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An interview with science writer Melissa L. Sevigny about Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon
In late June 1938, three small boats pushed off from the banks of Green River, Utah, with plans to run the raging Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, all the way to Lake Mead. In addition to Grape Nuts, a bottle of Four Roses whiskey, and the latest USGS survey maps tied up with a “lucky string,” the boats carried something rather unusual on board: women.
At the time that Elzada Clover and her assistant, Lois Jotter, set out to become the first botanists to catalog the Grand Canyon, rumors still swirled that prehistoric creatures might lurk in its labyrinthine side canyons. Only 12 non-native expeditions had made the trip down the Colorado River since John Wesley Powell’s inaugural 1869 trip, and almost all of those rafters were men (the only woman to have attempted the journey vanished without a trace, along with her husband).
Though Clover and Jotter had serious work ahead of them, the contemporary coverage focused almost exclusively on the fact that the pair were women. Clover and Jotter weren’t much better respected by the men accompanying them; in addition to their significant scientific duties, they served as cooks for the crew on the entire 43-day journey. Even in spite of the distractions, though, Clover and Jotter’s catalog of over 400 species, including four previously unknown cactus species, remains the botanical ur-text of the region: “There was simply no other comprehensive plant list [of the Grand Canyon] published prior to the closure of Glen Canyon Dam,” explains science writer Melissa L. Sevigny’s Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon, an excellent new book about the river expedition. “Anyone who wanted to understand how the vegetation had changed — because of dams, exotic species, or any of the other human and natural influences at work on ecosystems in the past half-century — had to refer to Clover and Jotter’s work.”
Sevigny aimed to do Clover and Jotter justice by restoring them to their rightful place in science — and remembered history. But her book is also a rollicking, keep-you-up-at-night adventure story, told in utterly enveloping and immediate prose. Happily, Sevigny is earning her accolades; the book has received a rare triple-crown of early starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist.
Brave the Wild River is out on May 23. Ahead of its publication, I had the chance to speak with Sevigny about Clover and Jotter, her writing process, and the continued uphill battle of women in the sciences today. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
It was the fact that they were female scientists that drew me in. I always wanted to be a scientist; I wanted to be a geologist when I was a kid. I stayed on that path for quite a while and then I became a writer. I feel myself drawn to those stories because I suspect they might have changed things for me if I had known more stories about women in science when I was on that path.
I was surprised that I had never heard of these two women before, Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter. I’ve lived in Arizona all my life. I thought I knew a lot about its history, and yet somehow their names had never come up. Something about that really compelled me and the more I looked, the more I realized I couldn’t find what I was looking for, which was the story of the botanical work that they did. If I wanted to know that story, I was going to have to write it myself.
I was lucky enough right from the start to have the diaries of both of these women. A diary is such an immersive document, you really do feel like you’re in their heads. They’re writing things down that maybe they wouldn’t say out loud to anyone. And so I got to know them first through their diaries, which were wonderfully descriptive, and through letters, which are another really intimate form of communication. They had friends and family that they were very close with and that they would write these letters to on the trip. Whenever they could stop and post a letter, they would do that.
But I also had to do some other things to get into their heads and one of them was raft the Grand Canyon myself. I was incredibly nervous. I’d never done a whitewater rafting trip before. But I knew I was going to need to do that.
I went with a botany crew; we were tasked with weeding out an invasive species of grass. I wanted to do that so I could get a sense of what it was like to actually have to work as a botanist on the river. It was a small group: We had three boats and six people, just like they did. Of course, a lot of things have changed since 1938 about river rafting, but it did feel like a very immersive experience. I remember at one point, turning around to watch the boat behind me come through a rapid and I thought, ‘Oh, there’s Lorin Bell.’ That is a character from 1938 in my book; it was not, in fact, Lorin Bell. Time, it feels different down at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. And sometimes I did forget that it wasn’t 1938.
I’m grateful to them for having the foresight to keep the materials because while they were alive, people often told them — or gave them the impression — that what they did wasn’t that important. And if they had listened to those people, they wouldn’t have kept these materials. The fact that they saved their diaries, they saved their letters, they saved the newspaper clippings, and they donated them to these archives shows a lot of foresight and a lot of courage. I couldn’t have written this book if they hadn’t felt that way.
I did keep my own diary. I made sure I wrote in it every night. I also had a waterproof river map with me and I made notes on it before the trip of things I wanted to make sure I looked at. Because there would be a moment in the diaries where they would say, like, “We looked up and we saw the Desert View watchtower.” That would be the whole description. And so I knew, okay, stop and look up here so that you can describe what they were seeing.
