Scientist and environmental policy advisor Anna Farro Henderson’s new book is Core Samples: A Climate Scientist’s’ Experiments in Politics and Motherhood. But in the prologue, she advises readers that the book is not “an explanation of science concepts or a guide to political procedure.”
In a recent What We’re Reading interview Henderson described her book as “unprofessional writing about professional topics,” referring to the accessibility of the book. She explained, “One of my big concerns is that people will assume this is something that is going to be hard or boring or technical before they even open it.”
Her ability to make research and political advocacy accessible, to show the human connections, balancing family and career, and still finding a kind of poetry in science makes this book of essays unique and compelling.
Henderson declared herself a writer early, at the age of 10. With six siblings, she would frequently escape to her closet for quiet and to write. “I’d write on the floor of my closet, and I remember coming out and kind of announcing, ‘I'm a writer!’”
Her path would eventually lead to studying geology and climate science, where her writer’s sensibility helped her connect with the science recorded in the Earth’s history.
She explained, “These concepts of science always felt like they were helping me understand my life and that they could be metaphors for life. I think the poetry is there, where it's both I want to understand the world and I'm confused about who I am and what it is to be a human…It’s like they were in a dialogue with each other.”
Henderson’s interest in climate science brought her to Minnesota, where she studied the human time scale of climate change on lakes. She said, “Lakes are really good archives collecting information on a time scale of a human life, changes in the landscape and changes in the climate. So, it was really like reconstructing how did past changes in climate happen? What did that look like? That helps us predict and inform climate models for the future.”
Henderson’s work as a scientist eventually led to politics. She was an environmental policy advisor for Senator Al Franken and Governor Mark Dayton. At first, it was a big transition for her to go from research out in the field to sitting down at the table with politicians and advising on policy.
Henderson explained, “I thought ‘What am I doing here?’ And within about a week, I was like, ‘Oh my, I was made for this place.’ In all of us are a spectrum of different kinds of personality traits and skills. When I was in science, I was using a narrow set of those -- I had very little use of my personality or skills like talking or explaining things. Most of the time I was just working by myself in a room alone. In politics, you're interacting. You're talking. You're writing. The things you're writing are going to be sent on to the Senate floor. They're going to be in a headline. The urgency of everything that was happening, the high consequences, it felt like I'm finally using this part of who I am.”
But her expectations of what she would accomplish clashed with reality. Henderson believed that as a scientist and expert in climate science that the facts would make everything clear for everyone.
“Every day in politics is just humbling because it's realizing that other people don't agree with you…It was really me coming and listening and being, ‘Oh wow, there's a lot I don't know and I need to take this into consideration.’”
Henderson eventually moved on from the political arena to dedicate time to writing. Apart from writing Core Samples, she’s been teaching writing classes, running workshops on storytelling in science, and bringing community bookmaking projects to rural libraries.
The shift from writing scientific articles to creative writing was something that seemed to feed Henderson’s soul. In her book she points out how as a scientist, her writing required “erasing” the person and focusing on the science. She found that creative writing allowed her to express “the self” in the work she did and this is what makes Core Samples such a compelling book, taking readers deeper into Henderson’s field work experiences and providing a more robust understanding of the work of science.
She explained, “I think it's really compelling to understand the broader context of the work. People love adventure stories, and every scientific field exhibition is an adventure. If we don't tell people about the adventure. How will they see the wonder?”
Find out more about writer Anna Farro Henderson on her website.
Note: the audio here is an extended version of the interview that aired February 10, 2025.
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