Dakotah Kimbrough

Warren Wilson College

Hey y'all, I'm Dakotah Kimbrough. I grew up in Cedar Grove, a rural town outside of Chapel Hill, NC. I'm currently a senior at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC. My major is Environmental Policy, and I'm double-minoring in Peace & Justice Studies and Traditional Music. College has allowed me to explore many pressing environmental topics, especially those concerning justice and advocacy. I've participated in and led service trips to community gardens and former coal-mining towns to explore the impacts of mountain-top removal, attended workshops and meetings surrounding law and policy, and have been a part of direct actions and protests against proposed legislation and regulation. These experiences have inspired me to work within frameworks that reconcile relationships between neighbors and the land they share.

I was introduced to Planet Forward through my participation in the Middlebury School of the Environment during the summer of 2017. We spent a week in Washington D.C. and worked with the team to learn how to become compelling storytellers and climate science communicators. As a correspondent, I wish to connect the reader to the reality of climate change and provide them with a different perspective towards these problems. Effectively confronting these environmental damages will require a meaningful dialogue with our relationship to the natural world, and we must be open to what it has to say.