Christine Keating

Mother, Writer, Climate Justice Advocate, Adventurer, Historian, Soldier

About

I grew up in the rolling Adirondack foothills of rural upstate New York, amidst blazing autumn sugar maples and more dairy cows than people. Leaving that behind at the age of 17, I sought out the medieval cobbles and art nouveau spires of Barcelona as an exchange student, finding the bustle of a modern metropolis along the way.

The global perspective I gained during that year prompted me to join the army, with the goal of embarking upon a career of peacekeeping and adventure. Just two months before 9/11, I entered the United States Military Academy at West Point and raised my right hand.

Adventure? Depends on your definition. Peacekeeping? Not so much. After graduating West Point in 2005, I deployed to combat twice – to Iraq in 2008, and to Afghanistan in 2012. The poverty, gender inequality, and factional violence born from generations of fundamentalist and imperial exploitation that I witnessed there shaped who I am today.

My career and personal drive for exploration have taken me all over the world. My current tally is 27 countries across five continents (I’m coming for you, Australia and Antarctica!). I’ve swum in the Amazon River and the Arctic Ocean, conducted historical research in three languages on three different continents, and, my greatest adventure of all, raised four incredible kids who are starting to have their own adventures.

Today, I use my voice to fight for a more equitable world. Climate change is the single greatest threat to humanity’s survival, and it disproportionately affects women and girls, and societies in the Global South. My goal is to travel the globe telling those stories through words and photographs. I also intend to work on long-range local anticipatory action projects, building climate-resilient communities prepared to face the future.

I hold a Master of Arts in Brazilian History from Brown University, and am working towards a Master of Science in Environmental Sciences and Policy from Johns Hopkins University. I live with my spouse Daniel and our four children in rural Kentucky.

Publications

OpEd: Why the phrase ‘women and children’ is bad for gender equality
Boston Globe, December 2023

OpEd: The US Shouldn’t Stand in the Way of an Ambitious Plastics Treaty
World Oceans Day, 2023

Conflicting Ethics: One Officer’s Experiences During and After “Dont’ Ask/Don’t Tell”
Interview of Captain Jolene Ayres with the West Point Center for Oral History

Walking Through the Desert on a Sunday Morning: An Account of the 2011 Bataan Memorial Death March
White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico

Exile Without End: The Acadian Expulsion
In A Global History of Relocation in Counterinsurgency Warfare

LANGUAGES

Projects, Fellowships, and Grants

Arctic Norway 2022 Expedition Historian with Sea Women Expeditions

In November, 2022, I had the honor of participating in an all-women’s international and interdisciplinary STEAM expedition in Norway’s Arctic fjords to study marine mammal behavior from the water. As an official event of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, we carried the first-ever expedition flag of the Canadian chapter of The Explorers Club more than 400 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle.

Public Voices Fellow with the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the OpEd Project

As a Public Voices Fellow with the Yale University Program on Climate Change Communication and the OpEd Project, my cohort and I are getting our voices out there – pitched and published, changing the shape of public discourse! With a particular focus on the climate crisis, our message is simple, yet so vital – we need everyone’s help to make a livable planet a reality in the years to come.

Kentucky Foundation for Women 2022 Artist Enrichment Grantee

The Kentucky Foundation for Women invests in local feminist artists across a wide variety of art forms, to bring positive social change to Kentucky. As a 2022 Artist Enrichment Grantee, I have brought an interactive, multimedia STEAM presentation about my Arctic expedition into local classrooms, sharing the wonder of the Arctic with elementary students and answering roughly 1,572,384 questions, from “why are the Northern Lights green” to “did you pet any sharks?” (That last one is a firm no.) Thank you to KFW for investing in me and in the next generation of explorers!

Telling a story can change the world

Words

I have been writing since I was a child. Now, as I move through a transformation from military career to civilian climate justice advocate, I acknowledge more than ever the power of storytelling to inform, influence, and inspire.

Images

The earliest books we pick up are full of pictures, not words. Pictures reveal, or they hide; they allow us to travel without leaving home, to revisit loved ones long since lost, to imagine immense possibility.

The photographs on this page were all taken with my iPhone on my various travels — some as far away as the Amazon or the Arctic, some as close as my back yard. I have happily just invested in my first “real” camera, a Canon 5D Mark III, and I am having a blast learning all of its possibilities!