Tucker Brown

Bio: Tucker Brown is a first-year at UNC majoring in geography and global studies. He grew up in Boone, NC, and is incredibly passionate about environmental issues. He was the president of the Sustainability Club at his high school and is now helping organize a climate strike on campus.

As a kid, how often did you interact with nature but more importantly how did you interact with nature? What role did it play in your upbringing and what are some of your memories associated with it?

I didn’t do much with nature when I lived in Knoxville, but I moved to Boone [in western North Carolina] when I was eight. In Boone, a lot of the things there were to do were related to nature. It started off with family hikes and got progressively bigger – we started going on camping trips, fishing trips, things like that. I basically grew up thinking that having fun meant going outside and doing things like swimming, hiking, camping, skiing, kayaking on the lake, backpacking, or anything else outside in nature. There isn’t really much else – there’s a mall, but it’s terrible, and you can go out to eat but other than that it’s pretty much all about going outside. And my parents are really into it, too, so that played a role as well.

Did they actively place an emphasis on nature in your childhood, or shape how you appreciated or interacted with nature?

Yeah, both of my parents were pretty keen on me being outside. My mom would’ve just been happy with me going on a bike ride or just getting any kind of physical exercise, but my dad would ask us to go on hikes and trail runs, or fishing. He can sit around and watch the tv for an hour, hour and a half – but that’s it. Then he wants to be outside. So he definitely pushed us to be initially involved, and once I was initially involved he kept encouraging me to take it further through hikes with my friends or solo trips and things like that. So they definitely got me started and supported me in that for sure.

Do you think the people around you in Boone had similar relationships with nature?

Within Boone there’s definitely a spectrum of people who like doing things outdoors and their parents push them to do things outdoors. The activities also vary – in the more rural parts of the county, fishing and hunting are bigger out there. And that’s definitely pushed hard by parents and grandparents. So I think people in Boone are certainly pushed to do outdoor stuff because that’s just what there is to do. It’s beautiful and fun, so you may as well take advantage of it. And I think almost all people who have spent most of their childhood in the area have an interest in the outdoors. Unless you were making art or music, I’m not sure what else you could be doing there.

Do you think that culture translated into people caring about the environment and its preservation?

Some yes and some no. Of course everyone’s going to say we should take care of the Earth, but at the end of the day it’s a political issue. And when it comes to politics, Boone and Watauga County is a very divided and polarized region. The town is extremely progressive, and the rural area is pretty poor, conservative, and religious. So you have a lot of people that don’t support climate-friendly politics and might not even believe in climate change, but at the same time they love to go hiking, fishing, hunting and all that stuff. So it seems very contradictory in that sense. The culture doesn’t carry over to action as much as I would expect it to, because when it comes to politics, people still stick with their side.

Does that apply to more community-level, person-to-person initiatives? Do their beliefs change the way they interact with society and behave environmentally?

Well, I don’t think it’s an explicit resistance to stuff like recycling. But in most areas, it’s more like apathy. People say, “I don’t see the effects of climate change in front of me, I don’t see the need to change my behavior to protect the environment. I’ve been living this way for years, and my family’s been living this way for years. Why should I change anything now, when it works for me, it works for people around me, and it worked for people before me?”

And to some extent I see where they’re coming for. There’s not much of a reason to buy into the science that organizations are putting out. But it’s an interesting conundrum. It does kind of come down to apathy, because they could seek out lifestyle changes like recycling that aren’t really political. But they don’t, because they don’t really seem to care, even though they love being outside. They don’t connect their actions and lifestyles to their environmental impacts.

From your experience here at UNC so far, do you think the same level of apathy exists in people here?

It’s kind of hard to say because I haven’t talked to people about it extensively. I think people in Boone are probably a bit more conscious of the environment because it’s right in front of them. You look out your car window, and it’s nature. So whether people are liberal are conservative, people can respect some level of not littering. Most people can get behind keeping Boone beautiful.

When you say they can look outside and it’s right in front of them, does that mean there are certain developments or trends that are forcing Boone to wake up to the threat of environmental degradation?

Absolutely! Increase in tourism is a big one. The tourism industry drives a lot – my mom is a public school teacher, and she gets benefits if the tourism industry does well. I benefit from that. But at the same time, it draws in significantly more people, which crowds the streets. It also brings in more air pollution, more littering – people throw cups out of their car windows, or cigarettes. Along with tourism comes commercialization, so you have a lot of businesses coming in that could add to the environmental toll.

So going back to your original question, I don’t think people here understand the environmental issues as much. If they’ve grown up in urban areas, it’s harder for them to grasp what it looks like since they haven’t grown up in the same kind of nature and don’t really know what’s at stake. But at the same time, people at this university are a lot more educated than people in Boone are. So I think when it comes down to understanding broader issues about things like climate change and threats to the global environment, I think people here have a much bigger understanding of that.

So would you say, then, that having the personal connection to nature that you developed in Boone makes you more conscious to environmental issues as compared to people here, who have an entirely intellectual relationship with environmental issues?

For sure, yes. That personal connection is 98 percent of the reason that I want to pursue a career in some form of climate activism advocacy. As a kid I would go sit or run on these ridges with thousand foot drops on either side and just realize that this is our planet, and it’s so beautiful. And I could do that any time I wanted to. During lockdown, I would go out to this one spot on the parkway for 14 nights in a row and watch the sunset. And when you sit there, you can’t help but feel emotionally attached to that. I still have a picture from there in our room, I even want to get it tattooed on my body. It’s an emotional image. Having that experience and those core memories, knowing the beauty and complexity of humans experiencing nature like that but also the science and the nature itself – seeing that during the formative years of my life made it a really big part of my identity.

Speaking of identity: do you think there are parts of your personality, or who you are, that have been shaped by the mountains?

Yeah, absolutely. I think on a personal level, I think it’s made me calm about being myself. I used to read nature poetry because of my passion for the outdoors, and I read this poem called Goodbye by Emerson. It was originally written about religion, but the way I understood it is that you could reach the highest human successes – go to Harvard, become the president, so on and so on – or you could live a simple life in a way that’s respectful of other people and nature. And when you die, and when you meet God, what really is the difference between those two kinds of people? So with that attitude, and the complexity of nature, I think I really changed how I look at the world. I pushed myself to not place as much value in typical accomplishments and instead value what’s real, by which I mean myself and the connections I create, both with other people and the natural world. I think that’s the basis of a lot of my thoughts on other subjects like religion, or capitalism, etc.