controversial work. For example, this past year, they managed to convince the Environmental Protection Bureau in a nearby township to host an open information meeting with local community members, who were concerned about industrial pollution impacting their water supply. Green Camel Bell has worked consistently since the open information laws passed in China in 2008 to bring information on pollution risks and rights to similar communities in Gansu.

During my visit I also participated in a “Protect the Mother River” clean up event that took place in honor of the revolutionary peasant hero Lei Feng. Hundreds of Lanzhou residents from eight community and university green groups attended. As we gathered all varieties of trash from the banks of the Yellow River, Green Camel Bell volunteers measured water quality, and talked to participants about reducing, reusing, and recycling. These types of events – often called “happy water tours” in China – are a popular education method among many of Pacific Environment’s partners.

Volunteers at River Cleanup, Lanzhou

In addition to weekly “happy water tours,” this year Green Camel Bell is developing a new program that takes education one step further – to environmental problem solving through theater. During my visit I got to participate in the launch of Green Camel Bell’s new environmental theater workshop, headed by American volunteer Allegra Fonda-Bonardi. At the culmination of the multi-week workshop, Green Camel Bell will host China’s first environmental theater summit in Lanzhou, inviting community theater groups from around the country to participate in learning theater techniques to help resolve environmental conflict. I look forward to reporting on this ground-breaking event, and have high hopes for Green Camel Bell’s continued efforts at the frontier of China’s grassroots environmental movement!

The city of Dalian, in Liaoning Province, China sits on a peninsula that juts into Bohai, a bay that made news two summers in a row for oil spills caused by offshore drilling. I spent four days here together with staff of Blue Dalian, a grassroots environmental organization that seeks to protect Dalian’s regional water resources – including the Bay of Bohai and the Biliu River, which provides drinking water for Dalian City. Pacific Environment has supported Blue Dalian since it started, in 2007, with funding, mentorship, collaborative campaigning, and training.

Harvesting Seaweed in Dalian

On my trip, we spent two days in a rental car following the Biliu River up to its headwaters in the neighboring municipality of Wangfu Zhen. For two years, Blue Dalian has been raising the alarm about uncontrolled gold mining in the upper Biliu Watershed.  The miners here use cyanide and other toxic chemicals to leach gold of out rock drilled from the hills surrounding the Biliu River. Gold leaching ponds are often located right next to the river, each containing thousands of tons of toxic mud. An earthquake, severe rain, or other accident could easily compromise retaining walls, spill the toxic sludge into the Biliu River, and poison downstream water sources including the reservoir that Dalian residents drink from.  Such accidents have occurred all over the world, including the recent Cadmium spill in Guangxi, China.

Blue Dalian’s initial strategy included investigating the problem and reporting their results. Last year, they produced Poisoned River: Gold Mining along the Biliu River and distributed this report to officials, community groups, and schools. The Dalian Municipal government has been slow to respond; one environmental official showed concern early in the campaign but was later transferred to another position.  Media has been sympathetic, but without evidence of existing harm being done, they have hinted the story won’t become marketable until an accident actually occurs. Local farmers have felt some impacts, such as livestock falling ill and orchards that no longer bear fruit. But they are worried about confronting the mining companies, most of which are controlled by powerful local government officials and have deep connections in their communities.

Sludge tailings on Biliu River

On my visit to the area, I was surprised to learn that Dalian and Bohai are also home to the Hong Yan Nuclear Power Plant, the world’s largest nuclear power plant, with six reactors currently and two more coming soon. Following the earthquake and tsunami in Japan last year, fears of a nuclear accident in China led government planners to suspend plants under construction and temporarily close others to undergo safety system reviews. Responding to increased local concern about the Hong Yan, Blue Dalian printed and distributed a citizen’s guide to nuclear safety.

Besides the dangers posed by a potential nuclear accident, the reactor cooling mechanism increases the temperature of the surrounding sea water by 6 degrees, which melts the ice shelves that provide breeding grounds to China’s only seal species, the spotted seal. Other seashore projects such as a trans-provincial coastal highway, offshore drilling, and poaching of seals for zoos and for “seal penis medicine” have reduced the local breeding population to about 1000 seals.

