Cromwell Cruz was comfortable with villains and heroes.

Government and corporations represented broken systems. Communities were the people resisting them. For someone interested in biodiversity, conservation and Indigenous communities, it offered a straightforward way to understand environmental conflict.

Then NextGen complicated the picture.

Cromwell began encountering what he calls the “messy, human middle ground”: government workers operating within budget constraints, Indigenous families making difficult choices under economic pressure, and communities whose own practices could sometimes create environmental tensions. 

The challenge was not to abandon accountability. It was to resist forcing everyone into an archetype before understanding why they acted the way they did.

“Systems are grey. Nature is fluid,” Cromwell says. Climate stories, he realized, rarely offer easy blame or silver-bullet solutions. 

Beyond heroes and villains

That shift became particularly important as Cromwell developed his NextGen story in Palanan, Isabela, in the northern Philippines.

His project focuses on the Agta-Dumagat community and how environmental and climate pressures are affecting wild food foraging, food security and cultural practices.

As access to traditional food sources changes, some community members have turned to other ways of earning a living, including wage labor and gold panning. Cromwell is interested in what those changes mean not only for livelihoods, but also for culture, identity and the traditional ecological knowledge tied to the landscape. 

The story forced him to confront the limitations of the framework he had brought with him.

Rather than casting communities simply as victims or environmental heroes, Cromwell became more interested in the pressures surrounding their decisions: what choices are available, what constraints shape them and what happens when survival and conservation do not fit neatly together.

By the end of NextGen, he described the shift plainly. Before, he looked for “villains versus victims.” Now, he is more interested in the friction between people, communities and the systems they inhabit. 

Putting people back into the data

Cromwell’s relationship with data also changed. He still sees evidence as essential to climate reporting, but Climate Tracker Asia pushed him to think more carefully about what numbers can and cannot show.

Statistics can document environmental change, but they cannot fully capture what it feels like to live through it. For Cromwell, that means treating people’s experiences not simply as illustrations of the data, but as an important part of understanding what is happening.

That shift has made his approach more people-forward: combining science and evidence with the choices, pressures and lived realities behind them.