When Kira Lawrence was in college, coming to terms with her own truth, Earth Sciences gave her a further chance to think about who she was—who we are—in the story of our planet. Having since studied the history of Earth's warm periods, she now worries about our future. Her perspective from the outside though, gives her a special view to solutions. Find out how unearthing strength in difference can help us leave things better than we found them.
Guest Kira Lawrence felt, in high school, that she was considered odd by the academic kids because she was a “jock” and wasn’t quite a mainstream athlete because she was a “brain.” In college she felt accepted for both of those identities in a place that had lots of people who were both. But, in realizing she was gay, she gained a whole new perspective on what it meant to feel “othered.” While initially frustrating, she contends that that perspective has infused her personal and professional passions with a fight for more equality.
At a time when mainstream religion did not seem welcoming to her, she ended up finding a connection to the universe through earth sciences, her selected major. She went on to graduate school in the subject and began her focus on climate science. The safeguarding of our planet for future generations has become her focus and she has recently found ways to spend more time applying her research knowledge to the pressing real-world problems facing humanity today. Outside of environmental work, her local activism also centers on making society's future brighter.//In this episode, find out from Kira how unearthing strength in difference can help us leave things better than we found them…on Roads Taken with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode's Guest
Kira Lawrence who is the John H. Markle Professor of Geology at Lafayette College. She is an expert in paleoclimatology, paleoceanography, and earth systems history who uses the remnants of organisms preserved in ocean sediments to reconstruct past changes in ocean surface temperature to help us sort out where we are today and where we might be headed in the future. She is currently applying her expertise outside of academia, working to inform climate-related policy within New Jersey's Division of Clean Energy at the state’s Board of Public Utilities, which has been tasked with many of the elements of the clean-energy transition plans in New Jersey. She lives there with her wife and son, who will certainly know that at the end of her days, she will have done all she can for the planet.
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Kira Lawrence: I very much want to look my son in the eyes 20 years from now when the floods and the droughts and the fires are deepening. And we're closer to these tipping points to food shortages and all sorts of disruption and be able to say to him, I did everything in my power to make it be different.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: When Kira Lawrence was in college, coming to terms with her own truth, Earth Sciences gave her a further chance to think about who she was—who we are—in the story of our planet. Having since studied the history of Earth's warm periods, she now worries about our future. Her perspective from the outside though, gives her a special view to solutions. Find out how unearthing strength in difference can help us leave things better than we found them...on today's Roads Taken with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Today I’m here with Kira Lawrence and we are going to talk about waking up to who you are and some of the other things that seem unexpected in life and what we do about it. So Kira, thanks so much for being here.
KL: My pleasure.
LJR: So I start this, asking the same two questions of everyone and they are these: When we were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become?
KL: So when we were in college, I think I was like a lot of our classmates, trying to prove that I belonged there academically at Dartmouth. I came from a pretty small rural community in upstate New York. And not many of my classmates went out of state to college. Almost nobody ever ended up at an Ivy league institution. I think I was pretty convinced that I got into Dartmouth because I was recruited by the women's basketball team. And so I was determined to prove that I also belonged there academically. So pretty engaged in the classroom and diligent about being a good student. I also think that Dartmouth, for the first time for me and actually even since then, Dartmouth felt like home because I finally felt understood, right? I was a smart jock and, you know, in high school of all the folks I played sports with wonder why I was such so academically inclined and all the folks that I knew that were identically inclined wondered why it was such a jock. And, you know, that's kind of, it played out for a lot of the rest of my life as well. But at Dartmouth, I was thriving in a community of other people who wanted to be smart and also wanted to be really great at their sport. So most of my friends from my time at Dartmouth are other female athletes, not just basketball players, but you know, across a whole range of different sports. And I really just embraced that experience and loved it. I would say to this day, the most important thing I did to Dartmouth was play basketball and you know, all the life skills that you learn from an experience like that, not just the teamwork, but the sort of commitment and the overcoming adversity, and sort of being in it with another group of people, something you really all care about and that connectivity to others working towards a common goal. I'd say I was pretty goal oriented both academically and on the basketball court. And you know, that was a big part of my experience.
I think the other big theme for me was what I'd say is coming to know my truth.
