Lisa Dale

Lisa Dale is a lecturer in Climate at the Columbia Climate School, and got involved in the climate space as a result  of her love for the outdoors after spending 25 years in Colorado. She is interested in wildfire policy in the American West, and sustainable development in Rwanda. Lisa calls herself an optimist and hopes that people can learn to live in the state of the changing climate without insurmountable fear and guilt.  

Lisa Dale 

She/her

Lecturer in Climate at the Columbia Climate School

Harlem, Manhattan 

Could you talk about your interests in environmental policy and the global institutional framework for climate change?

My PhD is in environmental policy, and it comes out of the political science department, so I'm very much policy oriented. I spent a number of years in Colorado state government working at the Department of Natural Resources. My research in academia has been focused on two seemingly very different areas of study. One is on wildfire policy in the American West. I'm doing a project right now on home insurance and wildfire. I've also worked in Rwanda – I was a Fulbright Specialist in Sustainable Development there in 2019-2020, and now have an academic research appointment at the University of Rwanda. I teach a course there as well. I've got a group of undergraduate Columbia students that I'm bringing there for spring break in March. The class is 10 students from Columbia and 10 from the University of Rwanda. We do sustainable development projects with local leaders. But I've also done quite a bit of research there – I study climate change adaptation policies in rural Rwanda, and so I've done research projects on crop insurance, and I've looked at some of the rural resettlement policies. 

Do you teach the 10 students in Rwanda remotely? 

It's a very tricky thing to pull off to have them included. They don't pay tuition and they don't get credit for the class. So what they do is they get a certificate for being a participant in the program held by the Columbia Climate School. The course was made available for application at Columbia and by application in Rwanda. At Columbia, we had 10 spots and 34 applicants. In Rwanda, I had 492 applications, also for 10 spots. We add the admitted students to our coursework site. They participate each week by doing the assigned reading. We have a shared discussion board, and the students interact that way. 

What are some examples of the projects you guys have done?

Two years ago, we did two projects. One was an e-waste recycling project with a local company called Enviroserve in Kigali that was working to recycle computers and other electronic waste, and the project that my students worked on was bringing e-waste recycling to higher education campuses in the city. The other project we did last year was an improved cook stoves project, working with a local community that was struggling to find markets for their product. In each project, we have a local partner. 

What got you interested in Rwanda specifically?

I did my graduate dissertation research in Ethiopia. One of my friends in grad school did her work in Kenya. And so I was able to do some traveling around, and just was always really fascinated in a part of the world that to me seems presented in the media and in the West [as] this sort of hard luck case. And I was always wondering what the real story was. It's so different from the US in every way, and it's uncomfortable, and I love that. 

Going back to your work with wildfires, was there anything surprising with the LA wildfires or was it something that you could see happening if you were studying them?

They started as wildfires, but they very quickly became urban fires, and that's new. So when I started working on this, it was a forestry challenge, and now in the case of LA, it's an urban challenge. So the intensity of the fires, the scale and the scope of these fires, and the time of year of these fires, is completely different than it was 10 to 20 years ago.So we have to kind of rethink the flow of resources to some of these communities. We definitely have to rethink how these communities are insured, and what the insurance looks like long term.

How did these wildfires happen?

The most common source of home loss is embers from the neighboring home. So it's embers, it's not the trees, but the trees are always going to burn. These are fire-dependent ecosystems. Forests across the West need fire. We can't eliminate fire. Burning trees is one thing, burning homes is much more toxic. Now we've got lead pipes that are burning, and you've got siding that's melting and that's releasing all of these toxins into the air. I know there's a lot of conversation now in LA about recovering and rebuilding, and the first thing they have to do is come and do debris removal. That initial task is so daunting. So the expertise on wildfires and the expertise on structure fires [need to be integrated]. 

Could you talk about the integration of political science/international relations and climate change, and how not a lot of courses integrate both of those, and the importance of studying the interconnection? 

