people

My personal commitment to conservation began in Bangladesh. Well, not physically in Bangladesh, but in the way that a book can transport you into a place or time you don’t personally know. On the page I read: one meter of sea level rise, 17,000 square kilometers submerged, 15 million people displaced. These apocalyptic headlines flashed across my vision like they were from a horror story, but this was real life. I had only just started tackling my 8th grade summer reading selection, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, when these statistics woke me up in more ways than one on that sleepy summer morning. It was in that moment that I realized climate change was the most dangerous and pressing crisis the world had ever seen, and I needed everyone to know. Rather than submitting a book report to my teacher, I insisted on giving a presentation to my classmates on the first day back to school, and I even handed out homemade flyers that listed practices to reduce your carbon footprint. Yeah, I was that kid.

I read An Inconvenient Truth as a 12-year-old girl in my North Carolina home. I have recently returned to my home state as a (slightly older) but still early-career conservation scientist to conduct research that targets the systems, people, and places that I deeply care about. My sense of urgency has set in motion a personal undertaking to tackle multifaceted problems like conservation and sustainability, especially ones with cascading environmental and human impacts.