Anna George

There are thousands of causes in the world worth fighting for. The one I am involved with is the fight against climate change. This seems to me one of the most urgent issues of our time. Climate change and its effects intersect with many other kinds of oppression, from race to class to gender, and the worst effects may be unstoppable if we do not act soon. Thus, there are many different angles from which we can attack the problem. The Climate Change Concentration has allowed me to explore several different approaches and led me to reconsider my plans for the future.

It is both a blessing and a curse to work with those who are as passionately invested in the future as you are. The week after the election, I had a meeting with the supervisor for my social media intern position on the Massachusetts state divestment campaign. Instead of identifying pertinent tweets, we discussed the election for almost the whole meeting. I was also saddened and horrified, but the election had also revitalized me. Our work of informing the public about the latest climate news had just become that much more important. Now, in addition to publicizing protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline and tweeting about the decline of coal, I had to share the news about the President-elect and his associates’ plans to defund the EPA and rejuvenate coal.

The summer undergraduate research fellowship required a completely different kind of thinking. I was studying how climate change is affecting plant ranges (where plants are found), one of my passions. Even the most repetitive research-based tasks, like checking data on spreadsheets or counting tree rings, were exciting to me. It was essential to have a sharp eye to catch mistakes in the spreadsheet and to use analytical thinking to judge tree ring measurements. This taste of research made me even more excited about the possibility of studying climate change in a future career.

In May, I am graduating with a degree in biological sciences and a minor in geosciences. I have applied for various ecological internships and fellowships, but I do not know yet if any of them will satisfy my desire to make a difference and feed my intellectual curiosity. There are a dizzying number of jobs out there and I am still working out whether activism or science or an entirely different career will excite my interest.

Melting glaciers are supposed to be as silent as a midwinter night, moving slowly and stealthily. The first melting glacier I ever saw was loud, full of dirt and rock and sweating ice. Beneath that, it almost looked like tears were pouring down its faraway face into its grimy terminal lake. It was going away from us, retreating up its u-shaped valley.

I stood watching the former glacial ice and dust rush away down a ferocious channel and I understood that the world was too late to save the glaciers. Denial and disbelief had sealed their fate. They rush away as we argue about each country’s individual contribution, negotiating and negotiating to see how little we can do, to protect bottom lines.

While I was in New Zealand during the spring semester, my visit to Hooker Glacier deeply affected me. I had heard about the average temperatures rising, the storms growing more violent and less predictable and small islands disappearing as sea levels rose, all of this causing devastation to people, the effects lying heaviest on the most marginalized. However, I had never before seen such visceral evidence of humans’ effects on the environment.

On the drive back to Christchurch, where I attended university, I carried the watery glacier with me. As I met with the fossil fuel divestment club and sat in my global change class, it weighed on me. The Break Free from Fossil Fuels Day of Action broke me from my stupor. I helped shut down a bank that was funding fossil fuel extraction and climate change for a day, but it wasn’t enough. As I sat there, surrounded by organizers, a thought returned to my head again and again: our action, however well-attended, was too small. No one cared that we could shut down one small branch of a large international bank. Later that night, I looked at the news from the day. It was dominated by reports of the participation of over 30,000 protesters in actions across six continents. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it did matter. Perhaps we had a hope.

A little over a month later, I returned the United States and rejoined Divest Smith College. Returning to my organizing roots helped me fully remember my hope for the future, as well as my fear. There is still time, if we organize. Even though I am still fascinated by the idea of studying climate change and its effects, I am not sure how useful it can be when we can already see the changes in our landscapes. We used to be able to step from dirt to glacier. Action, not research, is the necessity. Perhaps I will return to research someday, but, in the meantime, I must put down my measuring tape and field notebook, pick up my clipboard and protest sign, and fight.

I had not done an extended scientific research project of my own before. I had done small class projects that lasted a few days, but nothing that reached further than the classroom door and nothing on subjects that were near and dear to my heart. Biology is my major, but my passion is studying climate change and doing climate change activism. This summer, for ten weeks, researching the effects of climate change was my job. I was the research assistant to Jesse Bellemare, a Smith biology professor who collaborating with colleagues at other universities to carry this project out.

I got to put all of my effort into trying to answer the question: have plants in New England and New York shifted in their ranges over the last several decades, and is this due to climate change? More broadly, this research is investigating whether there are patterns in how plants in the United States have moved based on common characteristics of the plants. We were also exploring whether we can apply the patterns that we saw to creating management plans for endangered plant species in the face of climate change.

When studying climate change, there’s always the potential for feeling overwhelmed and saddened by the immensity and variety of destruction that humans are inflicting on themselves and the planet. However, in this project, there was an element of hope. Instead of merely cataloging the destruction caused, we were studying the changes while attempting to create a framework for to preserve endangered species. The fact that people are actively trying to find solutions gives me hope in the face of a terrifying situation.

I loved the diversity of experiences it offered me, each of which allowed me to stretch myself in a slightly different way. I was a scientist, an map-maker, and an explorer.  I searched species maps, counted rings on trees, read books on Emily Dickinson hoping to find a mention of a certain tree, explored the Connecticut countryside, and learned to create a GIS map. This last skill has already been helpful in a special studies I am doing this semester looking at the distribution of rare plants after an ice age, and I’m sure will continue to be useful, both through the rest of my time at Smith and beyond.

One of my favorite parts of this project was the element of surprise that accompanied all of our expeditions into the field. We never knew how many trees or plants we would find at a site, or even if we would find the species. But that was half the fun. We climbed down riverbanks, scouted out the edge of railroads, and even dived deep into the woods, all in the name of scientific research. I can’t wait to get back to it.