Chatter Marks EP 133 Where science meets story with Caroline Van Hemert

Crude Conversations

crudemag

Society & Culture

4.9 • 152 Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2026

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Caroline Van Hemert is a wildlife biologist, writer, and researcher whose work moves between science, story, and the lived experience of wild places. She’s based in Alaska, where she’s spent years studying migratory birds and the shifting ecosystems they move through, paying close attention to how climate change is reshaping patterns that have existed for generations. She’s also the author of “The Sun Is a Compass,” a memoir that traces a 4,000-mile journey she and her husband made from Washington State to Arctic Alaska under their own power—by boat, ski, canoe, and foot. Across her work, whether in the field or on the page, she’s asking a version of the same question: how do we find our way through a changing world, and what can the natural world teach us about movement, attention, and belonging? Caroline’s writing merges the personal with the scientific, a perspective shaped by her early research into beak deformities in black-capped chickadees. That work led to a broader focus on wildlife health, studying everything from parasites in polar bears to harmful algal blooms and their effects on seabirds — and how disease, toxicants, and environmental stress ripple across entire ecosystems. Because a change to one species is never isolated, it’s a community-level shift. For a long time, that work felt heavy, like serving as a gatekeeper at the morgue, documenting decline. But more recently her focus has begun to shift. In her new book, tentatively titled “Upwellings,” she looks for moments of surprise, places where the natural world resists the expected ending. Because she believes that by recognizing what’s possible in the wild can reshape what feels possible within us. It’s a shift that also reflects a deeper question about science itself: whether data alone can still move people, or whether it requires a more engaged, more human voice.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I think I'm moving toward a point of trying to hold both the very dark realities and also that that sense of possibility and of hopefulness together
0:25.5	in a more cohesive fashion. So I'm not just vacillating between being this sort of, you know,
0:30.8	stony-eyed scientist and, you know, a mom to my kids being out in the world, seeing wondrous
0:37.4	things, but something that
0:39.0	merges those. And I think that's true for me professionally as well, that having that really
0:44.9	dichotomous existence hasn't, it doesn't bring kind of the sense of personal satisfaction
0:52.4	or also the sense of feeling like purpose as much as bringing those together.
0:59.0	And so I'm still working on what that is going to look like, but I think by writing about science and hopefully finding ways to engage science and storytelling, which is something I've had the chance to do, you know,
1:13.0	some to some degree professionally, but figuring out what that path looks like is part of my
1:18.8	journey right now.
1:21.4	That was Caroline Van Hemer.
1:24.5	She's a wildlife biologist, writer, and researcher, whose work moves between science, story, and the lived experience of wild places.
1:36.3	She's based in Alaska, where she spent years studying migratory birds and the shifting ecosystems they move through,
1:45.4	paying close attention to how climate change.
1:48.1	It's reshaping patterns that have existed for generations.
1:53.1	She's also the author of the Sun as a Compass,
1:56.9	a memoir that traces a 4,000-mile journey she and her husband made from Washington State to Arctic Alaska under their own power by boat, ski, canoe, and foot.
2:13.0	Across her work, whether in the field or on the page, she's asking a version of the same question.
2:21.7	How do we find our way through a changing world?
2:25.0	And what can the natural world teach us about movement, attention, and belonging?
2:38.2	Caroline's writing merges the personal with the scientific,
2:45.1	a perspective shaped by her early research into beak deformities and black cap chickadees.
	...

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