Lauren is Assistant Secretary for Environmental Public Health at the Washington State Department of Health. She started the first state-level climate and health program in Washington state. She is Clinical Faculty at the University of Washington, where she teaches Public Health Practice. She founded and leads the Green Team at the United Churches of Olympia, and she speaks regularly on climate change and despair at commencements, community group meetings, to adult and youth environmental education groups, and various public health and environmental audiences.

Lauren is a climate pessimist. Actually, she’s an everything pessimist, wired to see risk and worst-case scenarios. She went to public health school and learned to calculate that risk with statistics. It didn’t help.

As an expert herself in looking on the dark side, Lauren has begun to notice that she is not alone in climate pessimism. And, this pessimism is keeping people from acting to prevent climate change—even when they otherwise have the emotional and economic resources to make a real difference. After this realization, she has started to focus her climate change work on combating climate despair—her own and others’.

Lauren is a woman of color living in Washington state with her spouse and two teenagers. She has a Master's degree in public health from Temple University; she is a Certified Health Education Specialist; and has a graduate certificate in science writing from Johns Hopkins University.

Lauren Jenks | LinkedIn