So I'm gay. And I didn't know that until I got to Dartmouth. And my time at Dartmouth was a real journey for me. At that time when I first sort of came to terms with, wow, I'm interested in women, I thought it was the worst thing that had ever happened. To me, it felt like sort of this dark mark on this record that I had been accruing, you know, high school and, you know, and, and like, how could this be true? And I didn't want it to be true. It took me a while to sort of accept like, no, this is who you are and you're gonna either be miserable or you're gonna own this truth. And, you know, it's interesting because now, and even, you know, probably even not that long out of Dartmouth, I started to realize that this was in fact, one of the best things that had ever happened to me and that is because I started to appreciate it, what it was like to be othered, right? To be a member of a marginalized group, a group that wasn't part of the mainstream of society. And it really turned my worldview upside down. It made me a lot more compassionate to all other types of marginalized groups. And it made me a lot more thoughtful about how we might create a better society. And I fundamentally see difference as strength and sort of hope for us as a country, as a global human society, that we can start to embrace those differences as strengths, rather than creating this ongoing antagonistic, you know, environment in which we live that are all about just drawing bright lines that are associated with difference.
And so, you know, all of that started for me at Dartmouth and it was sort of tied back to this realization that I was, wanted to date women and I was not straight. And that was hard. It was a real journey for me, but such an important part of my kind of life path started in that realization at Dartmouth.
And at that time at Dartmouth, there were not a lot of people who are out. I mean, I came from a rural high school, I said this, in upstate New York, you know, there was not really any diversity to speak of. Certainly nobody who is owning the fact that they were queer. And so. It was a lot, but there was kind of an underground of us at Dartmouth. And, and that was actually a really supportive community that created a space for me to kind of come to this realization about who I was. And now I consider it one of the greatest strengths of like my own personal characters, this sort of recognition about how that helps me see the world through new eyes.
LJR: Yeah. But as you said, you kind of had these bifurcated lives, like the jock and the smarty, and you have this kind of awakening, but you also fell into an academic field that you ended up really loving and becoming so core to who you are as well.
KL: Yeah. So I started at Dartmouth as an engineer. You know, I'm the daughter of a educator and a scientist. And actually as a member of the STEM faculty at Lafayette, I sort of recognized the importance of the advice that I got, which is if you're interested in math and science, you should start there because it's sort of hard to go the other direction. And so I started out in engineering. I took a lot of prerequisite science courses. And that was fine. It was kind of intimidating. You'd be like one of six women in the intro physics class, right? But I had some really great mentors professors and whatnot who were really supportive. But I didn't really find what I was very intrigued about until sophomore year. I took a class with a couple of my friends who were athletes that was like the intro Earth science class, and I was totally captivated about the sort of story of our planet through time and this sort of dramatic history of climate change and landscape change and continents moving and organisms evolving and dying out and like, wow, that's the history of our planet. And I also think that for me, there is some connectivity to spirituality and the sort of the majesty of our planet and this sort of connectivity to the natural world and trying to understand my and our place in this long history of planet earth. You know, as somebody who's queer and you know religion at that time seemed like not really the place to find the answers, because at that point of me sort of coming to terms with my sexuality, it felt very much like, you know—and I not appropriately sort of viewed it as a monolith but—I am being rejected by this part of our culture. I don't really want to go to them for advice about the meaning of life, right? So for me, Earth science was a chance to think about who I was, who we are in this story of our planet and in the story of, you know, time.
LJR: I love that. That is really beautiful. So when we were getting ready to leave, you’ve started to come to terms with your sexuality and who you want to be and who you want to show up as. You have this new found kind of passion in Earth sciences. What's your first path of thinking how you're going to use all that and be in the world?
