Whether on boats or skis, Lara Burgel Fowler had always been grounded by and to water. So when realizing an opportunity to build her own major and course of study, she navigated back with focus and care to water resource management. Find out how keeping curiosity alive and being willing to ask questions helps you move from novice to expert
Guest Lara Fowler had been a cross-country ski racer and studied Japanese in high school in Portland, Oregon. She took those two pursuits to college and pursued them to their highest. With all of the language requirements and a study abroad program that she wanted to undertake, she had nearly completed a major in Asian Studies. But she also had a long-standing interest in water. So in fulfilling her distribution requirements, she found ways to study water from multiple angles, did off-campus research in the topic, and ultimately won a senior fellowship to devote her final year to writing a book on water policy, in effect creating her own second major in water resource management.
After graduation, she took a year to pursue ski racing but decided to hang up the skiis and get a job in the water world. Recognizing that much of the discourse around water intersected with the law, she went to law school and ultimately worked as a water mediator, bringing disparate voices together to find solutions in water allocation. When her husband got the academic job he had long wanted, she found a new way to apply her skills and spark new interests.
In this episode, find out from Lara how keeping curiosity alive and being willing to ask questions helps you move from novice to expert…on Roads Taken with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode's Guest
Lara Fowler is an attorney and mediator who focuses on environmental, energy, and natural resource law, with a specific focus on water-related issues. She has a joint appointment at Penn State Law where she teaches natural resource law and negotiations and the Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment where she is working on questions related to water, the Chesapeake Bay, and systems-level behavioral change. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two children.
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Lara Fowler: So it’s that space where science meets policy meets, you know, lots of hard feelings and a lot of hatred often and distrust. How do you weave that together? And I really, really loved—and still do—working on those kind of really complex questions where science meets policy meets a solution space, and you have to build trust iteratively to find a way forward.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: Whether on boats or skis, Lara Burgel Fowler had always been grounded by and to water. So when realizing an opportunity to build her own major and course of study, she navigated back with focus and care to water resource management. Find out how keeping curiosity alive and being willing to ask questions helps you move from novice to expert…on today’s Roads Taken with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
I’m here today with my friend, Laura Burgel Fowler. And we are going to talk about how we go with the flow and where that might lead us ultimately. So, Laura, thank you so much for being here.
LF: Thanks for having me.
LJR: I start these conversations the same way every time. And I ask my guests two questions 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?
LF: Great two questions. Who was I in college? I was a cross-country ski racer. I was a Japanese major, Asian studies major. I was a senior fellow. I didn't take any classes my senior year and more or less wrote a book looking at Native American rights to water.
And who did I think I would become? I wanted to be an Olympic ski racer, if I could pull it off. After college, I graduated and moved back to Oregon, which is where I was from and worked a whole bunch of really bad jobs for a year to ski race, and eventually hung up my skis and got a job working water policy. And I'd always been intrigued with water and water questions. Actually since high school, if I had gone back to Dartmouth again, I think I probably would've been a geography major.
LJR: Okay. So, so all of those things are a mishmash. [LF: Yep.] And are really exciting to know where they came from. And so clearly we were all cold and many of us skied, but you had to have come to Dartmouth at that level already have been a cross-country, championship-level kind of skier. Right?
