(bright upbeat music) - Indy Burke was the highly respected director of the Haub School of Environmental Studies at the University of Wyoming.

Then in 2017, an offer she couldn't refuse, Dean of the Graduate School of the Environment at Yale.

Since then, the crucial studies and research she's directing there have maintained an unmistakable link to Wyoming because Dr. Ingrid Burke makes a point of it.

From the prairies of Wyoming to the Ivy League, I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

This is "Wyoming Chronicle".

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- [Steve] As Dean of Yale University's School of the Environment, Dr. Ingrid Burke occupies a very high seat in the field but she says academic grounding as both a student and teacher that she received in Wyoming wasn't just valuable, it was vital.

- I came to Wyoming because I wanted to be at a place that made a difference, brought science to solutions as we say actually at our school at Yale.

And the University of Wyoming is so special in that way because there's only one university in the state and every natural resource, problem practically on the planet exists here.

And there's fantastic scientists here and economists working on those problems.

And the knowledge that's created here really does lead to solutions for the Rocky Mountain West.

- [Steve] At Yale, whose school of the environment was ranked recently among the top five environmental studies programs on Earth, things weren't all that much different from Wyoming.

Only magnified - Yale was so attractive because the platform is the world and the planetary problems are so intense and the faculty at Yale are, I'm not gonna say they're better but they work on global scale problems, many do.

And many of the faculty, particularly in our school of the environment are deeply engaged in public service.

So right now, for instance, we have a faculty member in the White House bringing natural resource economics to national policy.

We have a faculty member in Geneva working with the World Trade Organization bringing an environmental lens to that.

We have a faculty member who was the lead author of an intergovernmental panel on climate change chapter this year.

We have three other faculty members who've served in the White House.

I guess my my point is, there is a real pathway to bring science to solutions through public service at the state, national, and international scale.

And our alumni at Yale serve as leaders all over the world.

- [Steve] With its famous name and worldwide reputation, Yale's Environmental Studies Program might seem to be superior to Wyoming's in every way.

A mistaken notion that Dr. Burke is quick to correct.

- There are many things about our school that are really special at Yale.

There are many things that are equally special about the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources.

- Interestingly, we were here in March for the ribbon cutting of the building we're in now, the big science initiative building.

Yeah and we talked to two people that I know you know and were colleagues of yours when you were at the University of Wyoming; Dr. Mark Leifer and Dr. Greg Brown.

And in talking to them, they mentioned this very same subject that is a big part of the UW tier one science initiative which was adding the public service component to it in a way that hadn't been a top priority before.

- Well, my job is basically to implement policy to make sure that this building, which is very complex and supports not just research but also education and service to the state, make sure that mission is achieved appropriately.

- Do I hear you echoing that?

What's the value of incorporating that into the what might be considered the so-called hard sciences?

- Well, I think it's easy to get focused on publishing peer reviewed papers and increasing your stature as a faculty member.

But most of us in the environmental sciences now are also driven by the urgency of the planetary challenges that exist.

And so we want to find a way to bring our scholarship towards solutions and solution possibilities.

So it's a matter of will but I also think universities are not widely viewed in a positive way right now in the United States.

And I think it's broader than that, that universities generally can be seen as being irrelevant to the problems of the day.

And I think it's crucial that we reinforce how important knowledge and leadership are for leading to a sustainable future.

- So does a little girl dream of being an environmental scientist one day, what sparked this particular energy in you?

- My parents were serious outdoors people and we spent every weekend outdoors and my mother was an advocational botanist and became a major conservation leader in Richmond.

She actually got a group of people together to fight an expressway that was going down the James River.

- Really, how'd that go?

- They won.

- They won.

- They were assisted by a major flood that made it clear it was a bad idea to start with.

But I always admired her and I always loved being outdoors.

I didn't have science in my head until later but I always knew that my passion was the outdoors.

- Well, we mentioned before we came on the air that you were one of the furthest things from science when you started college, right?

- That's right.

I was a creative writing major but I took every field course I could 'cause I loved to be outdoors and all my friends were that way.

