In this episode of Discern Earth, 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. I edited the transcript below for readability, so it is not exactly the same text as the audio version.
Transcript
Howdy. My name is David Valerio and this is Discern Earth, a podcast where I ask people who work in nature and climate about why they do what they do. Today is a very special episode in that it's a monologue, and I'm going to be speaking about why I do what I do, my own personal history and love for nature, and how I got to the place where I'm at.
So, to start off with, where am I from? I'm originally from Houston, Texas, the most biodiverse part of the United States, if you can believe that. We're at the boundary of the eastern Piney Woods, the beginning of the Great Plains, and then also our great Texas coastal grasslands.1 The city is situated on a tremendous area full of natural diversity and abundance. We're on the intersection of many American bird flyways.2 The three main ones all go through Houston. Even the one that goes across the Gulf of Mexico, as well as the land-based ones going through Mexico and up into Canada. They all cross Houston. So, I happened to be born in a place that’s got amazing nature.
That being said, Houston is a very urbanized city. A lot of concrete everywhere. We have these amazing bayous that the city was created on top of. Buffalo Bayou is the main bayou in the town.3 That was our main waterway, and what made us a trade center in the early days of the city in the early to mid 1800s. But as the city expanded, we concretized these bayous and have taken away this beautiful natural resource that we have. So it was an interesting place to grow up and to appreciate and love nature, because when most people think about Houston, they don't really think about nature at all. They think about highways, oil and gas (maybe.) If people think about Houston at all, they don't really think about nature, but there's a lot of it there.
The key experience for me growing up was going to summer camps as a kid at this place called the Houston Arboretum.4 This was a nature center located pretty centrally in Houston, within a broader park called Memorial Park. It's the largest park in the city by far. It was formerly an army training base during World War I that ended up being turned into a city park.5 It's kind of like Houston’s Central Park. It's got a wonderful, un-channelized part of Buffalo Bayou running through it. It also has a lot of woods. It's got a lot of different ecosystems there, right in the heart of the city, and the Arboretum is the epicenter of that nature. During the summers, I would go to do youth camps there where they would take us around the Arboretum and teach us about the various plants and animals that called this place home. It's been a place for me that's very centering, and it's where I was able to experience the natural world in an otherwise very urban environment.
I was also really big into National Geographic Kids magazines as well as TV channels like Discovery Channel, History Channel (back when it was any good.) A lot of the media that I consumed informed my own love of nature. I've always been just astounded by the many different types of living creatures that call this planet home and the diversity of experiences that they bring.
Another thing that we would do as a family is my Dad would often take us to Galveston Beach. Galveston's a town about an hour away from Houston, right on the coast. I remember after school on some days, my Dad would come and pick us up early. We would go to the beach and hang out — be on the sand, see the water, see all the creatures. That was a really beautiful thing for me.
Another key thing that's really shaped how I view the natural world is the phenomenon of hurricanes. Hurricanes are a very mystical, mysterious, really wacky phenomenon that — you wait, June through November, every year —you're wondering whether a giant storm is going to come and shut off life as you know it for a long time. A number of big hurricanes happened as I was growing up. Hurricane Katrina being the largest and most obvious one. I have some family in New Orleans who came and stayed with us after that. That was 2005, so I was about eight years old at that point. Hurricane Ike hit in 2008, that hit Houston. I'm going to blank on the other ones, but hurricanes are a running thread through my life, and they really show the power of the world outside of human control in such a stark, dramatic manner. They’re the truest examples of how humanity, although we have done a lot to constrain, channel and control the wild, show that there are some that we just can't, and hurricanes are certainly one of them. They're really wild things.
I've got some family in Phoenix, so we'd go out to visit them. Phoenix is the entryway to the great American Southwest. We did a road trip all the way up California, went through Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Colorado — all these wonderful, amazing desertscapes that I found very attractive because of their asceticism, how stark they were, the mountains, the beauty of the rocks. Those were very embodied experiences that made me attracted to the world outside of man, although I'd say my intellectual interests at that point were more in human history and politics, which was terrible.
Another thing that I found in high school was that I was really good at chemistry. I had a teacher, my AP chemistry teacher, whose class I thrived in. I loved tracking changes in substances and learning about how they affect all parts of what we do. I also took a class in environmental science that I was excellent at. That was my entryway into things like plate tectonics and Earth system science.