LF: I grew up both in boats and on skis. I don't remember the first time I skied. I remember being, I think, in junior high school and getting dragged to ski races with my older brother. And finally, like I have to go to these things. I might as well do them anyway. So my brother and I were the only two members of the Portland, Oregon cross country ski team. And I had the luck of having amazing ski coaches in high school. So we would drive up from Portland and go ski on Mount Hood, turn around, drive back and go to school. And so, yeah, I raced. I raced all the way through high school. And so I was looking for a place to go to college and heard about Dartmouth. My parents basically were like, are you trying to get as far away from us as possible? But Dartmouth had a great ski team, good academics. And so I showed up for that for first year and basically joined the ski team. And one of the more formative…you know, imagine you arrive, you don't know anybody, you meet people. And we had Sunday practices. So my first introduction really to the ski team was getting loaded up in a van and driving basically over to near Quechee and Woodstock and getting dropped off, told those are the white blazes for the Appalachian Trail. By the way, we've been driving for 40 minutes: Run back to campus. So Annie McKee Leys and I became friends that first Sunday, where we had a bottle of water and everybody ran off and left us. Midway through she sprained an ankle and it was all we could do to get back. Didn't realize there was a break point at mile 13. This is a 23 mile run, by the way. Break point at mile 13, where they picked our bedraggled selves up. But we spent that whole fall bound and determined to finish one of these crazy runs. And by the last time we were like, we've got a picnic, we’ve got a water bottle: We’re gonna do this. So we're still actually quite close friends. We're gonna do a river trip with them this summer. [LJR: Excellent.] And it came together in that, you know, that first run. But background of…as both a skier and a boater before I came to school.
LJR: Okay, so that explains the skiing. It explains a little of the water, but we'll get back to that. Where does east Asian studies come in?
LF: Also in high school again, older brother. We went to high school in the Portland area and they had a language requirement and they had Japanese at our school and we decided we'd learn to speak Japanese without our parents understanding any of it. So when I got to Dartmouth, they had a language requirement and I had taken enough Japanese that they were like, you can either start over as freshman; you can come as a second year student and do the foreign study program; or you can just test out of it completely. And I was like, I've studied Japanese for four years. Never been to Japan. I would love to go to Japan. So by my freshman year, so I was there fall, winter, and then went to Japan on the foreign study program.
LJR: Wow. Our freshman spring.
LF: Yes. [LJR: Okay.] And so by our first year of spring, I was half done with a major in Japanese. So I was like, I might as well major in Japanese.
LJR: Exactly.
LF: That winter, I took a class, a geography class, on water and ended up writing a term paper on Native American water rights. Thought this was really interesting. Talked with my professor while I was at a ski race—missing finals. Came back, cleared out, moved to Japan, wrote an application for a research grant for first year students and forgot about it until I called my parents to say, Hey, I'd really like to stay in Japan for the summer. And they were like, well, that's fine, but you have a grant to do research on Native American water rights. So I accepted the grant. My dad went to the local law library and sent me a lot of the seminal cases on Native American water rights to Japan, where I was getting this stuff and I ended up bouncing from Japan back to Portland, to a conference in Bismarck, North Dakota. Mind you this, you know, I was 18 basically, and talking with people at this conference as a freshman, sophomore in college and people would say, “Oh, come with me and we're gonna go listen in on this discussion about this negotiation with this tribe or set of tribes, Indian tribes about their water rights.” And while I was there, I met an attorney named Jim Noteboom, who was from Oregon, who said, “If you're from Oregon, come listen in. I represent the Confederate tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon. Come listen, come participate. Look at what's in your own backyard.” So I used the D plan actually, during off terms, to sit in on a lot of the negotiation sessions. So by junior year, you know, we had science requirements. So what’d I do? I took a geology class and I looked at the decline in the Oglala aquifer; or I took an engineering class and looked at the Yuma desalinization plant; took a political science class and tracked how water bills went through Congress. I made up a degree in water resource management.
LJR: So all the rest of us were doing all of our disturb requirements early and kind of cobbled together a major and then figured out the major and whatever. And you just did it in the reverse. Like you got the major out of the way. [LF: Yeah.] And then could plug in all of the disturbs around these other interests that you had.
LJR: By accident. I did. Yes. Yeah. Knowing what I know now, I would've probably approached it differently, but coming in, I was like, well, you know, this is what I'm interested in. And this is, you know, kind of kept exploring. So my junior year actually went to our class Dean and sort of said, Hey, I'd really like to write a thesis. I've done all this work. You know, and I'd attend these negotiation sessions and I'd be the only member they were public. And I was the only member of the public there. And they'd all turn to me and say, Laura, do you have any comments? And I'm like, no, no. But often people would turn to me and say, don't tell anybody, right? And so what I found now, I work with students all the time and I tell them they've got a superpower, which is they have the power to ask questions. And people want to mentor. They want to teach. They want to bring people in that space. I was like, use that.