KL: Quite honestly, I did not know. [LJR: Yeah.] You know, I now after like two decades of trying to shepherd college students through college and then on to the next steps, like that's not surprising actually. And here's why. Up until that time, like society kind of tells you what success looks like. If you landed in an Ivy league institution, you probably were on some sort of like successful pathway. But you know, like what was success? It was getting good grades and being involved in whatever extracurricular, you know, you found or plurals, right? [Extra]curriculars, you found your passion in. And, you know, kind of going after those things. And college was success, right? Getting an internship in whatever….So all of those things, society showing you the way, right? This way, this is what successful looks like. It's not actually till you get to the end point that the whole landscape is before you, right? And like, there's this cliff of, oh my gosh. Like, what do I do now? Like what does, what does success actually look like? And I think that's a very natural thing for college students, especially college seniors to feel, and even recent college graduates, because now it's up to you . And I, after two decades of like helping students think about it, I'm like, I am a pretty linear thinker, but you have got to embrace the serendipity of it, right? And you got to think about, and this is one thing I have said to my students over and over again, like what do you care about not your mom or your dad or your boyfriend or girlfriend, or your best friend? What do you care about? Go put some options on the table that are tied to things that you care about. And it's not going to be the first one, right? And actually my basketball coach said, Kira, the first job you have out of college is not a referendum on your life. Right? [LJR: Right.] And it took me like someone who had been chasing success and like very goal oriented, quite a long time to sort of process that, right? A lot of my sorority sisters were taking investment banking interviews and consulting. And like I knew I did not want to do that, right? But I'm like, what am I going to do? Like, how am I going to show that I like, I'm worthy of this Ivy league degree I just got, right?
And I ended up putting options on the table for myself. So like chase some Earth science threads, chased some education related threads, right? Cause that would let me do basketball and some science. So I actually landed as a teacher at a private school. I taught at Worchester Academy in Worchester, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. And I was a math and science teacher and athletic coach. And that was fun. And there were actually a lot of recent college grads who were also teachers at this school. And, but I was restless and I, again like this sort of soul searching about like, why are we here and what am I doing? And I think like, if you asked me now what I wanted when I left college and what I still think I want is, is to serve.
And what I mean by that is like, leave it better than you found it. Right? Whatever it is, like, leave it better than you found it. That's ultimately what I want. And if you asked me like, you know, all that searching about why are we here and, and what are we doing? That would be my answer. Right? Leave it a little better than you found it. And for me, that's a more just world. One that's more harmonious with the natural world. One that's more in keeping with a sustainable future for people and all the other organisms that sort of live on our planet with us. So I didn't know that then. And I was pretty restless about it. So I only stayed at Worchester Academy for a year. I went then to a little non-profit science and public policy organization on Cape Cod was actually founded by a Dartmouth grad who I think is one of the most inspiring people I've ever met and is still he's like 95 and it's still going strong. And, and one of my lifelong mentors. So I worked as a research assistant for the Woodwell Climate Research Center. And that was in the era of Kyoto protocol, so the first major international climate agreement. And, you know, the founder, George Woodwell and the staff there came back from Kyoto and they were excited that there had been an international agreement, but they sort of all acknowledged that it was well short of what needed to happen.
So the time at the research center, I think for me, I didn't recognize it in the moment, but in hindsight it really helped me understand the importance of science in service to the public good, right? That there, like science does have an important role to play in society in terms of informing decision-making. And that was a unique perspective because a lot of scientists don't want to wade into anything has any sort of political connectivity because our objectivity is sort of central to our training and our kind of worldview.
My restlessness persisted in Woods Hole. I met a lot of grad students at MIT and like who were at the Woods Hole, Oceanographic Institution, and lots of other people who were about my age, who were doing grad school. So went to graduate school, finally decided I wanted to sort of chase my Earth science interests first at UC Santa Cruz, then at Brown. The west coast didn't agree with me. I'm a pretty hard-edge East Coaster. Very purpose-driven. But I did meet my wonderful spouse, Catherine, at UC Santa Cruz. And my brother-in-laws joke that we met on a glacier. I was actually a Catherine and art, one of our lab group mates. We're doing glaciological field work. And they when asked by their advisor, like which new grad student do you want to bring, they picked me, I think in part, because to our knowledge, that was the first, like all women's glaciology team ever. And I think they wanted me to carry the heavy stuff basically.
LJR: Well, there are reasons for everything.
KL: Anyway but, so that was a pretty intense bonding experience because we got a helicopter, like helicoptered out and dropped off on this glacier. Mostly I carried the heavy stuff, but it was pretty neat.
LJR: Where was the glacier?