I think it's critical. We have some classes that touch on it, including mine. I think it's really hard to understand how 195 sovereign states think they're going to tackle climate change without placing it in the context of geopolitics and understanding everything else that these countries are confronting and dealing with, and how they interact with each other, and what institutions are in place for that, and how they make trade-off decisions and priorities. We talked in class about realism and idealism, and countries have these sort of different world views. Climate, of course, fits right in there, and increasingly is understood as a national security issue. 

What originally drew you to caring about the environment, and how long have you been in this space?

I was born in NYC and raised in the suburbs, so I didn't know that much about the outdoors or the environment. And in college, I went on some hikes, and I went on some backpacking trips, and I loved it. So after college, I moved out West, to Colorado, and I lived in a ski town at 9000 feet elevation in the mountains, and I started spending 365 days a year outdoors. And I was completely smitten with it. I was working as a ski instructor in the winter, as a backcountry guide in the summer, and I was completely immersed in living in this way. Back then, the threats were so different than what they are now. We were really worried about deforestation and timber companies, which is almost a non-existent threat right now to the American West. So I got really interested in the policies of that. That's one chapter of the story. And then I had this sort of epiphany moment. I went to visit my best friend from college in Washington, DC. I was completely fascinated by the work she was doing [in the Clinton White House] and I feel like those are the seeds of environmental policy. I ended up going back to grad school and studying that. 

What made you choose academia?

Although I worked in the environmental advocacy space. I was never really an activist. Doesn't suit me. I liked thinking about it from more sides. I felt like the advocates were very single-minded, and that's kind of their job is to fight for something. And I always was the one at the meetings [saying,] “Well, yeah, but can't you see it from the other point of view?” I really wanted to be doing policy work, so I ended up working in state government, and I loved it. I would meet with my former colleagues from the environmental community, but I also met with the oil and gas industry, hunters, fishermen, and sportsmen who cared about the land, and I got to really have a much broader, more real sense of perspective on a given issue that I wasn’t getting just in the advocacy organization. But, in the end, I love academia, and I love working with young people. So eventually, I left policy work to come back to higher ed.

What scares you the most about the climate crisis?

I never call it a crisis! But I completely respect and understand that a lot of people do, in climate school. And the reason why I'm really not willing to think of it as a crisis is because I think a crisis demands short term, panicked action. There's a resolution on the other end of the crisis, and we should panic, but only for a short time, because the crisis will end. That's not what we're looking at with climate change. This is a long term, forever societal transformation. I don't think it's a crisis in that sense, and I personally can't live in a crisis for the rest of my life. So many of our students are beset with climate anxiety and fear and worry because we keep telling them it's a crisis and yet we're like, but there's not much we can do because it's so big. I don't think that's productive. I am determined to turn down the volume a little bit. So instead of talking about it as a crisis, I think about it as a set of opportunities and challenges that we face, and be more methodological and systematic about how we tackle that. That's the only way I know how to live my life. I'm not here, like, “oh my god, the seas are going to rise.” I think about it as a reorganization of civilization on the planet. When we set up [cities] on the coast, where there was access to ports, it made perfect sense. Now they're in a different climate. They're all at really high risk, and storm surge and flooding and rising seas, and a lot of them are moving inland, so that process is going to be ugly and it's going to be bumpy, and it's going to cause harm, but that's the history of planet Earth. If we somehow think we're entitled to constancy and peace and neverending abundance of resources, we're kidding ourselves. 

Is there a message you want people to come away with? 

I think one thing that I find troubling is that so many people who learn about climate change almost seem to conclude that they have no business being happy about anything. While this is happening, how can I possibly enjoy my life or go shopping again, or turn on lights without feeling guilty? And I hear people say these kinds of things like, “I went on vacation, but I feel so guilty,” and I wish they could shed that because I think we vastly overstate our own importance if we think that our choice as an individual going on vacation or buying a t-shirt makes us feel guilty. I’d like people to find a way to continue their work to channel their fear of concern into action, and allow themselves to laugh and smile in the meantime.

Lisa Dale's Columbia class in Kigali in 2023