Jean Brennan: the call of the wild
She first heard it while reading a book. Not that book. “The Serengeti Shall Not Die” by Bernard and Michael Grzmek, who in 1959 sounded the alarm about the dramatic loss of wildlife in the East African plains known for iconic species like lion, wildebeest, elephant, and giraffe.
After completing her undergraduate coursework, she answered the call.
“I sold everything I owned, and bought a plane ticket to Kenya,” said Jean Brennan, the conservation science and climate adaptation coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Science Applications program in the North Atlantic-Appalachian region. “I had to see it before it was gone.”
She did more than just see it. She got a job with the Institute of Primate Research as a field liaison working with researchers who were studying animal behavior.
From then onward, in a career that has led her from Kenya to Borneo to the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development — with multiple advanced degrees along the way — Brennan has continued to respond to the call of the wild, always seeking to advance her understanding to meet changing conservation needs.
When studying the De Brazza’s monkey for her master’s degree in animal behavior, she realized one needed to understand ecology in order to effectively manage wild populations.
When pursuing a degree in ecology, it occurred to her that managing populations was for naught unless you could maintain a species’ evolutionary potential. That took her initially to Madagascar, to work with the Smithsonian Institution to rediscover a species of mongoose, previously known only from a museum specimen.
Later her research took her to Malaysia to study population genetics of elephants and gaur, which Brennan likens to a bison the size of an elephant — she used a crossbow to collect tissue samples for genetic analysis.
“I was working on big things using little things at the molecular level,” she said. “I was expanding and refining my skillset.”
But it was in Borneo, an island in Southeast Asia politically divided among Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia, that the call took on a new sense of urgency. She was studying proboscis monkeys and orangutans in a remote field station when the skies dimmed. In the late 1990s, massive forest fires burning in Indonesia, fueled by drought, spread thick clouds of smoke throughout the region. A direct result of illegal logging and clear-cut burning, fueled by changing climate. The smoke released into the atmosphere held off the monsoon rains, driving the island into severe drought.
“The smoke got so bad I couldn’t see a tree six feet away,” Brennan recalled. When the field station was down to its last 30 gallons of drinking water, she knew it was time to go. It took days to get off the island, but she eventually made her way out, and back to California, where her family had settled when she was in high school after her father retired from the Army.
She found a job with California’s Air Resources Board and took on a fortuitous assignment: the director of research asked her to read everything she could about the phenomenon called “global warming” and report back on its relevance to their agency. The more she learned, the more alarmed she became. “I said, I think you should pay attention to this,” Brennan recalled.
She took her own advice, applying for an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) fellowship with the State Department’s Office of Global Change, which was in charge of coordinating the nation’s climate response and negotiations.
She served as a member of the U.S. Delegation at international negotiations under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). When in 2007, the IPCC was selected to share the Nobel Peace Prize, Brennan was one of a small subset of the thousands of scientist working with the IPCC to be recognized by the IPCC to share in the prize “for her substantial contributions to the effort.”
A “divine dissatisfaction”
Remarkably, all of this just scratches the surface of Brennan’s career. And if you ask her what she considers her greatest conservation achievement, she won’t cite the Nobel. She’ll quote Martha Graham, a pioneering choreographer of modern dance.
“She spoke of a ‘divine dissatisfaction,’ the feeling of always wanting to keep moving, and do more,” Brennan said. “For me, it’s the willingness to accept the inadequacy of our understanding. A humility that drives me to learn more. It’s a guiding principle, an ethic, not a single accomplishment.”
That ethic continues to drives her toward new opportunities to engage with urgent conservation challenges, and with people who can help solve them. In her work for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, first coordinating the Appalachian Landscape Conservation Cooperative, and now helping to integrate climate adaption into management for at-risk species, she has focused on scaling conservation responses to landscapes and ecosystem through partnership.
In 2014, as the featured speaker for the Distinguished Lecture Series at Northwest Missouri State University during its annual Earth Week Celebration, she connected the dots between climate change and other threats to people and wildlife, emphasizing that addressing these large, interconnected problems requires collaboration.
Recently, she has reflected more on her own role. True to her history of expanding and refining, she said, “There was a point where I just decided to walk the talk. I believe in climate change. I believe it’s my responsibility to do something about, so I examined my own consumption.”
She moved into a 23-foot RV with her dog Ally, and learned how to conserve energy, water, and space. “I learned to live with only the needs, and not the wants,” she said. “To reduce my consumption and the imbedded energy required to produce and transport products.”
With fewer trappings, she has had more opportunities to connect with nature — which is how she prefers to spend her time when not on the clock. Brennan has hiked and camped in numerous national parks and natural places in the U.S. and abroad, including Yosemite in California, and Annapurna in Nepal.
But she doesn’t consider these excursions a “break” from work. “There is no work-life interface for me,” she said. “I find my work — the work of conservation — to be a service, a calling.”