And I took a field course in northern Vermont with a professor who had a ski out onto the lake when it was -40.

We auger through the ice and he said, "You know blue light gets through ice "and there's water down there and there's algae "and no one knows if they're photosynthesizing.

"Let's find out."

And it was like this spark got lit where I realized that science is a creative endeavor and it's few teachers that I have had but always those that I admired who introduced me to science as something that's creative.

- Someone in high academic position such as yours, there's lots of writing involved.

Has your writing background helped you there?

- Oh, absolutely.

There's nothing like bringing on a graduate student who went to a liberal arts college, by the way, because they can think and they can organize their ideas and they can write.

- From there you came thousands of miles west to Wyoming.

How'd that happen?

- That was serendipity.

That same professor had a friend who was at Dartmouth and he thought I should go work with him for my doctorate.

- And your undergrad was where again?

Where your current- - It was in Middlebury.

- Middlebury.

So I moved over to Dartmouth to work with a particular professor who was a well-known biogeochemist.

And I was only there a few months before he said, he was chair of the department there at Dartmouth.

He said, "I'm gonna move to Wyoming "and you can come with me."

He said, "They have a spectacular ecology program.

"And their botany department, it's world renowned "and I wanna move there and you can come too."

So it was total serendipity that brought me to Wyoming.

- Well, I love hearing that because people need to know I think that there's a need and a room and a presence of excellence everywhere including at the University of Wyoming.

I mean, you're living proof of it and you are seeing it even back then.

- Absolutely.

I began my doctoral work on sagebrush near Saratoga, Wyoming and I'm still working on sagebrush.

- Sagebrush is a more complicated plant than people realize, isn't it?

- Yeah.

- It's hard to transplant, it's hard to grow.

1/4 mile away, it won't grow the same way, it's fascinating and important.

- It is.

- You're dealing with concerns related to land management obviously, and similar things tied to water and wildlife and air quality.

There's always been a bit of attending controversy to some degree to those things.

And that's tied inevitably to these two political conflict but I think most people now would agree that these conflicts have certainly intensified or been sharpened or even hardened.

Does that affect your work now more than it used to?

Are you able to keep your eye more on the scientific ball so to speak and shut out some of the extraneous noise that accompanies all these issues now?

- I think the science isn't very complicated, communicating about the science can be a challenge.

I found that to be a challenge here in Wyoming- - You did?

- Absolutely.

Because of a perceived incompatibility as you noted between conservation and agriculture or conservation and energy production.

I think we have grown quite a bit over the recent decades to see the compatibility of working landscapes with conservation.

In fact, the biggest risk to our agricultural landscapes and forested landscapes is probably development right now in addition to climate change.

And that there are many great ways to conserve those systems and conserve the economic welfare of the communities that depend on them.

And that's all a part of conservation.

So finding ways to communicate about the environmental challenges that embrace the complexity of the issues, not just in terms of the chemistry or the biology but also in terms of the communities that depend on landscapes is important.

- You mentioned the challenges but also I know there are for example, duck hunters who might be at odds in some respects with conservation or environmental science in some ways.

But on the other hand, they are interested in conservation aspects of land management as well.

And there might be a place to find some common ground.

- And have done a great deal towards conservation in Wyoming and around the American West for sure as well as the rest of the United States.

- There's a concept that has sprung up in Wyoming and perhaps elsewhere as well, in our state, it's been called the working group where these groups of people have come together from competing interests for sure but away from the federal delisting or endangered species process and try to find a way to keep the government out of it which is a popular political position to take of course, in Wyoming, keep the government out.

And some people are finding that it means keeping it out from different directions and they're finding some success there.

Is that a focus at all of your interest or your work?

- This is what drew me to Wyoming, was the Ruckelshaus Institute.

- What is that?

- Which has a history of collaboratively bringing together people to solve contentious issues.

Started by Al Simpson and Bill Ruckelshaus back in the day with Mike Sullivan and John Turner in really important leadership roles.

- [Steve] Republicans and Democrats.

