Navigate

Telling a Fateful Story

In his film Staring Down Fate, Jeff Mittelstadt ’07 (MBA), right, documented the life and death of his friend, wildlife biologist Chris Lucas. (Photo courtesy of Jeff Mittelstadt)

The text message read something like, “I have ALS. I need you to tell my story.”

It was sent from Chris Lucash, a wildlife biologist, to Jeff Mittelstadt ’07 (MBA), a documentary filmmaker who had trekked behind Lucash through brush and over logs, recording him commando-crawling into dens to pull out red wolf pups, extract a few drops of blood and then crawl back to gently return them to their nest.

Lucash was part of a team working to reintroduce the endangered red wolf into the wild in the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in eastern North Carolina. The wolves were extinct in the wild until 1987, when four males and four females raised in captivity were released to run free. Lucash was there to help them thrive.

On the first day that Mittelstadt had shown up to work on his documentary about the wolf program, the biologist seemed to embrace survival of the fittest. He did not help carry Mittelstadt’s gear or even shake his hand. He did not expect the filmmaker would keep up or even come back for another outing.


Listen as Jeff Mittelstadt ’07 (MBA) talks about his emotional journey creating Staring Down Fate in the latest episode of the GAA’s Hark the Sounds podcast.

But years of long days bumping along in a pickup truck together had transformed that prickly beginning into a friendship. And now, at 54, Lucash’s body was failing him, and he wanted Mittelstadt — who also earned a master’s in mass communication from UNC in 2012 — to shift his focus from the wolves’ story to his own.

Lucash wanted to leave a legacy for his wife, Alisa Esposito, and their three children to remember him and his love for his work. He also wanted to share what he was learning about how the very environmental issues that endangered the wolves — including direct exposure to pesticides and to the neurotoxins released by blue-green algae — might be factors in neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. His fate and the wolves’ fate could be intertwined.

So Mittelstadt quit his day job.

It was November 2015, and Mittelstadt was director of sustainability at his first alma mater, Davidson College. He had made it his life’s mission to find common ground on issues by telling stories from all sides, especially in spaces where humans and the natural world interact, and to showcase stakeholders’ common interests.

Mittelstadt had done it with the Powering a Nation team at UNC’s School of Media and Journalism that created Coal: A Love Story, an award-winning multimedia project about the country’s relationship with coal. He had done it for a short film on endangered North Atlantic right whales caught up in fishing gear and killed in collisions with boats.

“People, planet, profit”

In 2011, while working on his master’s degree, Mittelstadt had begun looking for that common ground in a debate over red wolves, talking with farmers, hunters and wildlife biologists. He sought common threads to advocate for the “triple bottom line,” a concept he’d been introduced to while working on his MBA in entrepreneurship and sustainable enterprise at UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. It seeks a balance among social equity, environmental integrity and economic prosperity.  “People call it the 3Es,” Mittelstadt said, “but it’s also the 3Ps — people, planet, profit.”

The original focus of Mittelstadt’s film was the reintroduction of the red wolf into the woods of eastern North Carolina. (Photo courtesy of Jeff Mittelstadt)

The idea is that to arrive at sustainable solutions, people or organizations have to take all constituencies into account. A win-win-win might not be possible, but the various stakeholders can come closer to that goal if they listen to all sides.

Mittelstadt’s documentary was an attempt to look at the wolves’ reintroduction from all points of view, such as farmers who love them because they cull the deer that eat their crops and hunters who hate the wolves for that same culling.

To tell that story and others, Mittelstadt had founded WildSides, a nonprofit that creates multimedia projects focusing on issues between humans and wildlife.

“Our underlying mantra is that we don’t have to agree with people who might fall on a different side of the issue, but we do have to understand them,” he said. “If we can make ourselves think of it the way they do, we’re going to have a better opportunity to find a more lasting solution and a better way to disagree.”

The Next Generation of Storytellers

Jeff Mittelstadt, who lives in High Point, is passing his love for stories to a new generation. His WildSides Youth Storytellers for Empowerment is working with the local D-UP nonprofit enrichment program to teach young people to tell the stories of people in the community. “We want to make it second nature for the next generation to listen to other people’s stories, whether they agree with them or not,” Mittelstadt said. D-UP aims to get teenagers interested in living healthier, more constructive lives. “Telling the stories from both sides will help our kids see a different perspective in our community,” D-UP co-founder Jakki Davis said. “It’ll be a dual mentorship, great for the kids and the people whose stories they’re telling.”

“A very rewarding thing”

But then Lucash asked him to pivot and tell his story, and the resulting documentary released this year, Staring Down Fate, chronicles Lucash’s physical decline just as the red wolves seemed to reach a sustainable threshold.

As his mysterious physical difficulties began during the original project, Lucash did not want them shown. “This was the guy who tried to scare me a little bit the first time he met me,” Mittelstadt said. “He’s a guy who’s been chasing wolves in the wild, carrying them in carriers by himself.”

But once he was diagnosed with ALS, Lucash changed his mind to show how he continued to work through his decline. He wanted his kids to understand his work and see the beauty he saw in nature. He also wanted to make people see the connection between the health of the environment and of their own bodies.


“The question became, how do we die with purpose, just like we want to live with purpose?”

–Jeff Mittelstadt ’07 (MBA)

“It’s one thing to say that research has shown that these correlations exist,” Mittelstadt said. “It’s another to show somebody who has been affected by this environmental issue, to connect a family’s emotions as they deal with it.”

Staring Down Fate opens with a wolf leaping over the camera, finally free from its cage, and a small boy chasing it and its mate between the corn fields. The boy is Lucash’s son, Noah, and the then-healthy Lucash laughs while watching the scene.

“Taking something where there were very few of them and providing them an opportunity, a habitat, a time, a space, to go back to what they were naturally supposed to be, for me that was a very rewarding thing,” Lucash says in the film.

The film is personal and often painful; none of it is staged. Mittelstadt learned to cry quietly behind his camera, and then later, to focus on the technical issues of filming and editing and sound. At screenings, he still takes notes — in part to become better at his craft, in part to distance himself from the pain of watching his friend wither until his death in 2016.

“The question became, how do we die with purpose, just like we want to live with purpose?” Mittelstadt said. “Chris figured it out, and that’s one of the reasons he texted me. Maybe his story will help others think about how we live and die with the environment we depend on, use and sometimes abuse.”

Mittelstadt is returning to chronicling efforts to sustain red wolves in the wild, where their fate is precarious. He hopes that seeing how that ongoing challenge is met by all the sides with a stake in the issue also will be an example of how to live.

— Janine Latus


 

Share via: