In this episode, I describe my childhood fascination with nature, reflect on how I ended up working in nature and climate, and explain my spiritual motivations for striving to regenerate the Earth.
David Valerio: This piece is about why I do what I do, my personal history with nature, and how I got to where I am now.
I'm originally from Houston, Texas, which is located in the most biodiverse region of the United States. The city is situated at the boundary of the eastern piney woods, southern Great Plains, and Texas coastal grassland ecosystems—all of which contribute to natural diversity and abundance. We're also at the intersection of many North American bird migratory flyways.
Houston is a heavily urbanized city that is full of concrete. The city is situated on top of 22 bayous that thread their way to the Gulf Coast. Buffalo Bayou is the main bayou in the town, and was the city’s key waterway as it established itself as a trade center in the mid-1800s. As the city expanded into what it is today, we ended up concretizing these bayous and destroying the beautiful natural resources that God gifted this place with. It was an interesting place to grow up, and come to love nature in. When most people think about Houston, they don't think about nature at all. If they think about the city at all, they might envision highways, oil and gas, and cowboy hats. Yet, there is a lot of nature there.
The key experience that shaped my love for nature as I grew up was going to summer camps at this place called the Houston Arboretum. It is a nature center located within Memorial Park near the center of Houston, which is city’s largest park by far. It’s kind of Houston’s version of Central Park. The Arboretum has a wonderful, un-channelized part of Buffalo Bayou that runs right through it, as well as a lot of woods. It has a lot of different ecosystems there, right in the heart of the city. Environmental educators would take us around the park and teach us about the various kinds of plants and animals that called it home. It's a place that is always very centering for me to be in, and was where I was able to experience the natural world in an otherwise very urban environment. I've always just been astounded by the many different types of living creatures that call this planet home, and the diversity of living experience that they manifest.
My Dad would often take my brother and I to the beach. Galveston is a town about an hour away from Houston, right on the coast. He would come by and pick us up early from school so that we could go to the beach and hang out—be on the sand, see the water, watch the creatures. Those were really beautiful times for me.
Hurricanes have dramatically shaped my view of the natural world. They are a mystical, mysterious, and overall wacky phenomenon. Every year you wait from June to November, wondering if a giant storm is going to strike and shut off life as you know it for a while. A number of big hurricanes hit as I was growing up. Hurricane Katrina was the largest one, and hit in 2005 when I was about eight years old. I have some family in New Orleans who came and stayed with us after that. Hurricane Ike hit Houston in 2008. Hurricanes are a running thread through my life that highlight the power of the natural world in a dramatic manner. They are the starkest examples of how humanity cannot completely dominate nature, although we have done a lot to constrain, channel, and control it.
I've got some family in Phoenix that we would go out to visit fairly often. Phoenix is the gateway to the great American Southwest. We road tripped all the way up California, and hit up Nevada, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado on the way. I loved the amazing desertscapes, and found them attractive because of their ascetic nature. Their starkness, the glory of the mountains, the beauty of the rocks. Being out there was a very embodied experience that attracted to the world beyond man.
When I was in high school I learned that I was really good at chemistry. My AP Chemistry teacher pushed to work hard at it. I loved tracking the flow of molecules and learning how they shape all of visible reality. I also took a class in environmental science that I was excellent at, which served as my introduction to plate tectonics and Earth system science.
I ended up going to Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, originally to study chemical engineering. Houston is a big oil and gas town and the way to make money there is to be in the industry. If I had studied what I wanted to at that time, it would have been history and economics. My Dad shut that down, for good reason, by recommending that I do something that could potentially make me money I knew that I did not want to be a lawyer, so…
I ended up trying to pursue chemical engineering, and got very annoyed with it. I do not have the engineering mindset. My girlfriend at the time’s father was an Exxon geologist, and he recommended that I take a class in geology. I took it, and it blew my mind. I fell in love with it instantly. I was a huge lover of human history, and when I discovered geology I found cosmic history—an even more amazing history that human history is just a small part of. The story of the creation of the universe, the formation of the planets, life springing forth. It was amazing.
I ended up studying geology at Texas A&M, and was able to conduct a lot of field work during it. I attended geology field camp during the summer after my junior year. We hiked, camped, and mapped various sites in southeastern Utah and southwestern Montana for six weeks. It was one of the best experiences of my life. Seeing the exposed rock formations, imbibing those mountains. I analyzed them from a scientific and aesthetic perspective at the same time, which was interesting.
I also I got into climate science through studying ancient climates when I was at A&M. There is an organization called the International Ocean Discovery Program that runs a modified oil drilling ship that goes around the world's oceans collecting sediment cores from the seafloor, and sends them back to laboratories around the world for scientific analysis. The core repository for the entire Pacific Ocean—essentially a giant freezer containing all the samples ever taken out there—was for some reason at Texas A&M University. I still don't know the exact history of how that happened. I ended up studying the ancient climate of the western equatorial Pacific during the middle Miocene, which was about 10 million years ago. I used elemental proxies for things like altitude, temperature, and weathering rates to reconstruct the region’s ancient climate.