In terms of my professional career, and how I ended up working in nature as a real job, I ended up going to Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. I originally was going to study chemical engineering, because Houston, as I mentioned earlier, is a big oil and gas town. If I had studied what I wanted to at that time it would have been history and economics, but my Dad put the shutdown on that for good reason — saying I should do something that could potentially make me money — and I did not want to be a lawyer. So I ended up trying to pursue chemical engineering, and for various reasons I got very annoyed with engineering. That's just not my kind of brain. The girlfriend I was dating at the time, her father was an Exxon geologist, and he recommended that I take a class in geology. I saw him getting paid a lot of money. So I took my first physical geology class and it blew my mind. I fell in love with it instantly. I was, and am, a huge lover of human history, and when I discovered geology, I thought, oh wow, there's a much bigger, even more amazing history that human history is just a component of, and that's cosmic history. 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. Did a lot of field work. As part of my degree we had to do a geology field camp during the summer where we would go out and map various geological formations in the American West. I ended up taking the version of it that allowed me to go out hiking, camping, and mapping for six weeks with 20 other students, and that was one of the best experiences of my life. We were in southeastern Utah and southwestern Montana, and that was just amazing. Seeing the exposed rocks, seeing these mountains — being able to see them from a scientific perspective, but also seeing their pure beauty and aesthetics was a tremendous experience.
Another thing that happened while I was at A&M is that I got into climate science through studying ancient climates, actually. There's an organization called the International Ocean Discovery Program that operates a modified oil drilling ship which goes around the world's oceans collecting sediment cores, and sends them back to laboratories around the world for scientific analysis. The core repository, essentially a giant freezer for all the samples ever taken in the Pacific Ocean, was for some reason at Texas A&M University. I still don't know the exact history of how that happened, but I ended up doing a lot of chemical analyses of some of these sediment cores. In particular, I was studying the ancient climate of the western equatorial Pacific, around Indonesia, during the middle Miocene, which was about 10 million years ago. I was using various elemental proxies for things like temperature and altitude to reconstruct these climates.
Originally I had taken the geology degree thinking that I would start working for oil and gas immediately, but I caught the research bug and I fell in love with biogeochemistry — studying how various elements move through the Earth system as a result of life interacting with the abiotic environment around it. So, instead of going into industry directly, I decided to start pursuing a PhD in chemical oceanography at Rice University down in Houston. I was originally gonna do my PhD, again very lab science focused, applying fancy new isotopic tracers to study oxygen in seawater as a proxy for the surface carbon cycle. So studying how algae, phytoplankton — all the little trees of the sea, if you will — how they're sequestering carbon, creating oxygen, stuff like that. I also studied the nitrogen cycle, conducted a number of analyses of nitrogen in seawater from Baffin Bay in Canada looking at quantities of denitrification 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. It was rough for me. Personally, I was not finding a lot of fulfillment in it. So I pivoted into computational modeling and I ended up making that into my master's thesis, but I didn't really know what I was going to do. I knew I wanted to work in nature. I'd had this startup bug through the internet, honestly, and so I'd even gone into the PhD program thinking I was going to do a startup at some point, using these fancy isotopic tracers to study the environmental impacts of seabed mining.
By coincidence, a professor of mine at Rice, Jim Blackburn, a great environmental lawyer and someone I admire a lot, I took a class with him and he was starting up a new carbon credit registry at that same time called BCarbon.6 It was trying to compete against the established registries such as Verra, CAR, ACR, and Gold Standard. I interned with them before I mastered out, and then ended up turning that into a full time gig. And so I became the first of two full-time employees at this startup, which is exactly what I wanted to do. Being in a startup working on nature. I was really thrilled by the idea of using carbon as a revenue source to scale the rewilding of the land and sea, bringing back bison to the Great Plains, getting paid for the increased carbon sequestration capacity of those rangelands. For the ocean, somehow making the argument about whale poop stimulating phytoplankton growth in the surface ocean, and then whales dying and going down and sequestering carbon. I saw it as a really convenient vehicle for the broader mission that I was really inspired by, and that I'm still inspired by, to bring more nature into the world so that humanity can interact with and love it. I was writing 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 because the organization evolved out of a large stakeholder group that we were still running after it became a nonprofit. Before that, I had not really practiced facilitating conversations or translating complex topics into real-world speak.