KL: In Alaska. Just outside of Valdez, Alaska. [LJR: Okay.] Pretty awesome spot. Pretty cool way to start grad school, but I came back east to do my PhD at Brown. But on the whole, and again like this is for, for anybody who's contemplating graduate school, it was as much of a psychological journey for me as an intellectual journey in that it felt kind of self-indulgent. You go to, I don't know, talk to your friends from college or high school or some dinner party, and people ask you what you're doing and they kind of gloss over as you get started. And you're like, man, this really doesn't feel that important to the rest of the world. In hindsight, again, like there's so many of these for me, like not appreciating in the moment, the worth of that experience. And I think for me, that's something that I kind of take away from the story of my life is the each thing you do, even though if it felt like a dead end in the moment, or you're spinning your wheels, that actually has worth to informing who you are and kinda how you are in the world.
And. So, yeah, grad school. I think I, you know, I liked my advisor quite a lot. I'd like to folks I've actually played Ultimate Frisbee at Brown, super awesome group of women that I played that with and some other awesome grad students there, but I didn't love it because it felt a little bit like, what am I contributing, you know, in conflict with my, my interest in wanting to serve.
But now recognize that was training in how to think about the world in a different way. And a lot of those skills are transferrable to most everything else that I do. So I think there actually was quite a lot of value to spending those years in Santa Cruz and at Brown on that journey, even though in the moment it felt self-indulgent, I think it made me a better thinker and it changed my perspective about the way.
LJR: Yeah, but leaving with a PhD in Earth sciences or oceanography. [KL: Earth Sciences, yep.] Okay. There are a couple of ways, many ways you could take that and utilize that. And there's the academic route. And then there's kind of a science lab route. And then there's a policy, that's a little bit of all. So what appealed to you then? Or what were the opportunities that arose then that you thought, okay, I've had my indulgent time now. This is the way I'm going to use it?
KL: Yeah. So that's another like sort of connecting back to some of the other threads of my life. Catherine had finished grad school in Santa Cruz. She had come back to the east coast. She's from Connecticut originally and was doing a post-doc at Bryn Mawr College. And I liked teaching quite a lot. I was pretty sure I didn't want to go to a major research institution, you know, constantly having to have the next greatest idea that somebody is going to give you money for so that you can keep your job did not really appeal to me. So I was watching the job ads come through for academic jobs. I thought a little bit about doing science policy, but there was this opportunity at Lafayette College that came up and I was like, why not? That's actually in the same state as Katherine. And we, you know, for academics, that's a real challenge, right? We spent almost a decade getting to the place where we could actually live in the same house. And so that's another sort of challenge of the academic path. But I applied for the job at Lafayette. I got the job and that put me in Katherine within an hour of each other. And that was quick. So have been at Lafayette since 2006. [LJR: Wow.] So, so quite some time. It's been a really incredible place to be a great institution that really values education. I guess I should say, I study how warm it was a really long time ago using the remnants of organisms that are preserved in sediments on the sea floor to reconstruct climate through time. And what I learned from doing that, and sort of the community of scientists that I work in, is a pretty sobering results about where we're headed and what the world is like in a warmer world and pretty dramatically different than, than what it's like now, you know, over time, I've gotten more and more concerned about the inaction from in the policy sphere. So I've worked at Lafayette too, to get more connected to Lafayette's efforts into sustainability . [I] was a big part of the climate action planning process at Lafayette and we in 2019 pledged to go carbon neutral, pretty excited about that and trying to just get my students connected to the why is climate change such a hard issue to address and here are the threads of the ways that people have approached trying to solve this problem.
But the whole, while this sort of underlying frustration, right…George Woodwell, who I mentioned before, you know, 40 years ago, he testified and was part of a report that was issued to then president Jimmy Carter about climate change being a risk to human societies. So, you know, I'm not alone. I think a lot of climate scientists are like, Hey, we've done our part.