So I went to my class Dean and said, can I write a thesis on this? And she had a good laugh and she's like, you get points for an original question. The answer is no. And then she told me about the senior fellowship program. So I applied for it and I didn't take any classes my senior year. Didn't take a one. I audited one, but I otherwise was working on effectively a book or a dissertation about this particular negotiation and why it seemed like it was going to work. And so still to this day, kind of have to explain my undergrad degree. One is my degree is actually not a typo with an AB. Two, my major is Japanese or Asian studies. And three, I didn't take it in classes and created this de-facto degree in water resource management.
LJR: So fascinating. And yet then you graduate and you say, but my real love right now is cross-country skiing. And so I'm gonna pursue that at a very high level because that's pretty time bound later on. [LF: Yeah.] So let's, let's get that again outta the way right now. How did you manage that and everything else…life and being?
LF: Well, and part of it was that junior year, you know, I was skiing pretty fast. We ended up at the NCAAs. I ended up 17th in the country in one race, and I was like, this is awesome. This is really great. My senior fall, I was training really well, was really fast, super excited about it. And somewhere in there, you know, working on the senior fellow. Fellowships like that are exciting, but very lonely to some extent. I spent hours in the library by myself and somewhere in there the committee for that was like: Everybody who's working on some piece of their senior fellowship needs to provide a chapter or a book, whatever, by December 1st. And I ended up getting actually pretty sick that winter, where I kind of had serial bladder infections, of all things. And so my health just tanked. So I was like, okay, I've spent this year working really focused on the academics. I wanna switch and take a year to work on athletics. So moving to Bend, lived in a place with roommates. I worked a really bad job at a TV station entering in when public service announcements would run because I could train in the morning, work, and then go train in the afternoon. But at one point, I was like, I have a lot of jobs and I counted. I was teaching. I had nine different jobs at the same time at the same time.
LJR: Oh, I thought you said those were serial. Oh no. At the same time. Okay.
LF: It was just piecemealing, right? Like what do you do as an athlete? Some years later when I was in law school, actually, it was the year of the Salt Lake Olympics and they ran the torch through. We were, we moved to Seattle, to University of Washington for law school for me and a PhD for my husband. And they ran the torch through. And I remember walking out, you know, stumbling out of the library, out to the street. I was next to a businessman and a guy who was really, really drunk. And they were having this conversation about, you know, All these athletes are just professional athletes and I'm thinking, no, they're really not. Right?
LJR: Yeah. They're working at Home Depot and yeah.
LF: Yeah. People have, break their hearts to try and train for this level of athletics. So it's with great glee now that I've watched, obviously, the women do amazingly well in part because they work together and trained together. Corey Smith is one of our Dartmouth 96 folks. And he wrote a pretty poignant email a couple years after that entitled “My Olympic Dream.” And he basically was like, you know, we were of the age where the U.S. Ski Team really didn't support young athletes, right? The Dartmouth ski team was great. And then you were on your own and good luck to you because it's very expensive or you're working really crappy jobs to do it. So I had basically worked bad jobs. And finally, at the end of the year, I was like, I need to hang up my skis and do something.
My husband's a Dartmouth 97. Literally a week before he graduated, I got a job doing water policy in Salem, Oregon, working for a lobby group, representing irrigation district. Not what I would've expected to do, but I was like, well, guess we're moving to Salem.
LJR: Yeah. To start, you know, now you've done that. Now we're gonna move on to something else. That's that's great. And so he was able to come with you and start the life together.
