Climate Fix Blog

I grew up in the rolling Piedmont hills of South Carolina at the base of the Appalachians — picking blackberries and exploring along the train tracks behind my grandparents’ house. We weren’t outdoorsy, but we were outside, and often.  

My family didn’t camp, and we didn’t hike, but we did deeply enjoy the landscapes of the Southeast.

We traveled to Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina for picnics and careened down the slippery stone of Sliding Rock into a cold pool of water on those sweltering summer days. We spent biannual weekends in the Smokey Mountains of Gatlinburg, instilling my enduring love for Dolly Parton and crisp mountain air in the morning. We fished for bass in the clear waters of Lake Keowee and for wahoo, marlin, and mackerel along the inlets of Fripp Island, a place I spent countless hours biking as an adolescent along the island streets shaded by the tall palmettos. While notoriously unappealing to visitors, I miss the salty, sweet, rotten smell of the Pluff mud in the marsh, an ecosystem unique to the Carolina Lowcountry, and of fresh fish fileted on the dock.  

I first learned to ski on the sugar snow of Beech Mountain in North Carolina, but my dad wanted to take it to the next level. This was my first taste of Colorado — its expanse of blue sky, granite, and snow, and the exhilaration and freedom that came from skiing.

From our first trip in 2008, all I ever thought about was the next time we could go back.  

So, when it was time to head to college in 2010, I thought back to those years of ski trips longing to stay in the mountains and chose a school in Colorado. I loaded up my red Saturn Vue to the brim, and my dad and I embarked on the 22–hour drive through the hills of Tennessee and Kentucky, past the Gateway Arch welcoming me to the West in St. Louis, and across the vast flatness of Kansas. From my first camping trip at Loch Lomond near Winter Park to hikes through the Indian Peaks Wilderness to deepening my skill and appreciation for skiing, I quickly situated myself to the Colorado landscapes and way of life, and I didn’t plan on leaving.  

Before I loved nature, I loved language. I spent most of my time growing up tucked away in a corner of the house with a new book and spent countless hours at the local library. I was voracious for new information and obsessed with how language shapes our lives. Alongside the time spent in the outdoors in undergraduate, I studied English literature and political communication. When it was time to graduate, I wasn’t ready to be done, so I enrolled in a master’s program with the University of Denver’s English department.

It was there that my passion for environmental advocacy began to take root.  

Thanks to a class on pastoral literature and a class on Hermeneutics, I became fascinated at the relationship between human and nature and how we use words, stories, and art to communicate and understand that relationship. I began to ask questions like: Why is experiencing the Grand Canyon incomparable to just seeing a picture of it? How do we protect nature if we don’t have a relationship with it? How can we have a shared language and understanding of the environment? And can art really drive us to take action against climate change?  

 All of these questions led me to write my master’s thesis on the relationship between environmental literature, personal experiences in the outdoors, and political action. Through this work, I found the 1968 words of Baba Dioum, a Senegalese forestry engineer, to ring true: “In the end, we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.” I believed that if we wanted an environmental ethic across our culture, we needed to get people outside and aware of nature.  

And so, I graduated with a master’s degree and became… a ski instructor. What was meant to be a temporary move to Summit County, Colorado, turned into eight years of love for the high Alpine. After working for several publications, I found myself as the spokesperson for the town of Breckenridge. It was during this time that my love for outdoor recreation— trail running, mountain biking, and backcountry skiing — and the policies that made a community livable, equitable, and sustainable grew. I saw firsthand how policies enabled what I loved about nature and how they could protect that for generations to come. In Breckenridge, we did a significant amount of sustainability work — from creating an electric fleet to developing a sustainable tourism plan to increasing zero waste capacities. 

While others hated the tourists that flooded the community, swelling Breckenridge’s population from 5,000 to 30,000 during the busiest winter months, I began to wonder if we could leverage their experiences in this landscape to motivate them to support climate action. Would someone whose most cherished family memories are their annual skiing trip be persuaded about climate change if they learned that less precipitation and warming temperatures threatens skiing? Will rafters worried about flows in the Grand Canyon step up to support policies that keep water in the river?

Can our personal experiences with the landscapes that we love paired with smart, systemic solutions overcome political stagnation to create a better world?

These questions are how I found myself at Western Resource Advocates. WRA’s ability to create change at the larger, systemic level needed to truly address the challenges of climate change and its laser focus on the Interior West made me eager to join the team. At WRA, I have the unique ability to combine my background in outdoor advocacy, research in environmental literature and persuasion, passion for storytelling, and interest in public policy to protect the places I love from climate change. Every day, I have the chance to persuade a decision maker to vote for our environment or an advocate to hold these decision makers accountable to our communities and landscapes.  

When I was conducting my graduate school research, I leaned heavily on the work of Yi-Fu Tuan, a Chinese American geographer, and his understanding of topophilia. In his 1974 book “Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values,” Tuan lays the foundation for the complex and emotional relationship that humans share with their environments. Topophilia is the emotional bond between people and place and how our physical sense of place contributes to our perception, attitudes, and values. As many of us have experienced, nature can inspire awe, joy, fear, dread, comfort, nostalgia, and many more emotions. Topophilia is a way to understand how those emotions connect us with the environment and determine our actions towards it. “Without self-understanding,” Tuan wrote, “we cannot hope for enduring solutions to environmental problems, which are fundamentally human problems.”  

In this series, we’re exploring the human elements of our work at WRA.

You’ll hear from staff members across the organization about how their experiences across the West led them to WRA and how they’re turning their love for these places into advocacy. You’ll hear about some of the challenges that our region faces, how our team members are addressing them, and what gives them the strength to do this work even when things seem bleak. 

When I think about what gives me hope for the future of our environment, it’s the stories and people that are featured in this series. If our environmental problems are also human problems, then our environmental solutions also stem from the dedicated work of humans seeking those solutions. The work ahead of us is challenging, but it can be done, and we can take heart that there are thousands of people across the country stepping up every day to do that work.