We've told you guys across decades, this is fundamentally has a potential to reorganize human societies if we don't act. And this just ongoing frustration that not much has…not enough, not nearly enough has happened. You know, I, I have long sought to end on hope with my students. I think it's pretty easy, once you start to understand what is actually happening and what some of the outcomes and tipping points are, that is pretty easy to move to despair and not end on action. So I sought for a long time to end on hope with them. And it's been harder and harder for me to do that. Which leads us to kind of the most recent part of my journey in terms of my vocation…
Last year, I was on sabbatical and I applied for a science fellowship. I applied for several science fellowships. But I landed one in New Jersey to work for the New Jersey state government embedded in—you know, you sort of make your own case about where you want to land—So I was embedded with the Clean Energy Division, which is part of the Board of Public Utilities in New Jersey state government. And they are the team of people and not exclusively, but tasked with most of the clean energy goals of the state of New Jersey. And, you know, I super proud to be from a state that is really actually trying to address the climate crisis in its own little part of the world. And that work was inspiring, right? Here's this group of like 25 to 30 people who are seeking to enact these aggressive climate mitigation goals from charging stations to off-shore wind to all sorts of solar development. So my expertise are in sort of climate and ocean sciences, and it turned out to be a really good time for me to be working with them because, you know, the offshore wind program is into it, but at the beginning of a long effort at procuring like seven and a half gigawatts, that's a lot of energy, of offshore wind and needing to have some scientific expertise on the team to think about like, well, what is the impact of offshore wind on environment and the ecosystems that are off our coastline? So I just started a two year leave of absence to work on the, as the sort of environmental lead, on the offshore wind team for the state of New Jersey, which is a pretty amazing opportunity. I, you know, I think that it scratches this itch that I've had for a long time, right? Like most of us who are climate scientists, we sort of feel like we know the train wrecks are coming and we have been trying to—I don't know if I were to work with that analogy—tell the more affluent people in the, in the better cars to brace for impact, right. And give them some ideas about how they might slow down the train, but not ourselves to be able to stop the train. And, you know, even people who are not climate scientists, I think are starting to wake up to the reality of the floods and the fires, the sort of risks that are associated with the beginning. And I think that's the hard part for me, the sort of leading edge of the climate crisis.
LJR: And to further your analogy, there are other cars that are populated by the cheap seats, and those are the ones that are getting hit first. Right?
KL: Absolutely. Yeah. And that is, that is like, for me, this is so much tied to my ethics, right? Like how could I know this and not act? One because the people exactly your point, the people who had the least to do with this are the ones that are going to be the most harmed and least able to adapt to the impacts of climate change. Right. So that's, that's one. That's huge, right? And then the mortgaging of the next generation, right? Like, so one of the things that makes me so driven to work on confronting the climate crisis is thinking about the next generation. And that has always been true, but it really came home to me when, when we had my, our son Kai, and, you know, part of me being inspired to work for the state of New Jersey was this silent promise that I made to him that I was going to do everything in my power to make it be different. And I very much want to be able to look my son in the eyes 20 years from now when you know, the floods and the droughts and the fires are deepening. And we were closer to these tipping points of, you know, food shortages and all sorts of disruption of the ocean currents and whatnot, you know, risks of sea level rise, et cetera, and be able to say to him, I did everything in my power to make it be different. And that's really important to me, right? Because I think that the whole next generation is going to look back at us and say, how could you? You knew, how could you have not acted? How could you have not protected us from this when you knew it was coming?
LJR: Yes. However, you know, just as I do, they are watching now. They're not going to have to wait the 20 years for you to hear for you to say it back. They're seeing us do it. And they're getting inspired by those, like you, who are taking action. And so luckily with their eyes open and with great people out there like you, they will start following those footsteps sooner and become part of that solution rather than just blaming. You know, they're going to be part of that solution. It won't necessarily be solved by the time we'd like it to be solved for them, but they need people to step up now and you're doing that.
KL: Thanks. I appreciate that interpretation. I often say to my students: You know, you can think of this as being saddled with this seemingly intractable problem, which you have, right? I'm a generation ahead of you and I feel that way too. Or you can think about this as being a member of a generation that has the opportunity to dictate the future of humanity, right? And so you don't get to watch, right? We not spectators. We need to be participants in, in this effort to solve the climate crisis. I think that that's also true about our democracy, right? Is that this is not a spectator sport. You gotta get in the game. If you want it to be different. If you want to not get to those really scary tipping points that the climate crisis has, that are out ahead of us. If we fail to act, then the time is now. And that's what sort of made me up in my life and decided to go work for the state government.
