How This Third Actor went from Performance Artist to Climate-Health Expert
As a former senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York City, Kim Knowlton focused on the health impacts of climate change and strategies to make health preparedness a more central feature of city and state climate adaptation plans. Her research has included heat-and ozone-related mortality and illnesses, and the connections between climate, pollen, allergies and asthma, and infectious disease. Kim has been on the faculty of environmental health sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health since 2005.
How people come to their chosen field is often mysterious and surprising. Only looking in the rear-view mirror does it seem to make some kind of sense. Third Actor Kim Knowlton’s path was not straightforward, though in hindsight, the skills and knowledge she acquired by trying various and seemingly wildly unrelated endeavors added up to a ground-breaking career for which, without knowing it, she’d been preparing all her life. Kim participated in the early days of an entirely new field, climate-health science, which is now a pillar of the environmental movement, though Kim says, “We still have a lot of work to do to connect those dots for people.”
Here’s the trajectory: at Cornell, Kim went from pre-med to geology, studying radioactive waste siting issues as an undergraduate; from there to NYC working in text book publishing by day, a performance artist by night (yes, a performance artist)! Kim was part of a nervy, seven member group whose shows often had a political edge, sometimes taking stories from the news, including one about white supremacy, which was well ahead of its time, and one that examined our stories about the end of the world. “That was 30 years ago,” Kim told us, “We’re still dealing with the same issues, kicking the can down the road to the next generation.”
Kim lived a double life of publishing and performance art for seven years before she felt the call of her first love—science. At Hunter College, she completed a masters in environmental and occupational health science, and went on to work with a consulting organization that helped citizens’ groups review proposals for radioactive waste sites. When a company applied for a license to bury radioactive waste near a small community in West Texas, the direction of her life changed once again. Kim and her team discovered a potentially dangerous fault zone in the area, and local activists opposed to radioactive waste siting near their town used Kim’s team’s scientific analysis to get the license application overturned. “I saw how ordinary people could take action and win a fight for environmental justice with the help of science,” Kim says.
The success combining science with local citizens’ advocacy against powerful interests was a “road to Damascus” moment for Kim, and once again, she was inspired to make a dramatic shift. She enrolled in Columbia University where she earned a doctorate in environmental health science. When her research mentor was awarded one of EPA’s first grants to study climate change and health, Kim chose to work with him. Research on the relationship of climate change and health was unusual. It’s hard to believe, but in 2000, few people were studying those climate-health connections which are so apparent today. Kim became one of the first specialists in an entirely new field.
At the time, even the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), one of America’s premier organizations using science, policy, and law to confront the climate crisis, didn’t have a scientist who focused on how climate change affects human health. They hired Kim to fill a position that hadn’t formerly existed. It was a dream job that lasted for 17 years, growing in importance year after year, collaborating with other scientists working across the field, developing epidemiological studies, analyzing environmental data, and bringing the information to the public, the press, and to briefings on the Hill with members of Congress.
Kim herself is as amazed as anyone by the serendipity of it all, how all these strands came together. “Lucky, lucky me: I was in the right place at the right time a bunch of times in life in ways that connected strands of work and thinking that used to be separate.” And though you might think that the performance art piece was an aberration, it all fits. “The politics is consistent, and the training really helped me to communicate confidently and forcefully to get people’s attention… We’re all performing in one role or another most of the time— so it was great practice and so much fun.”
Kim joined Third Act Upstate New York in 2024 after being galvanized hearing Bill McKibben speak years earlier to NRDC. After all these years, she still believes that science and action can work together, that “writing articles doesn’t do squat without activism.” She participated in the Summer of Heat protests at Citibank, where she was a “singer and screamer,” loved it, and took part in the protests in Albany in the beginning of December designed to motivate the governor to sign the Climate Superfund bill.
“I’m an optimist,” she says. “It moves me to see how many people are determined NOT to kick the can of climate, environment and health problems down the road again to future generations. And I want to keep learning from them.”