By Jenna Brown

Amid a climate crisis—hurricane after hurricane in the Gulf Coast, flooding in the Sahara Desert, and bleaching coral reefs—Anna Farro Henderson’s Core Samples (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) attempts to redefine our interconnectedness with the Earth in its intimate writing style.

Published in late-2024, Core Samples follows Henderson’s experience as she balances motherhood, writing, work as a climate scientist, and her time as an environmental policy advisor to Minnesota Senator Al Franken and Governor Mark Dayton. Weaving together scientific findings, stories of misogyny in the science field, and anecdotes of foibles in governmental systems, Henderson creates a captivating memoir that screams at the top of its lungs, “carpe diem” (but also “fuck carpe diem”).

Henderson begins her narrative with a notebook, the “first tool” she obtained as a scientist. “While some people see art and science as opposites,” she writes, “for me, they are a braided river, each strand and flow an approach to wonder.” Climate change primarily has not been a main political concern, her writing implies, because of the inaccessibility of climate science literature (i.e. scholarly publications, journals, and studies). Through memoir, Henderson makes the climate crisis approachable, framing our interaction with the Earth’s systems as a relationship, an ongoing story.

Henderson grew up in Dharamshala, India, watching goats by Qinghai Lake, and enjoying local cuisine. While she was living there, an earthquake destroyed a community higher up the mountain, an example of the kind of natural disaster she details throughout. But it wasn’t until after high school, when she traveled to Italy to be an au pair, that she realized her interest in climate science. Hearing stories from victims of climate crises and friends who spoke of booming rivers, erupting volcanoes, and even winter suicides, Henderson writes, “It strikes me that if I want to understand my new friends, or people in general, I need to know the larger story of the land on which their lives play out.” What Henderson hits on again and again is our attachment to the Earth as that attachment plays out during actual climate crises. What makes this book different is that Henderson also includes climate-related stories about making out in parked cars. The climate crisis is not just a B-roll on the news; it is, this book shows, a part of our individual dramas.

Core Samples centers mostly on the informational, though. One of Henderson’s strengths, as seen in her NOR short story, “A Blueprint for Escape,” is scene-writing, and it’s certainly welcome when her writing veers into revery and personal essaying that helps us see how nature impacts us. What Core Samples achieves is that it shows us a way in which we can understand and process environmental fluctuation through personal detail and narrative.

In college, Henderson studied geology, and as a requisite for graduation, she attended a field camp in Juneau, Alaska, where she and others hiked and skied to sites to measure the movement of glaciers. She and her peers struggled to keep moving in the cold weather, and a few fell due to exhaustion, hypothermia, or dehydration. Throughout her book, Henderson recounts many moments where she overexerts herself in this way, and that effort becomes a central theme: “I tell myself that I don’t care what happens to my body after I die [. . .] I might fall, break my leg, crash through a crevasse. But I give myself to the mountain, skiing, falling, saying, Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.” This ecstasy isn’t the sort of writing we usually associate with climate change, but the spirit showcased here seems like an antidote to climate dread.

In graduate school at the University of Minnesota, Henderson spent her Ph.D years extracting sediment cores from lakes in Minneapolis, Maine, Ghana, Colorado, and New Mexico, analyzing the layering of sand, clay, silt, and other materials to determine how the climate has changed over time, and how it will change in the future as a result of global warming. During an extraction in North Park, Colorado, lightning strikes nearby; she and her adviser are the highest things above tree line. Yet still, they continue. Her daring labor, from Juneau to Colorado, raises the question: might climate activism require from all of us this kind of recklessness, risk, passion? This book succeeds in showing us that spirit.

After her Ph.D, Henderson began working under Senator Al Franken as an environmental policy advisor, while also being six months pregnant. Balancing motherhood and work was not easy. The lactation room of the senate was her sanctuary, where she could slow down from the rapid-fire conferences and meetings. And even after so much work, the bills she and others fought for did not pass: “Having power does not translate to feeling powerful. As I take my place at the head of conference tables and on stages, I can’t shake the feeling of being a kid in the front row of class waving my hand in the air.” She continues, “But isn’t that what makes a leader? [. . .] Enthusiasm and willingness to play the fool?” Once again, the book suggests that we might need to continue our work—be it artistic or parental or environmental—against long odds. Carpe diem, while processing the futility as well.

In 2014, though, Henderson moved back to Minnesota with her family to work under Governor Mark Dayton as a project manager for climate policies, data, and events. Henderson led the governor’s campaign for clean water, which earned Dayton the name “Water Czar.” It is inspiring to see this kind of success in a book that details quite a bit of stonewalling.

Core Samples also investigates social trends in climate politics. The mainstream movement, she writes, has been generally comprised of white men from urban areas. Henderson acknowledges her privilege in the climate conversation: “I get the light to shine on some white women (like me). But most of the table still sits in shadow. I see how the dominant narrative of experts and leadership writes a lot of people out of the story.”

When thinking over all the material in Core Samples, what keeps sticking out to me are the small moments: Henderson’s classmate, Samantha, unable to move in the Alaskan snow as Henderson speaks of God and Faith to ease her mind. Henderson’s Ph.D advisor, Bryan, finishing up the last of his Nutella; or of the hidden silica bronze mice in Smithsonian exhibits; or the painted mouse on the third floor of the Minnesota Capitol building. I think of Henderson atop the capitol roof, looking out at all the streetlamps and car lights glittering, “the air outside so fresh I could eat it by the handful.” I think of her leaving the job, as the “umbilical cord” tug towards political activism snaps. I think of these instances because of her ability to link small moments to the nebulous and worldwide and sometimes unapproachable climate crisis.

In putting names and faces to solastalgia and climate dread, she stamps all our faces on the shifting terrain.

But most of all, I think of terroir: what ties us down to the Earth we walk upon it, how it changes us and how we change it. “Science in our lives is part of larger narratives,” Henderson writes. “And what we believe in are our stories, not science. We live by our stories.”

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Jenna Brown is a NOR intern studying English and classical civilizations at Ohio University.