I originally studied geology thinking that I would start working in oil and gas immediately afterwards, but I caught the research bug and fell in love with biogeochemistry—the study of how life cycles different elements through the Earth system. I decided to pursue a PhD in chemical oceanography at Rice University down in Houston. My initial focus was on using fancy new isotopic tracers of oxygen in seawater to the study how phytoplankton and cyanobacteria contribute to surface ocean carbon cycling. I also studied the nitrogen cycle by conducting isotopic analyses of nitrogen in seawater from Baffin Bay in Canada to understand how much denitrification went on in the water column there.
COVID hit when I was in my second year, and it was a bad time to be a laboratory scientist. I ended up deciding to master out of my program. Long story, but academia is rough for a lot of people and it was rough for me. I was not fulfilled by it. I pivoted into computational modeling and I ended up turning that work into my master's thesis. I didn't know what I was going to do after I graduated. I knew that I wanted to work for nature. I had gone into the PhD program thinking that I would found a startup at some point, using isotopic tracers to study the environmental impacts of deep seabed mining.
Luckily I ended up taking a class with Jim Blackburn—the greatest environmental lawyer in Texas history and someone that I admire a lot—and he was starting up a new carbon credit registry called BCarbon. It was trying to compete against established registries like Verra, Climate Action Reserve, American Carbon Registry, and Gold Standard. I interned with them before I mastered out, and ended up turning that into a full time gig. I became the first full-time employee at the organization, which is exactly what I wanted to do. Work for a startup that was working for nature.
I was really thrilled by the idea of using carbon credits as a revenue source to scale rewilding projects on land and at sea. Bringing bison back to the Great Plains and getting paid for the higher carbon sequestration rates on those rangelands. Making the argument that whale poop stimulated phytoplankton growth in the surface ocean, and whale falls sequestering carbon dioxide in the deep ocean. I saw it as a really convenient vehicle for the broader mission that I was really inspired by—to bring more nature into the world so that humanity can love it.
I wrote methodologies for certifying credits generated through soil, forest, and blue carbon ecosystems. I gained a lot of technical skills, but I also got a lot better at talking to people. The organization evolved out of a large stakeholder group that we continued to facilitate after BCarbon became a non-profit. I hadn’t really practiced facilitating conversations or translating complex topics into real-world speak before then. I learned a ton from that experience.
I was there for about a year and a half and I ended up leaving for various reasons. The most immediate one was that I had gotten married to my wife Alma, who was pregnant with our first daughter Maya, and I needed health insurance. I ended up moving to a company called Validere. They help oil and gas operators—companies like Shell, BP, and Exxon—quantify their greenhouse gas emissions for regulatory reporting purposes. I was brought on to help them do some work modifying their MRV system to be appropriate for agricultural carbon markets, because they had closed a few clients who had received USDA Climate Smart Commodity Grants.
Throughout this time I became increasingly cynical about carbon markets. I saw so many examples of lies about the actual climate impact of projects. I’m currently at a company called Renoster. We’re a carbon credit rating agency focused on nature-based solutions that help carbon credit buyers figure out which forest carbon projects are good, and which ones are bad.
Around the time I left grad school and began embarking on my career, I became devout Catholic. My grandmother was Catholic and I was baptized Catholic, but my family left the Church when I was young—around two or three. We bounced around various Protestant churches and ended up stopping going to church in middle school altogether as my parents’ marriage was not going great.
I got dumped by that girlfriend I mentioned earlier when I was in my sophomore year of college. I had thought I was going to marry her and had put a lot of transcendent value into that relationship. I was broken after that. It was really bad. That got me to start seeking a source of meaning that was not another person. I got into Buddhism and Taoism, and joined a Buddhist community when I was at Texas A&M. I got a lot of value out of meditation.
After coming back to Houston to do my PhD, I was back around my Grandmother. She was the closest person to me in my life. I decided to take her to Mass every week, mostly because I loved her. I didn't know what I thought about Catholicism. But after going weekly—observing and participating in the ritual—I thought that there was something there. Catholicism has been around for a long time, and I thought that I should investigate it seriously.
I learned more about it, and practiced. After a while it blew my mind. I had been seeking a moral code. After battling anxiety and depression throughout my life, I was seeking something that would make me happy. As I got deeper into Catholicism, I thought that it was a really powerful faith. I'm now an Eastern Catholic. We're Orthodox by tradition—so our icons, incense, hymnography etc. are Slavic. I was attracted to Eastern Christianity because I found that it addressed the deep mystical, spiritual side of myself.
I had this love for the natural world, but there wasn’t a reason for my love. It wasn’t metaphysically grounded. Why did I care about nature? I just felt good to be in it. It was beautiful. As my faith as deepened, my view of why I do my work has shifted a lot. It has gone from being rooted in an appreciation of nature in and of itself, to now being informed by my relationship with God.
God created the world out of nothing. He made it and called it very good. He gave humanity a special place within the Creation, to steward it and serve it’s priest. Offering it all up to God for his greater glory. Now my striving for planetary regeneration—or whatever term you want to apply to a wilder future where man and nature commune— it is coming from a deeper place of my own relationship with the God who created everything.
As I've dug into my own why for caring about nature more, it has directly impacted how I think about the problems that I'm trying to solve and the questions that I'm seeking answers to. I think it would be good for everyone who works for nature to think more about these questions. Whether or not you agree with my Christian worldview, having a why and rigorously thinking about it is an extremely important thing to do.
