Core Samples

A Climate Scientist's Experiments in Politics and Motherhood

2024

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Author:

Anna Farro Henderson

People live by their stories—how can we use them to accelerate action on climate change?

Anna Farro Henderson embarks on a remarkable narrative journey in Core Samples, exploring how science is done, discussed, legislated, and imagined. Grounded in her experiences as a climate scientist, an environmental policy advisor, and a constant juggler of the many roles and responsibilities of professional moms, Henderson’s eclectic, unconventional essays illuminate the messy, contradictory humanity of our scientific and political institutions.

This is a remarkably honest book—and therefore funny, moving, and eminently worth reading. Anna Farro Henderson’s deep encounters with Big Science and Big Bureaucracy will help you understand why progress on matters of life and death can be so maddeningly slow; her encounters with herself may help you figure out how to live your own life.

—

Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

Tags

Literature, Environment, Film and Media, Minnesota and the Upper Midwest, Political Science, Science and Technology, Biography

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.

Anna Farro Henderson is an award-winning writer, PhD scientist, and environmental policy expert. She is a fellow at the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, teaches at the Loft Literary Center, and works in climate advocacy. She lives with her family in St. Paul, where she makes daily visits to the Mississippi River.

—

Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

Field Notes

Prologue: Science as Story

I. First Experiments

What If? Coming of Age as a Scientist

Saying Yes to the Mountain

Whatever Discomfort, Find Beauty

Research as a Muse

II. Ecotones

How to Pee Standing Up: Rules for a Woman in Climate Science

Dear Spartina: A Science Love Letter