Professor Meredith Kelly’s Vision for a Greener Dartmouth

Written by: Rachel Kent 21', Dartmouth Sustainability Office Coordinator

Sustainability Program Coordinator Rachel Kent ‘21 sat down with Professor Meredith Kelly, Academic Director of the Dartmouth Climate Collaborative, to learn more about her motivations and goals for the role, covering everything from eons-old glaciers to her current playbook for climate scholarship at Dartmouth. Kelly was named Co-Director of the Collaborative, along with Director of Sustainability Rosi Kerr, this April. She chairs the Earth Sciences Department, where she teaches and researches glacial geology. 

Rachel Kent: What brings you to this work—in other words, what motivates you to get up out of bed in the morning and work on climate change? 

Meredith Kelly: I’m a climate scientist by training. I’m a geologist and I study records of past climate, specifically using glaciers around the world to focus on understanding global patterns of climate change. My interest in this dates back to undergrad, when I started studying geology, and I was really interested in understanding records of past climate. I was living and working in New England, and I was interested in how the ice sheets that existed here during the last Ice Age shaped the landscape. 

At the same time, when I was an undergrad, the scientific community was having this amazing discovery of where we were just starting to obtain ice core records from Greenland. What those ice cores showed was something we had never seen before: records of really rapid climate change. These were large changes in climate on the order of 10 degrees Celsius in air temperature change that happened in thirty years. Prior to that, what scientists had understood is that climate change moves pretty slowly and that it’s driven by changes in Earth’s orbit. This discovery with the Greenland ice cores just turned that on its head and showed that climate change can happen really rapidly—and we don’t understand how the climate system operates. That’s where my love of the science and the love of these questions comes from. 

In my 30 year career in climate change, what’s amazing to recognize is that when we look at the climate change that has happened in that period, or in the past 100 years, we recognize now that we we’re experiencing a rapid climate change. We know that humans are causing this climate change, and a main driver is human-produced greenhouse gases. And we really don’t understand how all those things work together. 

The position of Academic Director of the Climate Collaborative brings my love of the complexity of the Earth’s climate system as a climate scientist together with my really strong drive to want to do something about how humans are impacting climate. I see leading the Climate Collaborative together with Rosi Kerr and others as being able to make an impact, albeit on a small scale, of taking an organization, a community like Dartmouth, and being able to shape it so that we’re simultaneously teaching and learning about climate while we’re changing Dartmouth’s impact on the Earth’s climate. We want to show Dartmouth as a model for how other small communities can do this, and then scale up from there. 

RK: The Climate Collaborative is a relatively new entity on campus, and organizationally, it doesn’t have a great precedent. Essentially, with the Collaborative, we’re trying to do something that hasn’t quite been done at Dartmouth in bringing together many different corners of campus under the umbrella of climate and sustainability work—and, understandably, that can lead to confusion for those who aren’t familiar with it. Can you explain how you understand the Climate Collaborative? What exactly is its structure and function, and what is the benefit of this novel design?

MK: The academic side of the Climate Collaborative started with the Climate Futures Initiative (CFI), which was a year-long effort led by Professor Laura Ogden to have a lot of conversations on campus with faculty, staff, and students about people’s interests in terms of working on climate and having a unified force for this. The outcome of CFI provided incredible insights into what we already do that is incredible, for example in Arctic Studies, climate and health, climate change science, and environmental humanities—in addition to the directions our campus community wants to go in the future. A big takeaway was that people didn’t want a centralized institute because of Dartmouth’s incredible breadth of work on climate. People did want a unified effort that would permeate throughout Dartmouth and support existing structures and promote current research and scholarship—and also bring people together to form new collaborations. 

The Climate Collaborative today is an effort to provide the fabric or the connective tissue at Dartmouth for existing efforts across scholarship, teaching, and operations on climate and sustainability and to develop new initiatives across these areas. For example, one of the ways we’re doing this is by leaning into Dartmouth’s incredible sense of place and the wonderful lands that make up Dartmouth. Through our campus as lab initiatives, we’re providing support for faculty, students, and staff to conduct scholarship on and with lands and also to be creative about how we teach and do experiential learning at these sites. This integrates Dartmouth’s amazing effort to decarbonize its campus—particularly implementing geo-exchange as part of that decarbonization process—and asking questions like, how can we use that for scholarship and teaching, and how can we provide knowledge  about sustainable carbon-free energy sources in this rural and northern area back to Dartmouth and the larger community?

RK: In this work, I’m grateful for the enthusiasm I’ve experienced in the Dartmouth community across the board to plug into climate and sustainability work. What are the best ways for students, faculty, and staff to engage with the Collaborative?

MK: I look at this as the beginning of an effort and something we’re developing at a pace as quickly as we can. Over the next year, there are opportunities for faculty and staff to get involved in the campus as lab program— 

RK: Is this an appropriate time to soft launch the Campus as Lab Summit on Oct. 7?

MK: Totally! That will be an opportunity for folks to learn more about what campus as lab means and how to access funding for research and scholarship on Dartmouth’s campus and lands. For students, we’re planning to have programming in partnership with the House communities. One of the things I’d say is on the front burner right now is a new Climate Scholars program for students to get involved with a cohort of students interested in climate issues to interact and meet with faculty on campus, discuss relevant issues, and connect with folks who are doing climate scholarship.

For faculty, we’re working with DCAL to develop a workshop on climate curricula and courses, with the idea of moving toward a larger offering of climate related courses in the curriculum. On the student side of that, we’re hoping to have a student focus group come together to see where the student desires are related to curricular offerings related to climate. 

RK: One of my favorite books about climate change is What If We Get It Right? By Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. I’d like to pose that question to you now—what would it look like for Dartmouth to get this moment right and do our part to contribute to climate action and study? Feel free to be as imaginative and visionary, or as practical, as you want! 

MK: If we get it right, Dartmouth meets our carbon goals that we’ve set. We’ve significantly reduced our greenhouse gas emissions in our energy system, and we start to do that with our food systems and transportation as well—our whole scope of carbon emissions decreases significantly. Also, we gain some understanding of how to do that in a rural, northern, cold climate that we can share and scale for other folks in this community and cold climates. Students coming to Dartmouth see Dartmouth as a place where they can study climate and come out with an understanding of Earth’s climate system and how they can be agents of change, no matter what they’re studying. Folks at Dartmouth would be doing incredible, cutting edge climate scholarship, whether that’s quantifying contributions of greenhouse gases by oil and gas companies, like the work of Justin Mankin, to creating art that communicates climate change to broad audiences, to understanding the mental health impacts of dealing with a future in which our climate system is really different from how it is now. Dartmouth would be a place of world-renowned climate scholarship. We would work with our lands and with communities in the Upper Valley and our greater region. 

Students at Dartmouth, across all schools, would gain experience in complex problem solving and collaborate with partners in a really hands-on way so that what we teach and learn at Dartmouth are really skills that can be applied in a range of scenarios—not something that you can learn in an online program. AI can’t write it for you. They’re actually real-world skills, interacting with lands and with real people, and working as teams. 

RK: That's a future I want to live in. And many of the seeds for the vision you’ve just laid out are already planted.