- Absolutely and they were very much my mentors when I first arrived here in 2008.

And we were able to secure an endowed chair at the Ruckelshaus Institute who's an expert in collaborative process.

Every student at the University of Wyoming's Haub School takes courses in collaboration.

And I think it's crucial for our future.

And I will say we don't have that strength at Yale.

We have negotiation courses but we don't have a program like Dr. Markos here.

And I think Wyoming is a real leader and Wyoming is full of case studies of successful work like that.

I hope it can continue even as contentious as things have become over the past several years.

- You earlier answered a question and used the term working landscape.

Well, what do you mean by working landscape and how's it been affecting you here recently?

Or how's your work affecting it?

- Well, I should say that most of the landscapes on planet Earth are working landscapes.

They're either producing food or other kinds of natural resources.

They're very few really wilderness areas left and local communities depend upon the natural resources that are produced from those landscapes.

That's what I mean.

In Wyoming it is primarily the ranchers and other eco-agriculturalists who are working the landscape.

Right now, my closest collaborator by the way is my husband, he's a dryland ecologist.

He was a professor with me at Colorado state then at University of Wyoming and now at Yale.

He's a preeminent dryland ecologist and he and I work on how climate change will affect the American West.

Some of the earth dry lands like the American West cover about 20% of the terrestrial surface.

So what we do here has relevance for a big chunk of earth.

And we're looking at how climate change, for instance, he has a doctoral student who's asking how will climate change in the the Pinedale area affect forage for livestock grazing over the next several decades?

Doing experiments on that and we're finding some interesting things, I'm not gonna tell you too much about, you can ask me again in a few years.

And I have a student who's working on understanding how carbon storage below ground will be affected by the changes in precipitation we think will happen with climate change.

- And these are Yale students?

- These are Yale students.

- And they're doing work in Wyoming.

- That's correct.

- So you're bringing them here, what role does Wyoming have generally in environmental science and conservation and this working landscape research?

- Wyoming is a perfect case study for many places of the world.

If you were to fly to Mongolia today and get out of the airplane, you would think you were in Wyoming.

If you were to fly to Patagonia, you would think you were in Wyoming.

There aren't as many fences in those places as there are here but the American West and Wyoming in particular looks a lot like the cold deserts of much of the rest of the world.

- What do your Yale students think when they arrive or have completed a course of a few weeks in the summertime, say in Wyoming?

Is it a good experience for them.

- Oh, they love it.

Yeah and in fact, my doctoral student last year had a high school student working with her from Pinedale.

They became very fast friends.

Bill's doctoral student also had a high school student from Pinedale who I think will be a star actually in environmental science at some point.

So they get to know the community.

They live there for many months and they love it.

- I would think it would be hard no matter where you are, whether it's the University of Wyoming or Yale or anywhere else in your field, not to be confronted all the time by the, what I guess I would call the currency of climate change, the talk about it, the arguing about it, the impact of it, the trying to predict the impact of it.

How is that perceived differently or is it in your position at Yale and your former position at UW?

- Very differently.

I was quite careful about my language in Wyoming talking about climate change.

There is no question that climate change is occurring or why it's occurring.

There is unfortunately a partisan divide about climate change and many groups have shown this.

It's not a question of values and partisanship, it is a question of science but it's really perceived as a political issue, which is risky.

And so communicating about climate change must be done very carefully and non-confrontationally using language that is not in any way condescending of someone else's values.

And one needed to be careful in Wyoming, I found.

And I am never careful talking about climate change in my current role at Yale.

I am very rarely asked by someone why I would talk about climate change when it isn't real at Yale.

And I think that divide is important to understand.

And I think we need to be training our scientist to be careful in terms of how we talk about our science so that it is normal plain speak and so that we're focusing on the things that matter much to people like drought, like water availability in the American West is a good thing to focus on.

- So that the divide itself can be part of your academic study.

Absolutely, academic research.

- Yeah, and science communication has always been important but right now when real scientific issues that will affect people dramatically all over the planet need to be understood by the lay person and the American voter, we need to be ever more careful in speaking about it in a way that is acceptable and understandable.

