Meet the scientist moms fighting climate change for their children
Joellen Russell likes a big class. The bigger the better, actually, with online sections and huge auditoriums and students swarming her after a lecture – the way they did one Thursday morning this fall after her Intro to Oceanography course at the University of Arizona.
“Wait, Dr. Russell, I’m not sure about the homework.”
“What about the jet stream?”
“Dr. Russell! I saw your sweet family at CVS!”
The distinguished professor stays onstage, laughing, joking, answering question after question, until finally she suggests that anyone else who wants to talk should visit her during office hours, which she holds at a picnic table outside.
“It’s a bit of a circus,” she says as she walks out of the voluminous lecture hall. “But, I like it when it’s noisy. I like it when they want to talk and they want to tell you things and they want to ask things.” She grins, as if getting away with something. “It’s fun.”
The university’s administrators have suggested that perhaps Dr. Russell might want to teach smaller, more exclusive seminars. That, after all, is what’s typical for tenured professors with named chairs and multimillion-dollar grants and international partnerships on the cutting edge of scientific research. But Dr. Russell knows that students who take her introductory class are more likely than other undergraduates to enroll in another science course. They are also more likely to graduate. And that, she believes, means they are more likely to join her in what she sees as the biggest, most important fight for humankind today – a battle not only against climate change, but also against those who say there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
And she wants to grow an army of resilience.
“My job is not to just advance the science,” she says. “It’s to build the next front lines. I launch as many as I can.”
Dr. Russell is not alone in