LF: Yep. It's a great place. I think, to raise a family, but if you're 20-something, it was a rough place to be. We actually moved then to Portland and I switched jobs and worked for the Oregon water resources department doing water policy. So I was based in Salem, but my job was the Eastern third of the state. And I'd pretty routinely get sent out. Like here, this very small town had problems with water issues for 10 years. Go figure it out. You know, I was like, okay, great. You know, I’m 22 and I will jump into the deep end of this. But I found that I was often facilitating meetings. I was often working with different stakeholders. I was often trying to figure out kind of how do you, how do you solve what seemed to be very intractable problems? And so started to just pick up, you know, how do you run a more effective meeting? How do you facilitate an effective conversation? And then switched so I was working in the south central portion of the state and was the staff person between multiple state agencies, trying to figure out a question of water allocation. So water in that area had been a completely allocated to irrigation for a hundred years. There was a need for water for cities, a need for water for fish. And they realized the U.S. Geological Survey did a study in the 1990s, late nineties. When I was working there that basically said lo and behold, the surface water was connected to the groundwater. All the surface water was appropriated and you start putting straws into the groundwater, you were taking water from somebody else. So there was a very fast collision of lots of interests. And I was the staff person working between these multiple state agencies and a public set of stakeholders and a professional mediator. And I was like, what's a mediator? What do they do? So you have a neutral third party whose job is to help bring people together. And I was like: I never knew, but I wanted to be a water mediator.
LJR: Yeah. And, and it's, it takes not only the facilitation skills, but the subject area expertise as well. [LF: Yeah.] So how did you, it wasn't one of these I'll just I'll listen and be mentored. Did you have to go back to law school, right?
LF: Yeah. Well, and I talked with a lot of people and sort of said, Hey, wait a second. You know, I'm really interested in going back to school. Like what, how do you become a water mediator? What would you study in? A lot of people said, look, if you're working in the water space, you're working under the shadow of law. You always, the threat of a lawsuit is there. You need to understand that, but you don't necessarily have to be a lawyer. So I was definitely at the odd duck of Hi, I'm here in law school, but I don't wanna be a lawyer. I wanna be a mediator. So Chris and I, my husband Chris and I looked around for the country to decide we were gonna be broke at the same time and just ditch our work. He was working as a planner at that point. He was like, I get paid lots of money to go study a problem in Pittsburgh in the winter or Sacramento in the summer. Like I wanna pick what I'm studying. So we applied to the four same schools, quit our jobs and traveled for 10 months. We actually stopped traveling September 6th, 2001, which was a good time to stop traveling the world. Yeah. Move to Seattle. And so went to University of Washington where I got a law degree in, he finished his PhD a couple years later.
LJR: Was that settling enough roots for you to start your family?
LF: Yeah, for a while. So I got a job in 2004 when I graduated from law school, actually working for a law firm that was the general purpose law firm in Seattle andTacoma, but they had a, a resource strategy. that did a ton of water work in California. So the first mediation case I worked on, actually, and my boss was like, we've got this issue in the central valley of California over water quality, will you go figure out what's going on? I basically got dropped into the deep end and worked on crazy questions like, you know, who gets to store and use groundwater in the greater area of Los Angeles, or how do you fix flooding in a river basin in Washington state where devastating floods, you know, cause $300 million worth of damage and killed all the livestock in the area. What do you do? So it's that space where science meets policy meets yeah you know lots of hard feelings and a lot of hatred often and distrust. How do you weave that together? And I really, really loved working—and still do—working on those kind of really complex questions where science meets policy meets a solution space, and you have to build trust iteratively to find a way forward.
