Core Samples: A Climate Scientist's Experiments in Politics and Motherhood
By Anna Farro Henderson
Review by Hope Taft
Citation:
Henderson, Anna Farro, 2024, Core Samples: A Climate Scientist's Experiements in Politics and Motherhood, University Of Minnesota Press.
Description:
Description provided by University Of Minnesota Press.
People live by their stories—how can we use them to accelerate action on climate change?
Climate scientist and policy expert Anna Farro Henderson embarks on a remarkable narrative journey in Core Samples, exploring how science is done, discussed, legislated, and imagined. Through stories both raucous and poignant—of far-flung expeditions, finding artistic inspiration in research, and traversing the systemic barriers women and mothers face in science and politics—she brings readers into the daily rhythms and intimacies of scientific research and political negotiation.
Grounded in her experiences as a climate scientist, an environmental policy advisor to Minnesota Senator Al Franken and Governor Mark Dayton, and a constant juggler of the many roles and responsibilities of professional moms, Henderson’s eclectic, unconventional essays range from observations, confessions, and meditations on lab and fieldwork to a packing list for a trip to the State Capitol and a lactation diary. Readers are invited on voyages as far afield as the Trinity nuclear test site in New Mexico, the Juneau Icefield in Alaska, and a meteor crater in Ghana—and as close to home as a town hall meeting in America’s corn belt.
A love letter to science and a bracing (and sometimes hilarious) portrait of the many obstacles women, mothers, and people digging for truth navigate, Core Samples illuminates the messy, contradictory humanity of our scientific and political institutions. Bringing us behind the closed doors of discovery and debate, Henderson exposes the flaws in research institutions, the halls of government, and the role of science in policy, yet she shows how each crack is also an invitation for camaraderie, creativity, and change.
Review:
This book was given to me by (my husband) Bob as a Christmas present in 2024, the same year it was published. He knows I don't like to read for pleasure so I suspected it had something in it that would appeal to me. He picked a good one in Core Samples to put under the tree.
Even though Anna’s language is a bit earthy for my likes I learned a lot by skipping over those words. She spent her college career learning to be a geologist with a focus on Climate Change. She almost remained in the academic area, taking core samples in such diverse places as glaciers, mountain lakes and frozen ponds until her first child arrived. That sent her on a new path. With an American Association for the Advancement of Science grant, she joins the staff of Sen. Franken, head of the Committee on the Environment, and then parlays that experience into the position of the Water Chief of the Minn. Governor Mark Dayton. Honest and frank, she tells the pitfalls of Big Academia and Big Government and why condensing the challenges of climate change into policy is so hard. Along the way, her memoir gives helpful hints on how to be heard in the halls of Congress or the State Capitol. It's Your Story that she, as staff, won’t forget that makes the issue come alive in a way that it will be remembered when competing voices are gone. So have a good one!
It's finding the cracks in entrenched groups that can lead to change. It's the involvement of all shareholders in the climate change issue that can foster better understanding of positions held by famers, environmentalists, Indigenous people, local politicians, and average citizens. She sees no easy solutions, but gave me lots of ideas on how to work on them. As she says “Climate Change is really about water”. With my interest in Ohio scenic rivers and the Little Miami River in particular, it’s no wonder Bob thought I would read all 220 pages of Core Samples. If you are interested in change or reaching consensus on any topic, you should too.
