Cultivating Skills to Contribute to a Diverse Coalition to Protect the Planet

Caroline grew up loving the outdoors as a place of exploration and at times as an avenue to get away from her younger siblings. She has loved reading and learning throughout her life, and as a young person this especially helped her reach perspectives different from that of her rural community and lived experiences. Through Caroline’s explorations in working as a freelance journalist and at the Carolina Center for Public Service at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, she later reflected, “My job was to share stories about people doing interesting things, and I wanted to be the person doing the interesting thing.” So, Caroline took policy, environmental, statistics, and economics classes while working at UNC which opened up doors as she started to look into applying to public policy programs.

Caroline communicated, “I chose policy because I wanted to be doing systems-level change. I like to think about big-picture things.” Caroline expressed that she’s learned making a more just world involves more than one-on-one discussions to convince people of thinking differently and that instead by improving the systems we live in, people can experience for themselves the ways in which equitable policies help everyone. We discussed how racism is entrenched in systems that are harder to change and that while these systems impact people on a large-scale, not everyone has access to see how policies impact them.

On how she feels in relation to what she studies she said, “Environmental justice is my focus now and it was like this perfect confluence of my interests in sustainability, social justice, and public policy. So, EJ policy is where I’ve landed and it feels really perfect - it feels like a long time coming.” Caroline wants to be able to use all of her communication skills from public relations and journalism in the environmental justice space.

When asked about how her identity shapes what she does, Caroline said that being from a rural area has made her passionate about giving voice to people underrepresented in government and she hopes for a diverse set of people, and their interests, to be at the table when it comes to land use decisions. Caroline shared that an increase of industrial hog farms in the area where she’s from, has led to the contamination of land owned generationally by Black communities, which has impacted their quality of life and left them with little power.

Further expanding on her identity, Caroline said that despite personally aligning more with liberal values but coming from a fairly conservative area, “...even if someone holds a view that you disagree with or think is horrible, you still have to remember that person is a human and denigrating them doesn’t make anything better.” Caroline sees greater possibilities through restorative justice and moving away from a dichotomy of values that exclude complex, valuable conversations. Caroline values different types of knowledge when it comes to the environment. She understands humans as a part of nature who have responsibilities as stewards of land and that we can learn from forms of life around us. 

While the conventions of today tend to separate humans from nature, Caroline values the intergenerational relationships she has with others whether it be her close family and friends to knowing her neighborhood and her program peers. For her, this is a part of her larger life-long goal of building and being a part of a larger community to protect the environment through joining the workforce. Caroline thrives on the complexity of what she studies and loves being a support to undergraduate students, and she hopes to take these skills and experiences wherever she goes.