So Chris finished his PhD in 2007. Our son was born a week before he finished his PhD. And I basically said, look, I really like my job. The academic world often depends on the farm team system. Go get a job somewhere, prove you can make it. I'm a lawyer and a mediator, please don't ask me to move from place to place to place. So we thought Chris might actually get a job, you know, in a big mid Midwestern city. And it was prepared to do that, but that job opportunity fell apart. And the 2008 economic crisis hit and all the academic jobs dried up. So here we are with me working full time as the breadwinner and the family, if you will; him just finishing his dissertation home with a newborn. And he is like, I love kids, but I'm not a baby person. So a lot of real struggle of yeah, you know, of handling and raising kids. I was flying almost weekly to LA. So having to deal with that back and forth. He had then got a postdoc. And again, every year we were like, do we go, do we stay? Like, what do we do? He finished that postoc; got another postdoc. We had our daughter in 2010. So two kids. Then juggling this and he finally reached the point where he is like, I've been on the academic job search for a while. I can't find a job. What do I do? And so he actually went about, he was is an urban and economic geographer doing demography and other things and started his own business. But he went on unemployment to set that up and on, on unemployment what do you have to do you have to apply for jobs? What kind of jobs do you apply for? If you're an academic, you apply for more academic jobs. So he basically was like, I thought I couldn't, you know, so this is constantly navigating again, two careers, two kids. Do we stay? Do we go? And after six years of looking—six years! When I'm talking to students and they're really despairing, you know, two sets of postdocs and starting his own. He got a job offer in two places, one in Seattle at U-Dub, but not in the department that he was in or at Penn State. So then we had a real choice of, do we go, do we stay? What do we do? Right. So Penn state flew me out as the trailing spouse or the trailing partner. And after a little bit of talking with people, I was like, oh, People are working on really extraordinary things associated with energy and water. Yes, I could see actually making this jump. So I had never taught and certainly had never taught at the law school level, but the law school was like, we will hire you half time. And the other half you can effectively be a fellow with what's called the Penn State Institutes of Energy and Environment. So we made the jump in 2012 with a two-year-old and a five-year-old to move to central Pennsylvania.
LJR: Ah, that's so exciting. And I mean, you'd been doing work that you clearly were suited for and enjoyed, but then got these opportunities to kind of think about how you might just use those skills differently. What did you find were the things that kind of made you most excited about making, having made that jump?
LF: Couple different things. One turns out I love teaching. I had taught kayaking lessons. I had taught ski lessons. I even taught community college Japanese classes, but never something like law students. And I love working with students. And to be able to highlight that there are different ways to be a lawyer, right? That you don't have to practice in a law firm per se, but you can be a mediator, you can work for doing public policy, that there's a whole bunch of pathways. So I love teaching. Really love working with students. I teach water law. I teach energy law. I teach an environmental mediation course and I teach a negotiation course. And then one of my colleagues that I work with within the Institutes of Energy and Environment said, go figure out what's going on with the Chesapeake Bay and water quality questions. So I dropped into the deep end of water quality. And so I've been working really closely on questions like that. I'm on, what's called the Chesapeake Bay Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee. And I periodically laugh. I'm like, you know, you let a lawyer on the science committee, right? They're like, you're a social scientist. I'm like, So I'm deeply involved with a number of different research questions that, you know, related to sustainable aviation fuel, renewable natural gas, flooding, water quality, but sort of at that nexus of food, energy, and water, but the human behavior side of it. And the legal side of it. And so within the Institutes of Energy and Environment, my role is to help break those disciplinary silos to solve real world questions. So what I love is my focus on solving real world questions then comes over into the training space and to real world questions in a place like Pennsylvania, which I really, I had visited once when I was nine. And then to up and move here is to be like, oh, this really is the Keystone State. Teaching energy in a place like this…The first oil well was in Pennsylvania. The first nuclear power plant, Pennsylvania. The first nuclear disaster, Pennsylvania, right? Today, the third largest deposit of natural gas in the world is in this area behind Russia, Qatar, and basically the upper Appalachian region. And so a lot of the questions, right? There's lots and lots of discussion right now, thinking about what's the Marshall Plan for middle America. What's reimagining Appalachia to think about what we want our ecosystems to look like? What do we want our communities to look like that are human-centered living with the environment instead of taking it apart? What does that look like? We have a climate transition, then we need to be moving very, very fast. How do we do that and make sure we're not leaving communities behind while we're doing that? Working on a flood resilience question right now with the Borough of Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, and Pennsylvania's the most flood-prone state in the country What's climate change making worse? Flooding. This is the 50th anniversary of hurricane Agnes, which was the most significant flood on record for most of the U.S. for a long time. People have forgotten, you know, they've forgot what Hurricane Lee looked like in 2011. It's not the top of their mind, but can you open up flood resilience and learn to live with the water while rebuilding communities and making a viable space? So that's the challenge I'm working on in a bunch of different ways and super, super interesting.
