Relationship
Resilience
Reconnection
Relationship Resilience Reconnection
How do we create a more sustainable, more equitable future for all?
With the pressing challenges bearing down on our region, we need bold, rooted solutions for the future. Hosted by Central Oregon LandWatch, the Livable Future Forum is a dynamic public lecture and conversation series designed to imagine the possibilities for a better reality ahead.
During our 2025 series, conservationist Chuck Sams, author Michelle Nijhuis, and National Geographic Explorer Kiliii Yüyan came to Central Oregon to help us explore what it will take to create a livable, just, and ecologically vibrant future in the face of profound challenges.
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PAST EVENTS
December 4, 2025
Guardians of Life
Indigenous Practices for a Thriving Earth
DEC 4, 3 PM & 7 PM | TOWER THEATRE, BEND, OR
Photographer, filmmaker, and National Geographic Explorer Kiliii Yüyan will share breathtaking stories of survival, Indigenous resilience, and ecological kinship. Through images and stories spanning the globe from the Arctic to Australia, Yüyan reminds us that when we protect the more-than-human world, we are also protecting ourselves.
$30 GENERAL, $15 STUDENT
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Photographer Kiliii Yuyan is best known for his joyful grin. He has reasons to be thankful. He's survived a hunting polar bear and charmed sea snakes. He's found community at the edges of the world. But perhaps it is easiest to say that Kiliii is a storyteller who seeks to understand the world from many human perspectives.
From his Chinese and Nanai/Hézhè (East Asian Indigenous) ancestry, Kiliii was driven to be curious about the natural world. For two decades he built and paddled traditional kayaks, exploring his grandmother's culture through the craft of his ancestors. Today, he is a photographer committed to telling stories that help humanity understand itself and its relationship to mother earth.
His publication credits include TIME, Vogue, and WIRED. He has been honored by awards from Pictures of the Year International, Leica Oscar-Barnack, PDN and ASMP and, in 2023, Kiliii received one of National Geographic's highest honors, the Eliza Scidmore Award for Outstanding Storytelling. Kiliii is currently on a speaking tour with National Geographic Live. He is based out of traditional Duwamish lands (Seattle), but usually found beneath the sea or floating on Arctic ice.
November 13, 2025
A Shift in Thinking
Essential environmental reading
NOV 13, 7 PM | OPEN SPACE EVENT STUDIOS, BEND, OR
Longtime High Country News contributing editor Michelle Nijhuis, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in the Age of Extinction, will walk us through 20 influential books — spanning all genres of literature — that can help us shift our thinking away from systems of ecological oppression and toward a more just and verdant future.
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After 15 years off the grid in rural Colorado, Michelle and her family and now live in White Salmon, Washington, on the north side of the Columbia River Gorge. A lapsed biologist, she specializes in stories about conservation and global change, but she’s covered subjects ranging from theater to wrestling to my preschooler’s conviction that Bilbo Baggins is a girl. Her book Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, a critical history of the modern conservation movement, was published by W.W. Norton in 2021 and was named one of the best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune, Smithsonian, Booklist, and other publications.
Michelle is a longtime contributing editor of High Country News, an independent magazine that produces some of the finest journalism in the American West, and the lead editor of its Conservation Beyond Boundaries series.
Her writing has appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, and she’s a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. Her work has won several national honors, including two AAAS/Kavli Science Journalism Awards and inclusion in four Best American anthologies, and it’s been generously supported by the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and the Food and Environment Reporting Network.
She is also the co-editor of The Science Writers’ Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Pitch, Publish and Prosper in the Digital Age, published by Da Capo Press, and the author of The Science Writers’ Essay Handbook: How to Craft Compelling True Stories in Any Medium. As a project editor for The Atlantic from 2017 through 2023, she edited features for the Planet section and the Life Up Close series.
Her last name rhymes with "my house."
October 30, 2025
Rights of Nature
A Conversation with Chuck Sams
OCT 30, 7 PM | RAY HALL ATRIUM, OSU-CASCADES, BEND, OR
The first Indigenous National Park Service Director and Cayuse and Walla Walla tribal citizen Chuck Sams will join LandWatch Executive Director Ben Gordon for a discussion on the Rights of Nature—a movement that redefines how we relate to land, water, and wildlife. Sams will share perspectives shaped by Indigenous law and conservation leadership, inviting us to recognize nature not as property, but as a relative.
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Chuck Sams currently serves as Oregon’s Council Member to the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, as Director of Indigenous Programs at Yale’s Center for Environmental Justice, Lecturer at Yale’s Environmental School and Oregon Tribes Scholar in Residence and Senior Fellow for the Native Environmental Sovereignty Project in the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Center at the University of Oregon. From 2021 to 2025, he served as the 19th director of the National Park Service in the U.S. Department of the Interior.
In addition, he has served as Executive Director and Deputy Executive Director for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR). Beyond work with the CTUIR, he has held leadership roles with a broad range of organizations, including the City Volunteer Corps of New York, Earth Conservation Corps, the Columbia Slough Watershed Council, the Trust for Public Land, the Umatilla Tribal Community Foundation, and the Indian Country Conservancy Education.
Chuck holds a Master of Legal Studies in Indigenous Peoples Law from the University of Oklahoma School of Law. He also earned a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, Management, Communications, and Leadership from Concordia University.
Chuck served in the U.S. Navy as an Intelligence Specialist with an Attack Squadron, at the Joint Intelligence Center Pacific Command, and with the Defense Intelligence Agency Headquarters. His expertise was in Soviet/Russian Affairs, Middle Eastern Affairs, China Affairs and AntiTerrorism.
Chuck is an enrolled tribal member of the Cayuse and Walla Walla tribes with the CTUIR. Chuck, Lori, and their daughter Ruby reside in Pendleton, Oregon. Their older children—Rose, Chauncey, and Clara—are leading fulfilling lives as adults. The family loves to camp, hike, bike, hunt, and fish.
The 2026 Livable Future Forum is generously supported by:
Previous support and in-kind assistance from:
“How can we support and perpetuate the rights of all living things to share in a world of abundance? … Imagine what a world of prosperity and health in the future will look like, and begin designing for it right now.”