On a tour of the Dalian peninsula and Biliu River, we stopped at a dump on Bohai Bay which services the “Opening Up Zone” of Dalian City. A hotspot for birdwatching, we also hoped we might spot a spotted seal in the wild. No such luck; but in addition to several kinds of gulls and ducks, we caught sight of a white-tailed eagle resting on a distant slice of sea ice.

Garbage dumped into the Biliu River

Last year, Blue Dalian teamed up with ten other local and national organizations and successfully convinced planners to re-route the trans-provincial coastal highway around sensitive breeding habitat. But the species is still in peril, and this year, Blue Dalian and Pacific Environment will investigate potential new risks to the boundaries of the spotted seal nature reserve. We will promote policies that ensure that future development projects cannot so easily bypass nature reserve boundary protections.

Russia’s Kolskaya gas drilling platform sank approximately 200 miles off the coast of Sakhalin Island in the Okhotsk Sea on Saturday after completing an exploratory well on the Western Kamchatka Shelf. At least 16 crew members are dead and another 38 are still missing. Miraculously, 14 people were rescued from the freezing water. Environmental damage is expected to be minimal, as the platform’s fuel remains stored in hermetically sealed containers.

Russian media is already reporting that the towing operation, conducted in heavy seas during the winter storm season without sufficient safety equipment, violated several laws and safety protocols. A criminal investigation has already begun. Meanwhile, a damning video from a local news station in Murmansk (the home city for many of the Kolskaya’s crew) shows relatives of the missing captain and safety officer explaining that both men had unsuccessfully lobbied their superiors to delay the operation to avoid the Okhotsk Sea’s famously powerful storms.

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The Hawaiian culture places great emphasis on the word “Aloha,” which means love, peace, compassion, and charity. Hawaiians greet and bid farewell to their guests with Aloha. Unfortunately, there was no Aloha at this year’s APEC Summit (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) in Honolulu, Hawaii.  Sadly, a local Hawaiian youth was killed on the first day of the summit after scuffling with a U.S. federal agent who was hired as a security guard for the multi-day event. This caused bewilderment and a wave of protests from locals.

Honolulu, normally a peaceful vacation town, was not very friendly during the week of the summit and seemed to escalate into chaos. Roads were closed for world leaders and their entourages, causing massive traffic jams. According to witnesses, just the Chinese delegation alone, arrived with 1,000 members and that was only one of the 21 delegations in attendance. Thousands of armed soldiers and federal agents patrolled the perimeter of the tourist part of Honolulu-Waikiki, where the summit took place. Displaying weapons to cause fear in peaceful people is, unfortunately, a common practice in many countries. The meeting was held on Hawaii, far from the US mainland, where large-scale protests were unlikely. Yet, authorities and the APEC planning committee apparently decided to take special measures in light of recent Occupy Movement Protests in most large US cities.  To give you a sense of how much security was there, the US government spent $44 million to prepare for the summit, including $18 million for police and $10 million for “contingency expenses” such as 700 thousand units of non-lethal weapons, including 25 thousand pepper sprays, and even 3 thousand tasers, all purchased by American taxpayers.

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The blackout that shrouded San Diego in darkness in September demonstrated the problem with relying on power grids as they’re currently designed. The problem began at a substation in Arizona, and a series of triggering events caused failures all the way to San Onofre nuclear plant on the coast. At the cost of an estimated $100 million in damages, and major inconvenience to millions of people, the San Diego region received a crash course about the fragility of depending on a grid that runs mostly on distant sources of energy.

But it didn’t have to turn out this way. Four years ago a San Diego engineer, Bill Powers, published a groundbreaking report, San Diego Smart Energy 2020. The report was all about how to use off-the-shelf technologies in order to build and generate power locally to enhance the existing grid, and provide protection against these sorts of events. The report isn’t a pie-in-the-sky vision of the future. It uses affordable technologies that are available and ready to deploy. It’s a practical guide that includes a 20 percent reduction in energy usage through existing efficiency measures and 2,000 megawatts of local solar projects. To back up the solar, which doesn’t generate at night, Powers’ report proposes 700 new megawatts of small co-generation facilities, similar to what is already in use at Qualcomm, UCSD, SDSU, and Children’s Hospital, which are highly efficient users of natural gas.

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I have now spent two amazing months in the United States working as a Community Solutions Program Fellow with Pacific Environment’s Alaska Program.  This experience has  given me a global perspective on the struggles faced by the environmental movement and the natural resource extraction sector and will no doubt improve my work with my home organization, the Zimbabwe Environmental Law Association (www.zela.org ).  In Zimbabwe, my work focuses mainly on improving community benefits, securing community rights, protecting the environment and promoting transparency and accountability in the diamond and black granite mining sector.  In Alaska, my fellowship with the Pacific Environment has centered on oil and gas development and its negative impacts on the environment and Indigenous communities.  While I have never worked on oil and gas, I have found the work to be intriguing and similar to my work back home, specifically as it relates to community rights.

I have already learned many important things about the global environmental movement during my fellowship so far. First, I realized that impacts from natural resource extraction activities are similar across the world and come with disastrous consequences on both the environment and on communities.  I have found that this is the same whether it is hard rock mining or oil and gas extraction in the U.S.  In Zimbabwe, mining continues to result in environmental pollution and community rights violations, as decisions are made without provisions for viable alternatives for local communities. Often times their land is left completely decimated.  In the same manner, oil and gas extraction in the Arctic poses a threat not just to the Arctic environment but to the lives and cultural rights of Indigenous peoples.  These similarities have shown me the need to learn from the work of organizations in the U.S. and to share my experiences when I return to work in Zimbabwe. I have realized that there is a need to strengthen international networks to ensure global advocacy and lobbying efforts at various international arenas including United Nations platforms. Read the rest of this entry »

Endangered Snow Leopard

Every fall, Pacific Environment gathers the leading environmental experts and activists in Siberia and the Russian Far East for the region’s most anticipated, preeminent strategy meeting. We call it the “Sosnovka Coalition,” in honor of the town where the first meeting was held 13 years ago. Although each Sosnovka meeting is different due to location and current priorities, the spirit and the excitement of seeing old friends and meeting like-minded people remain the same from year to year. During the four days of intensive strategy discussions, Sosnovka members reflect, analyze and come up with important decisions that will shape the conservation landscape for the next year. Newly invited members of the coalition receive hands on experience and the most up-to-date legal and technical information from Russia’s brightest environmental leaders. No wonder that some coalition members jokingly describe the meeting as a four-day PhD program!

Sosnovka traditionally m eets in the city or region that is home to the most acute environmental threat. This year’s meeting was held in the Republic of Altai, where plans to construct a gas pipeline threaten the native nature and culture. The proposed pipeline would bisect a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a plateau that indigenous Altains consider sacred.  If built, the pipeline will deliver gas directly to China and the accompanying infrastructure would threaten to destroy the critical habitats of rare and endangered species, including the argali sheep and snow leopard. By selecting Altai as a meeting place, we helped raise regional awareness of this threat while building the capacity and visibility of local environmental and indigenous organizations.

Horses in Uch-Enmen Nature Park ( Photo: Elena U)

This year’s meeting was organized and hosted by two of Pacific Environment’s longtime partners in Altai: The Foundation for Sustainable Development of Altai (FSDA) and Tengri School of Spiritual Ecology. We’ve been working with both organizations since 2006, supporting several specific projects and assisting with capacity building and leadership initiatives.

Some of the most heated discussions at this year’s meeting focused on traditional topics such as legislation, oil and gas development, mining, forestry, protected areas, hydrological dam development, and alternative energy. New topics, such as working with media and social networks, blogging, and use of new technology also drew interest. The most divisive debate concerned collaboration with political parties. Some members support the tradition of separating environmentalism from politics and keeping Sosnovka independent from political parties, while others seek an opportunity to use the upcoming presidential election as an opportunity to push national political campaigns to incorporate an environmental platform. The debate is not over. It has changed from a face-to-face meeting into an online discussion.

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