I was there about a year and a half and I ended up leaving for various reasons. The most immediate, pragmatic reason is that I'd gotten married. I’m married to my wife Alma, and she was pregnant with our first daughter Maya, who's now one year old, and I needed health insurance. So I ended up moving to a company called Validere. They help oil and gas operators — companies like Shell, BP, Exxon, the main guys you hear about — quantify their greenhouse gas emissions for regulatory reporting purposes. I was brought on to help them do some work modifying their MRV approach to be appropriate for agricultural carbon markets, because they had gotten a number of clients who received USDA Climate Smart Commodity Grants.7
Overall, throughout this time I got very cynical about carbon markets. I saw so many examples of, frankly, lies about projects and their actual climate impact. I got laid off. I'm now where I am now, which is a company called Renoster. We're a carbon credit rating agency focused on nature-based solutions trying to help people who are buying carbon credits determine what forest carbon projects are good and which ones are bad.
I haven't talked about the spiritual element in all this, but towards my time leaving grad school and then embarking on my career, I became a very devout Catholic. My grandmother was Catholic, I was baptized Catholic, but my family left the Church when I was young — around two or three. We bounced around various Protestant denominations, ended up stopping going to church in middle school as my parents’ marriage was not going great. In college, that girlfriend I had mentioned whose father was a geologist, broke up with me. I thought I was going to get married to her and put all this transcendent value into that relationship. I was broken after that, it was really bad. That really kickstarted me on my spiritual journey of saying I need to find a source of meaning that is not another person or another thing. I got into Buddhism and Taoism. I joined a Buddhist sangha when I was at Texas A&M. Got a lot of value out of meditation and read various Taoist texts, which was good.
After coming back to Rice to do my PhD, I was back around my Grandmother who lived in Houston. She was the closest person to me in my life. I decided to take her to Mass every week, mostly because I love my Grandma. I didn't know what I thought about the Catholic stuff. But after going and taking her, observing and participating in the ritual, I was thought that there was something there. Catholicism has been around for a long time, and I thought I should investigate it. As I learned more about it and went and practiced, it blew my mind. I'd been seeking a moral code. I'd battled anxiety and depression throughout my life. What would make me happy? As I got deeper into Catholicism, I thought, whoa, this is something that's really, really powerful. I'm now an Eastern Catholic.8 We're Orthodox by tradition, so our icons, incense, and hymnography are Slavic. I was attracted to this Eastern approach to Christianity, which I hadn't known about before and found that it addressed the deep mystical, spiritual side of myself.
I'd had this understanding and love of the natural world, but it wasn't grounded in any spiritual explanation for what the value of it all was. Why did I care about it? I just felt good. It was beautiful. And that’s a great thing. But with this emergent Eastern Catholic faith, my view of why I do my work has shifted from being one about liking nature in itself to now, I see the work that I do as being extremely informed by my relationship with God. Because God created the world out of nothing. He made it, and he called it good and very good. He put humanity in a special place within this broader Creation to steward it and serve as the priest of all Creation, offering it up to God for his greater glory. Now, in terms of seeking this broader regeneration, rewilding — whatever term you want to apply to a wilder future where humans and nature intersect — it's coming from this deep place of my own personal relationship with the God who created everything and who created all these beautiful things that I had seen and appreciated, without having that lens, but now I feel like it's whole.
I’ve found that as I've dug into my own why for caring about nature more, it's directly impacted how I think about the problems that I'm trying to solve. What are the questions that I'm seeking answers to? What are the potential business opportunities that I'm going after? I think it would be good for people like yourselves, who are in nature and climate or are interested in nature and climate, 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.
I just gave you my life story, using the lens of nature and my relationship with it. Future discussions on this podcast are going to be in the same vein, but where I'm exploring other people's lives and their own personal histories, and how the philosophical, the religious, the spiritual motivations for their work, whether they recognize it or not, inform what they do and how it could alter the kinds of things that they're doing going forward.