- Well, what would you say to a Wyoming PBS viewer who might be living in the dynamics of this divide?

- Make climate change a conversation around the dinner table, talk about climate change with your friends.

- Start with your own circle before clashing with a different one.

- Yeah and listen first, and discuss and listen and make it a topic of everyday conversation because it is the most important threat facing humanity today and we should be talking about it.

- Do you notice differences in the Wyoming climate from your early days here to now that are apparent in your work or just your observations?

- Well, I think the data show that there have been some changes.

For me, my first field season here, '83, '84, there was a massive snowstorm.

- I remember it well.

- And I remember along I-80, just all the dead antelope.

And I'm not spending my winters out here now.

I also remember walking to graduate school when temperatures were well below zero- - In the middle of the day.

- Yeah and walking from what we called the treat area where graduate students lived in basement apartments and walking through Laramie in very, very cold temperatures.

And I'm often out here in December and January and I haven't seen those sorts of temperatures.

- [Steve] I know you're involved in The Nature Conservancy as well.

What drew you to that and what's important about it to you?

- I was invited to be on the Nature Conservancy Board of Wyoming and I love it.

And there are several things about it that are important to me.

One is it's a connection back to Wyoming and it's a reason to come here and see close friends who care about the environment in Wyoming.

The other opportunity that I love is sitting around the table with individuals from very diverse perspectives.

The TNC board has people from energy and ranching and environmental groups with really diverse viewpoints and they're focused on solving the most important conservation issues in Wyoming.

And I love that.

It keeps me- - Yeah, an average person might think of the Nature Conservancy as Greenpeace.

It's very different from that and a lot of land that has been conserved under TNC as ranch land for example, and continues to be used as that, right?

- That's right, they're very practical in their mission to preserve working landscapes of Wyoming and a focus on water and a focus on climate change as well.

- You're also involved in an entity called the Conservation Fund which as I understand it integrates objectives dealing with both conservation, preservation and economic development.

And it's convenient, I would think, for some people to view those interests as conflicting and maybe even incompatible.

Do you see it that way?

- Oh, not at all.

And I should say the Conservation Fund is actually conserved more land than any other NGO in the United States.

They provide bridge funding for government entities who wanna conserve something, see it a as crucial landscape for wildlife habitat.

And the Conservation Fund makes it possible for many state, federal and private organizations to conserve land.

And their real focus is on working landscapes.

And right now, one of their focuses is on working forests.

And so they have an emphasis on sustainable management of working landscapes and helping communities be able to engage in providing jobs in the local area as well as conserving wildlife habitat and landscapes.

- So when we hear the term conservation, it doesn't mean locking it up so that no one can ever look at it, go on it, view it, it means so that it can continue to be used in productive ways so that we don't ever get to that extreme point.

- That's right.

- That's fair to say?

- That's right.

And one of my real heroes is John Turner who of course, served as director of the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service and he's up there in the Jackson area and as he says, "Conservation is a conservative ethic."

- [Steve] He was a Republican state legislator.

- And has done so much for conservation in Wyoming and beyond.

- In working in science, you told me today earlier, you were up to your elbows in soil sampling.

- That's right.

- Focusing and trying to find out vital information that will advance, satisfy your own interest and advance your study and advance the field.

And you can kinda lose track of where you are while looking at the sample or the slide.

Do you allow the aesthetic to creep into the scientific when you're doing your work in Wyoming still?

- Oh, the reason to work in Wyoming is not only because of scientific curiosity, it's because I love these landscapes.

And I can go for a walk, for instance with my husband, and talk about nothing but grasses and shrubs because that's our real passion is these landscapes and these plants and so on.

- And so in your case, it enhances the aesthetic experience, that knowledge that you have.

- Absolutely.

- [Steve] You intend to maintain your ties to Wyoming through your career?

- Absolutely, as long and as much as I can.

- I thank you for being with us today on "Wyoming Chronicle".

- Thanks so much for the opportunity.

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