Wild Thing
Breaking a trail from Antarctica to Washington, D.C., Kristin Larson gets to know both Emperor penguins and Skadden lawyers.
The American Lawyer
By Mark J. Miller
October 01, 2009
In 1990, in the middle of the Antarctic winter, Kristin Larson and a colleague left the warmth of McMurdo Station and set out on the Erebus Ice Tongue, a sliver of glacial ice flowing off the nearby volcano. It was 30 degrees below zero. She had been cooped up for months, so she and her partner rejoiced in the opportunity to throttle up their snow machines. Still, they stopped every 20 minutes to be sure that the sea ice was thick enough to support their 500-pound machines. At one check, many kilometers from shore, Larson's ice auger went right through. They turned and raced back to solid land.
It was the closest she came to dying during her eight years working as a scientist amid the ice, penguins, and general otherworldliness of the globe's most forbidding continent. Armed with degrees in molecular physiology and marine biology, she went to Antarctica in 1988 because "it was the wildest place to go." She wasn't disappointed. From the start, Larson was managing McMurdo Station, the largest and one of the most-respected research facilities on the continent. At various times during her tour, she was pinned by hurricane-force blizzards, spent a week among 300,000 Emperor penguins, and stood less than 20 feet away as a group of orcas mauled and ate a seal.
Environmental groups started staging protests at McMurdo in the years before she arrived, and their cries were partly responsible for environmental law changing on the continent. Larson was at the center of debates between policymakers and scientists around the world. "Antarctica is an entire continent with no sovereign rule or indigenous peoples, yet dozens of countries operate there," she says. "It was like an ongoing megasession of the U.N.," she says.
By 1998, she'd hit the "ice ceiling," as she calls it. "It was time to either accept this as my calling for life or to move on and find a more conventional job," she says. She decided to move on. She realized that policy wrangling was as important as science in preserving the environment, and saw law school as the best way to combine those fields. So she enrolled part-time at George Washington University Law School, and took a job at the National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs in Washington, D.C.
Like the rest of her story, her time at law school was not typical. As a 2L, she got a call from the White House Council on Environmental Quality. The Bill Clinton/Al Gore administration had just issued an executive order that required environmental review of proposed international trade agreements. Gore's office had learned of Larson's Antarctic expertise, and invited her to cochair a committee that developed national guidelines for the program.
After graduation in 2000, she moved to Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in Washington, where she is an associate, working mostly on transactions, evaluating the environmental aspects of corporate deals for clients ranging from old-school industrial manufacturers, to new renewable energy companies.
Despite the time demands of her job, Larson's adventurous streak is alive and well. Since 2002 she's been the pro bono legal adviser for the Explorers Club, an august organization founded in 1904 and dedicated to supporting exploration, whose members have included Roald Amundsen and Ernest Shackleton.
That adventurous streak was established at a young age. As a kid, she went camping and whitewater canoeing in the California Sierras. Her family also took trips in her father's little plane: "We'd go down to Baja California, landing on barely discernible dirt tracks, and trade our outgrown clothing for live lobsters and fresh fish," she says.
She still loves the outdoors, so she'll return to Antarctica in January as a guide and lecturer. Next year, she'll also travel to the opposite extreme--the Gobi Desert, on a trip sponsored by the Wild Camel Protection Foundation. She hopes to assist with scientific observations of endangered camel populations.
Skadden doesn't directly support her activities, but "does encourage outside interests and avocations," she says, mentioning colleagues who travel great distances to see rare birds, as well as lawyers who are beekeepers and acrobats in their spare time.
Larson has been so busy, in fact, that she's never had the chance to climb Kristin Peak, the mountain in Antarctica named in honor of her achievements in science and exploration in 2001. "I hope to do it one of these days," she says.