I'm not entirely sure what the pathway is forward. I think from the academic lens, which I'm accustomed to, and I feel like is a pretty good fit, one of the things that occurred to me about the work with New Jersey is that even when all the lights are green, right, our governor, our legislature has basically green-lighted, we're going to get to carbon neutral. There's huge complexity. Because you're trying to retrofit a system that was not designed to accommodate clean energy, right? And so while I'm inspired by what New Jersey has done and really feel finally that I'm able to like scratch this itch to actually do something about the climate crisis, instead of just teaching people about what's to come, it's even more sobering, right? Because at the federal level, we haven't even gotten to green lights to get us to action. The actual action part—we’re sort of living that now—is enormously complicated, right? Because none of the rules and none of the infrastructure was built to accommodate this needed change. And so people like me on this sort of small team of people in lots of different places, right? But we're trying to solve those really complicated problems of how do you fit this square peg into this round hole. Right. And that's pretty sobering too, because even though we're going as fast as we can, it's not going to be fast. And that gets us closer to those tipping points that none of us want to be at.
LJR: Yeah. But on your dial of hope to despair, now that you are in a moment of action, even if it's geographically centered in a place that isn't federal ,all of that, does it feel like you're tipping toward the hope more than the despair now for you personally?
KL: For me personally, I think I feel pretty inspired to be in one of the states that I would say is likely building a model for others to emulate as we move forward. [LJR: Yeah.] And that's the piece that sort of ties back to where I think I'm headed, which is…what occurred to me during my fellowship year is we're going to even need an army of smart people who want to do the action part, right? Every state government, every corporation, every everything is going to need people who are able to think about how do we transition the energy economy from a fossil based approach to a clean based approach? And how do we do it as efficiently and effectively? And as cost-reduced as possible.
LJR: And equitably, probably
KL: Equitably. Gosh, absolutely. As the, as a, as a core theme. I will say that New Jersey is deeply committed to that. A lot of these other states that are at the leading edge of addressing the climate crisis, right?—New York, Massachusetts, California—all have a big equity component to the work that we're trying to do, right? Many of the fossil plants are in what we call New Jersey, overburdened communities, marginalized communities, whatever terminology you'd use. And that's terrible for public health and all manner of other things. And so, you know, a big part of what New Jersey's trying to do and these other states who were sort of leading the curve is to have the future be more equitable when it comes to how we live in the world, right? And this energy transition should not be silent on that, right? It should just be, it should be this sort of a core plank of, of what we're seeking to achieve. Yeah, absolutely.
I guess I want to return to this theme of coming to the recognition that we're going to need an army of people to do all these things, right? And there's a role for education in that, but in a much more directed one that I think is part of the current model. So we're going to need people who can graduate with a degree in government or a degree in electrical engineering or whatever it is, and sort of have enough of an understanding of, well, like how does the transmission system of our electricity grid work? So they can go work for, you know, electric distribution company or the, you know, public utility commission and already contribute and not have to climb the pretty steep learning curve. And so I think there's, there's an opportunity for more applied education and more policy-oriented education. That's not sort of typically how liberal arts colleges see themselves. But I, I guess I think there is a very big role for higher education to play in addressing the climate crisis. You know, I think it could be a thematic part of what higher ed does is it's sort of lots of different disciplines, all connecting, right? There's this whole move towards interdisciplinarity in higher ed. And I think there's a real opportunity for this to be one of the kind of core themes that is an emphasis for institutions and thinking about how people with different disciplinary expertise can contribute. I guess hat makes me hopeful that there are real opportunities to kind of leverage some of the things that I have done to imagine a future in which our students are, rather than starting to feel despair, are feeling like they have agency and a real opportunity to contribute in an impactful way.
LJR: And that's your concern and your hopes for post-secondary education, but I know you're also involved in education more broadly conceived, K through 12 or earlier, and that too plays into your kind of whole mantra of doing the right thing and advocating for the realities of where we are being not exactly optimal in today's society. So do you want to talk a little bit about that?
KL: Yeah, sure. Thanks for that segue to I think one of the other things that I'm really passionate about. And I guess I'm going to kind of circle back to this realization when I was in college, that I was gay and how that really impacted how I see the world and this whole kind of through all of time, right, this demonization of minority groups and this sort of othering of people who were not in the mainstream. Right? Not in the majority. We, my spouse, Katherine and I have become pretty active and engaged in working for change in our own community in a way that I think is about improving the education system, about improving our community. So we've been pretty active in local board of education races, and in trying to support local candidates for political office who we think are gonna have the best interest of all people in mind. And, you know, that has been a pretty big part of what we've done in the last about five years.
