Kelso-born author explores climate change, human condition in new memoir - The Daily News

Kelso-born author explores climate change, human condition in new memoir

Brianna Craft left college with a mission to help rescue the earth. And she’s never looked back.

Born and raised in Kelso, Craft’s recently published memoir, “Everything That Rises,” swings between a reflection of her childhood and her travels working with diplomats across the globe on an issue she says no one can ignore: climate change.
On March 28, the International Renewable Energy Agency warned that the world needs to ramp up the deployment of renewable energy sources by the end of the decade.

Now a London-based senior researcher with the environmental think-tank International Institute for Environmental Development, Craft, 36, has hopped from one part of the globe to the other. She works with politicians and scientists, sits in on negotiations that can stretch long into the night, and supports poorer countries in accessing data and other resources.

People are also reading…

“And then I’ve had this side hustle of writing and trying to tell the story of what I do,” she said in an interview with The Daily News. “I’m really happy to have had the memoir published last week and get to be home in America to talk to the people I really wanted to talk to about it. And (I) just try to bring to life this work that I’ve been living for the past decade.”

In her book, she writes about a looming environmental catastrophe. But the author also explores facets of the human condition: labor rights, facing sexual harassment as a young female traveler, parental abuse, suicidal thoughts and finding joy in bleak situations.

She is scheduled to speak Tuesday at the monthly meeting of the Longview literary group, WordFest. She also has a new novel set to come out next year, marking a shift from nonfiction.

A new purpose

After graduating as valedictorian from Kelso High School in 2005, Craft enrolled at the University of Washington. That’s about when she first became aware of worsening environmental conditions.

A professor’s lecture in her environmental studies class induced both panic and confusion. As she writes in her memoir, she couldn’t believe the lack of urgency and news coverage in the United States: “My country talked about climate change like a minor risk it could afford to ignore.”

In that lecture, she found a new purpose. She finished her undergraduate degree, got a master’s in environmental studies from Brown University and soon won a travel scholarship. An internship sent her across the globe to Africa.

She spent time as a graduate student in Durban, South Africa for the 2011 Conference of Parties. Then she went to Gambia, a sovereign state on the West African Coast where the vast majority of people depend on agriculture to survive. Craft’s takeaway was clear: countries that contribute the least to carbon emissions pay the biggest price.

The people she worked with, she writes, had an enthusiasm that “was everything I wanted to hear, from the people empowered to actually enact the changes that they promised.”

Craft’s time in Gambia shaped how she thought of the ripple effects of greenhouse gas emissions. In America, she said, the discussion around addressing environmental issues often centers on cost. Officials focus on the expenses of adding more renewable energy sources, how to fund electric vehicles, where to put wind turbines.

“I really didn’t hear about the climate crisis until I was an undergrad,” she said. “Once I did start paying attention to it on American news, it was presented as a debate. We would have one pro and one against, and it was framed as something that was uncertain. ... We’ve lost decades of time where we could have been acting to this fake debate.”

But in the wet-and-dry tropical country of Gambia, Craft’s memoir says, no one has the luxury of avoiding the topic.

The situation was becoming apocalyptic. Less developed countries back in 2013 were seeing the effects. Increasingly unpredictable floods, long dry spells and stronger storms had already killed hundreds of thousands of people globally by the time she landed in Gambia, she writes.

Craft was soon enveloped in the bureaucracy of climate negotiations. She entered an intricate web of acronyms, treaties, agreements, coalitions, councils, protocols and proceedings — words and processes that all revolved around solving the crisis. The experience showed Craft, she said, real change has to come from sweeping policy reform at the highest level.

“We need holistic changes to our energy infrastructure,” Craft said. “We need leaders in positions of power who are going to have a plan to get our emissions to zero. We need to divest our money and our time completely out of fossil fuels.”

She spent her time in meetings where country leaders pledged to reduce emissions but had a hard time agreeing on how to do that. Buckets meant for money to pay carbon reduction costs stayed empty. Countries like Gambia were already losing the battle against climate change — one they did not cause — while the largest culprits seemed to avoid the issue.

She was there when the Paris Climate Agreement was signed in 2016, and she watched as former President Donald Trump backed out of the agreement a year later. Craft seesawed between swelling hope that something would get done and the deflated disappointment when proceedings ended with no real action.

Through it all, Craft said she loves her work and holds onto optimism.

“As a researcher, I am so inspired and motivated by the people I get to work with, the people who are government officials in the least developed countries who really fight for climate justice every day,” she said. “It’s really, really rewarding to be in those spaces.”