When I got home, I typed up little bits of description out of my diary and I printed them out and I cut them up with scissors and then I actually would tape them into my draft and work at integrating them in.
That’s a direct quote from something that Lois Jotter said. I found out pretty quickly that both these women wanted to be remembered as botanists and they struggled because people wanted to talk about them as if they were the first women to succeed at rafting the Grand Canyon. Elzada Clover actually pushed back against that for a very specific reason: She would refer to herself as the first non-native woman to raft the Grand Canyon. She knew that the region had a long Indigenous history — Navajo and Hopi both have stories of running this river long before a white person came along and did it. Elzada knew that and so that was one reason she pushed back against that label.
But the second reason was that she did want to be remembered as a scientist, as a botanist, and I don’t think that really happened for her during her lifetime. But it’s difficult to center a story on science when the fact that they were women shaped so much of their experience. When I first dove into writing this book, I wanted to stay on the science and I really thought the sexism that they experienced would be a smaller thread — I thought it would be there, but I didn’t want it to center it. But as I was writing, it was impossible to ignore all of the obstacles they faced because they were women, so I hope I managed to strike the right balance and do justice to their story. It was a frustration for them when they were alive and it was a difficulty for me when I was writing, like “How can we tell this as a science story when they’re constantly being told that they shouldn’t be scientists?”
I think that’s absolutely right. And I’m glad you said you were shocked by that because I was fairly shocked too, and then I was embarrassed for being shocked. I expected going into it — this is embarrassing to admit — I really expected the sexism would almost be kind of funny, you know, it would be like, “Look at how those people acted in the 1930s!” And it is funny, but it’s a much darker humor than I expected because women are still facing all of these things today.
Maybe not to the same degree — it might be a little more hidden or subtle now — but all of the same things that [Clover and Jotter] experienced: struggle getting a job, struggle getting a promotion, struggle to be taken seriously, to have a seat at the table. Smaller things too, like people fixating on their physical appearance, telling them to smile. All of those things still happen to women today. I wasn’t expecting to write as much about that going into this book as I did, but I knew I had to because it was a very real part of their story and an extremely relevant part of their story.
It’s become only more relevant as time goes on. Clover and Jotter were the only people to make a formal plant list published in a Western scientific journal before Glen Canyon Dam went up. Today, there’s been a shift in thinking about the Colorado River. In their era, it was a given that people were going to build dams and they were going to harness this river. But today, a lot of people want to figure out how we can undo some of that damage, how we can protect the rivers, cultural values, and environmental values. And in that discussion, it’s hard to know how to do that if you don’t know what the river used to look like.
Clover and Jotter’s plant lists are just one part of that story. There’s also Indigenous wisdom about the plants along the river. There are other pre-dam records, but together it creates a picture of how this place used to look. Not saying that we can make it look like that again, but it gives us a way to pin our baselines in place so as we move forward, we can understand what kind of processes we need to restore this river. How do we want to protect it?
Yeah, so many things. Gosh. I was lucky to be able to track down some of their relatives and some of their former students and had really wonderful interviews with them. But there’s always questions, like, did you get it quite right?
There’s a key moment in the book where [Clover and Jotter] lose part of their plant collection and all I have are these little scraps and I don’t know exactly how that happened. Like, what were you planning? Who did you give that collection to, who was entrusted with it, and then what happened? I’d love to fill in those kinds of details.
I’d also like to ask them how they feel about how their botanical work has been used today. So many things changed from the 1930s to the present day and they lived through those changes, but because I don’t have as detailed records later in their life, I don’t know how they felt about what happened to the Colorado River, how they felt about how their work was used or ignored or misused over that time. I would just love to sit and talk with them about that. That’s one of many, many questions I would have.
This was a story about two ordinary women. I mean, I think they were remarkable, I wrote a whole book about them. But sometimes when we tell stories about science, we focus on the lone genius in the laboratory discovering a new element or breaking the laws of physics. Most science actually gets done in a much more incremental fashion. It’s about ordinary people who are passionate about some part of the natural world and they go out and they chase that curiosity and they move our knowledge forward. Just a little step. That’s what [Clover and Jotter] did and I think that’s how science works.
I started this conversation by saying that I wanted to be a scientist, right? I hope that young people or people of any age who are interested in science will see that it’s not something done by geniuses locked away in laboratories. Anybody can be a scientist.
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A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”