So I think there's an important, some important outcomes of that. And this is sort of back to my theme of like being participants and not spectators and the importance of that for all of us. You know, we were at my spouse's college reunion and we were sort of lining up to do at the parade of classes. And my son, our son, who was five at the time said to us, what are we marching for this time, mom? Because we had been to so many different protests about just the political scene of our time and about the kind of othering of people, whether it be by race or religion or socioeconomic background or whatever it was, right? Trying to stand up for people who were being targeted. And I think being gay, this sort of whole evolution, gosh, like what a crazy past 25 years. Right? When I graduated from college, the only place that I could be legally joined to somebody else was in Vermont. And there was, not helpfully, like on my journey to Dartmouth from upstate New York, like one of the highway overpasses was spray painted “Take Back Vermont,” which is basically like the anti-gay rights movement in Vermont. So, and the year after we graduated, right, Matthew Shepard was strapped to events and pistol whipped to death in Wyoming. And so a pretty sobering time. Also this dramatic change in societal perception, whether it be through what happens on your TV screen, to the rights of the LGBTQ community in terms of being able to get married. And in 2015 re the federal government actually recognizing our relationships, just even doing your taxes is crazy. But, you know, there are some nontrivial footnotes along that pathway. You know, I had to be fingerprinted and background check to adopt my biological child. So in New Jersey we were fine, right? Like actually both of our names were on the birth certificate. But this was before 2015, traveling anywhere, right? On our phones we have legal documents. And we appeared before a judge so I could adopt a son who is biologically mine. Yeah, it's kind of, it's dehumanizing right? That, and unless somebody tells you that story, you’re mostly not thinking about it, but that's happening right in our country, all sorts of stories like that, not just to the LGBTQ community, you know. Think of the, like, “don't say gay” in Florida or the helping transgender kids get the medical care they need is child abuse in Texas, right? Like these are the conversations of our time. And I think again, like we shouldn't be silent, right? We can't be bystanders because that's just not going to get us to where we need to be as a society, right? We gotta, we gotta find our common humanity. We gotta stop throwing lines in the sand and pointing fingers across them. But I do think we need to stand up to people who are weaponizing othering as a sort of political tool. I guess that's for me, one of the overriding messages in my life. Like, this is even back to when I graduated from college, like, what do you care about? What are your values and how do you find a way to live in a world that reflects those values? And if you care about it, then find it, don't watch, right? Get in the game. Because we're never gonna have a society that embraces difference in a way that makes us stronger and less people say, I don't think persecuting people who are different is the way to be. Seeking to find our common humanity, I think for me, is how we become a more inclusive society and a stronger society.
It's also to me like how we solve the climate crisis, right? Because even if you go from the scale of school board decision-making, you can scale that all the way up to the globe and thinking about how people interact with each other and how we recognize the inequitable impacts on different societies and how we sort of honor those in the collective way forward. That's how we get to an answer. That's how we get to a human society that isn't fundamentally disrupted by the climate crisis.
LJR: In that I hear a lot of hope actually, because that's a daunting recipe. And if you think we can get there, I think there is a lot of hope in that. And I think all of those issues, you are still trying, as you said, to leave it better than what you're literally doing in all aspects of home life, community life, academic life, policy life and we really appreciate your efforts in that and your willingness to talk us through that for right now. So thanks so much for being here.
KL: Thank you. Thanks for having me. It’s been a real honor.
LJR: That was Kira Lawrence who is the John H. Markle Professor of Geology at Lafayette College. She is an expert in paleoclimatology, paleoceanography, and earth systems history who uses the remnants of organisms preserved in ocean sediments to reconstruct past changes in ocean surface temperature to help us sort out where we are today and where we might be headed in the future. She is currently applying her expertise outside of academia, working to inform climate-related policy within New Jersey's Division of Clean Energy at the state’s Board of Public Utilities, which has been tasked with many of the elements of the clean-energy transition plans in New Jersey. She lives there with her wife and son, who will certainly know that at the end of her days, she will have done all she can for the planet.
What can you do besides taking a stand for something you believe in and taking some action in your community? Gain further inspiration from the stories previously told on our show at RoadsTakenShow.com or keep tuning in each week with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley, for more episodes of Roads Taken.