By Karina Chavaree

Interview with Laura Booth (Columbia College 2015)

Among the lush hills of Tennessee Valley, Laura Booth (CC '15) shares how her path from Columbia’s Environmental Biology program to a career in ecological restoration has been shaped by community and deep ecological ethics.

The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

It’s mid-morning as I pull into the parking lot, watching people mill about excitedly. I’m excited too, standing amidst unbelievably verdant green hills, mapping the trails that cut through the contours of the earth and spill down to the cove at the edge of the Pacific. Tennessee Valley is a small section of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, just 20 minutes outside of San Francisco.

This is where I meet Laura Booth, a Columbia University graduate, on a sunny Tuesday in March. Laura studied Environmental Biology at Columbia, where she was also involved with campus journalism and climate activism. Now, she works as a National Parks Biologist in Tennessee Valley, spending her days stewarding and restoring the threatened land. As I walk towards her in the bustling Tuesday morning parking lot, I’m greeted with the smiles of the many volunteers who join Laura every Tuesday to assist with weed pulling and planting native plants. Laura gives me the rundown of the day’s task as the weekly volunteers walk ahead of us: we would be removing invasive French Broom (Genista monspessulana) from an out-of-bounds area of the valley using a weed wrench, which acts like a lever on the plant stem to remove it from the soil after preparation.

Walking past an abandoned Park police barn en route to the restoration site (photo by the author)

After an hour of weeding, Laura and I walk away from the group to a small grassy patch amidst the Broome and have the conversation that follows.

How did you decide on majoring in Environmental Biology at Columbia?

I thought I would study English when I went to Columbia. I always wanted to be a writer or a journalist. But when I got to Columbia, reflecting on my growing up in Southeastern Pennsylvania across from a nature preserve, I wanted to work on climate action, and I couldn’t see how those two things would fit together. I first declared in Anthropology, then I wandered my way over into Sustainable Development, but the emphasis on technology didn’t resonate with what I saw as the fundamental changes that we need to make to our society. So, I ended up in the Environmental Biology (E3B) department. E3B was my lucky home.

How did your coursework and lab work at Columbia bring you to your career in restoration?

My experience studying abroad in Kenya was so formative for me because it helped to conceptualize what a career outside would look like. When I was in the field there, or in my courses in the E3B department, I had the sense that I needed to go cut my teeth in my early career. There was definitely encouragement to go straight to graduate school. I knew that wasn’t the right path for me. When I left Columbia, I was signed up to work in an Urban Ecology lab at Fordham. I would’ve been lucky to be in that job, but I did a gut check and knew that I wanted an experience more embedded in a community. I moved to the Bay Area totally on a whim, having never been to California, to work for the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory, a community science project that’s part of the park.

I wandered between roles and tried to figure out how I could find a job where I would both have the interpretive opportunity that I get by working with volunteers, and also an opportunity for hands-on work. I was an interpretive park ranger in Muir Woods for a while, not doing physical stewardship, and I knew that I was still hungry to do more without knowing what to call it. It took a long time to find my way to restoration, but I think once you start doing the hands-on work, and see it as being both connected to the past and the future, working with indigenous ways of knowing and responding to social issues like globalization, you just become connected to it.

I think that the courses and lab work I did helped me realize that understanding ecological questions requires more experience in the world. I wonder if it’s still true that at Columbia, we didn’t do anything that was out and out restoration and praxis. I think the thing about restoration is that it responds to heal some of the damages that have been the result and purpose of colonization and globalization, so I think there’s a desire for that. Folks come out here and they really feel it–that's what keeps me going in this work that otherwise is often seasonal, underpaid, and hard to stick with for many reasons.

Tennessee Valley, Summer 2023 (top) vs Winter ‘24/25 (bottom). Photos by Laura Booth

How does your personal poetry practice intersect with your restoration work?

It’s been very foundational for me, and I’m lucky to have worked with people who treated the orientation to language and culture as being incredibly relevant in this work. Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about it at the beginning of Braiding Sweetgrass, how these things are intricately connected: art, how we live, and science all work together. Science and innovation require iterative curiosity and being imaginative. In that sense, making a poem, asking a scientific question, or developing a hypothesis about what you think is going on around you are all the same. I think they are powerfully joined, and the ability to be in that imaginative, creative space, if you have the ability to think about patterns and ask technical questions, then they may become intertwined in either a poem or a scientific paper. Both things are about seeing connections that are not immediately apparent and elucidating them.

I’ve been reading lately about how we haven’t had an innovation in a long time. An electric car is still a car, it’s not a reimagining of the way we live. I’ve been reading a lot of Ursula K. Le Guin; she has a book of essays that is a collection of her writings about Science Fiction called “The Language of the Night”, and there’s an essay called “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons”. It’s about our fear and societally cultivated resistance to the imagination. I think that when you’re in that childlike space of wondering, it’s also a space of being ultimately responsible for ourselves. Culturally, we’re not so trained in taking responsibility for our actions. Every action that we take, the systems that we’re working under, they do affect people somewhere. In the same way that we throw trash away, we have made invisible those relationships, and that is an emergent intention of the system we live under. I think poetry and science are excavation techniques and processes. They are fundamentally very similar.

I think both poetry and restoration work are a direct unlearning, or a rejection, of what we are accustomed to, and make our minds work in ways that they don’t usually do. It’s exciting to think about how much those things can do in such a suffocating political and environmental world.

I agree. I think when people say “I can’t make a poem” or “I’m not smart, I can’t be a scientist,” it denies the openness to the world that we all have as younger people. But I really view these intertwined methods as an opportunity to see our surroundings in a different light.

Can you talk more about the place your restoration work has in intersectional climate activism and greater ideas of decolonization?

I think we are all tempted to believe that if we have a lot of reach, a lot of followers, or we work in policy, that loudness means that we’re more impactful. But that [loudness] also cuts out the entire relationship with non-human life.

Say you're living in perfect ethical congruence with your moral compass (which is very unlikely), how do you scale that to the collective? When you approach others and connect to them as if they are your family and your relations, it becomes an anathema to do them harm. When I worked as an interpreter at Muir Woods, I thought about how it’s only a group of people who come from the outside, who don’t have a relationship with the redwood forest, that could possibly log 97% (two million acres) of the old-growth forest. If you have a relationship with that system like it’s your kin, it just wouldn't happen, and it didn’t for thousands of years.

I think that when we ask ourselves how we find the political will to make true progress on climate action, we have to connect to the world beyond just people. It has to become impossible for us to do them harm. I love Tennessee Valley, so I don’t want to see it harmed. I also feel that way about the land that raised me in Pennsylvania. We are all complicit and entangled, but I think there are small ways to live in closer accordance with our ethics, and habitat restoration is one of those ways.

I also think it’s important to connect deeply with people, expand access to this kind of work, and work with young people to give them the skillset to keep going. We need to turn the tide, slowly, to an economy that doesn’t treat this work as an externality. Rather, we should accommodate it as part of our economic model.

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