LJR: Yeah, well, and it really does track back to, you know, you were interested in water, but it wasn't really the water. It was the community's interactions with water, right? And that is now what you're dealing with. Yes water. But other elements of our environment, it's not just the environment, it's the communities interacting with what is to become of their own community because of what's happening in the world on that global scale.
LF: Yeah. And, and that I think is the common theme for a lot of it. So two years ago, we actually lived in Sweden from August of 2019 to May of 2020. Interesting time to be abroad, but I was on a Fulbright looking at that question, which is where are people finding success in handling complex water questions, flood drought, water quality. And it was really, really super interesting to be making those, you know, kind of comparisons of different systems of thinking about transboundary water questions. And they are places where people commonly say, well, people fight over water. And more often the research shows actually that water is a commonality that allows people to bridge it because it is so important. Climate change is water change. It's flood, it's drought, right? Every degree warmer, we get the more ability at the atmosphere to hold moisture. It may come down as a massive snowstorm. It may come down as a rain bomb, right? It may come as drought, as those patterns lock in place. Those are water changes. Therefore, you know, climate is seen as a threat multiplier. How do you address those? And some of that is then working again with those communities for that resilience so they can withstand the conditions and the changes we're seeing.
LJR: Yeah. Well, it seems like you have also been facilitating resilience in your family, making changes when you need to uprooting and going to Sweden and then trying to get back home again. So if you were to look back and talk to your 18-year-old or 21-year-old Lara and say, Hey, this is where you're gonna be in 20 some years, would she say, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Or would there be some other desire that she would have for you or at this point?
LF: I heard recently somebody was like, you know what I wish people majored in? I wish they majored in curiosity. Not Japanese, not water, not engineering, not anything else: Major in curiosity. And I love that because I think that's kind of what I've done. I've always been curious and I've followed that passion and it's led me to some crazy places, right? You know, like, I was talking with the folks with the Fulbright commission in Sweden. And I said, I'm really not your normal academic. And they were like, yeah, we look for the not normal academics. But that has led me into being asked would I be a juror for the Stockholm International Water Institute’s junior water prize. And I was like, sure, I would love to know what kids in high school around the world are doing for finding cool water solutions, which led, you know, to now they were like, would you consider being chair of this? I was like, sure. I'd consider being chair, right? So you never know where sort of the curiosity and interest and enthusiasm will lead. And again, I mentioned this earlier. I do tell my students: Find that curiosity, find that passion, be willing to ask the questions and don't take no for an answer. And I think that's been probably my motto for leading me into some really unusual, but really super interesting spaces. Yes, it looks like I'm sort of linearly focused on water, but a lot of it was serendipity and a lot of it was kind of being like, I'm about to jump off a really big bridge and I hope there's a bungee cord to catch me and not necessarily knowing where I was gonna land, but being okay giving it a try and seeing what happens.
LJR: Yeah. And just asking a lot of questions. And as you said, people like to bring you in and you've, you've definitely been brought into really cool things and I'm sure you will be brought into many more in the future. So thank you so much for sharing this with us and being here today.
LF: Thank you for the interview and thanks for the chance. And if anybody's interested in water, I'm always happy to talk about water, people, and how we find solutions to the world's most challenging questions.
LJR: That was Laura Fowler, an attorney and mediator who focuses on environmental energy and natural resource law with a specific focus on water related issues. She has a joint appointment at Penn State Law, where she teaches natural resource law and negotiations and the Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment, where she is working on questions related to water, the Chesapeake Bay and systems level behavioral change.
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