In March, David Kennedy was named by President Biden to serve as chair of the US Arctic Research Commission (USARC), a body that advises the White House and Congress on matters related to the Arctic. He originally joined the commission last December, appointed by then president Donald Trump; all seven USARC members are Trump appointees.
Biden has made mitigating climate change a critical priority for his administration. That stance could raise USARC’s visibility, responsibility, and potential influence. Kennedy brings decades of experience in the Arctic and in science administration to his new role. The well-being of Indigenous people, environmental sustainability, and climate change will be major focuses of the commission, he says.
Kennedy got his first taste of the Arctic in the early 1970s, after college, as a pilot in the US Air Force. After five and a half years in the service, he worked at the University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute and then, for three decades, at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). His responsibilities over the years included overseeing science projects conducted to keep tabs on the environmental effects of offshore oil exploration, directing cleanups after oil spills, managing coastal zones, and more.
“I’ve had an interesting career path,” says Kennedy. “I’ve never had a strategy or five-year plan. But opportunities have come my way, and I have taken advantage of them.”
PT: How did you come to major in anthropology in college?
KENNEDY: Throughout my growing-up years, my parents always insisted that I do something that would lead to a secure foundation to make money. They promoted business administration. So when I went to college, I took all the accounting and the other appropriate courses. In my second year, I took anthropology as an elective. I was absolutely fascinated. I dropped all of my business administration courses and signed up for a degree in anthropology. My grades immediately went up.
I was accepted to graduate school in anthropology, but then I got drafted. The Vietnam War was going strong. I went around to all the different services and took a bunch of aptitude tests. I came back qualifying for pilot training, so I decided to go to the air force. That’s how I became a pilot. I didn’t like it much, but it certainly beat being an army grunt.
PT: How did you end up in the Arctic?
KENNEDY: At the end of the training, instead of any of the fighter pilot stuff, I selected Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage. Alaska was considered an overseas assignment, which meant it was longer in duration than many of the other assignments, and that extended time frame allowed me to not have to go to Vietnam anytime soon.
The assignment was supplying and working on remote locations and sites throughout Alaska. We did a rotation to Greenland every few months and flew aircraft with skis to radar sites located across the ice cap.
PT: Were the sites military or scientific?
KENNEDY: They were more military than scientific. They were intended to intercept anything coming over the pole to attack the United States. The sites were huge radomes with living quarters underneath them. Their legs were drilled into the ice. They were at altitudes of up to 9000 feet. That’s when I first really began to enjoy and appreciate the beauty and complexity of the Arctic.
PT: How did you get involved in Arctic science and science policy?
KENNEDY: The air force was charged with supporting the National Science Foundation, so we pilots began bringing research crews out onto the ice cap. That’s when I began to talk with Arctic researchers and to get really interested in the kinds of research they were doing.
Another thing I routinely did was to resupply Fletcher’s Ice Island. The island was discovered by and named after Joe Fletcher, an air force guy who developed a major research program around living and doing science on this floating iceberg.
Fletcher was a research director at NOAA and a very influential guy. I had the opportunity to meet him a couple of times at the officers’ club in Anchorage. He tried to recruit me to become a hurricane hunter when I got out of the air force. But I didn’t want to fly anymore. It was not a passion for me. I told him that I had a VW bus and was going to drive it to Mexico. I wanted to be a hippie for a while.
But just as I was getting ready to leave the air force, I was recruited—through Fletcher’s influence—to the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska to become the logistics facilities director for something called the Outer Continental Shelf Environmental Assessment Program. I took the job and moved to Fairbanks.
The program developed science and environmental impact statements for offshore oil leasing. Every imaginable sort of science was being conducted, from ice dynamics to bowhead whale tracking to ecosystem characterization. My job was to meet with the scientists and find out what they needed and to develop infrastructure to support them. I spent a lot of time with scientists out in their remote camps. I got an in-depth look at multidisciplinary science in the Arctic.
PT: How did you become involved in cleaning up oil spills?
KENNEDY: When I started the job in Fairbanks, what was known about interactions between oil and the ocean was for the most part from laboratory experiments. Program scientists proposed that a research unit develop some basic observational tools that could be portable and that staff be trained to use the tools and be on call 24/7.
I signed up to be on the regional team. I took all the training to do sampling, measure currents, and so on. The first spill that happened was in Alaska around 1977. There were more spills, and before long I had the most experience of anyone in terms of going to the scene of a spill and doing the measurements. That expertise led to me being asked to head that organization.
As the regional team got more and more proficient at evaluating spills and their impacts, we kept running into members of the US Coast Guard, which is responsible for cleaning up oil spills in the US. We teamed up with them—they wanted us to coordinate with scientists who came to them wanting to do research. When there was a spill, we’d provide scientific support to the coast guard: modeling; ecosystem characterization; and measurements related to chemistry, toxicity, and the effects from different cleanup methodologies.
PT: Do you have any interesting anecdotes from the oil spills and their cleanups?
KENNEDY: One of the more interesting things happened with the Exxon Valdez spill. That was in March 1989, in Prince William Sound. Over the course of months, it spread and contaminated beaches as far as Kodiak Island—a few hundred miles from the initial spill. The tremendous amount of oil disturbed marine mammals, salmon, and everything along the beaches, and it had a terrible effect on the Indigenous communities, which subsist on hunting and fishing. They lost all of that. There was widespread, incredible angst and horror about having a spill in pristine Alaska.
Exxon became more and more aggressive in the types of equipment they developed to clean up the shoreline. They had these barges with an incredible array of high-pressure washing equipment. Those things had huge articulated arms and a head that was maybe 10 feet long and 3 or 4 feet wide. They got the beaches clean. But the scientists noticed two things: The beaches that were clean were almost devoid of any kind of life, and the oil from the beach and rocks was being washed out and deposited to an inner tidal area where there was rich, diverse ocean life.
As the oil was being washed off, it was trailing down into the more sensitive intertidal areas and contaminating areas that had not been contaminated. We—the community of scientists working on the spill—devised a way to test that theory further, by allowing segments of the beach to be left alone so we could have research plots to go and compare. It was a great hassle to get everyone to agree—the state of Alaska because it was their natural resources that were being left contaminated, Exxon because they were concerned with public relations issues, and the public.
After lots of effort, we were allowed to try it. We found that the beaches that were left alone had significant living organisms, so there were at least seed species available to repopulate, and there was no contamination in the lower tidal areas. The cleanup can be as intrusive as the oil. The findings led to changes in how cleanup is done.
PT: What were the next steps in your career?
KENNEDY: I eventually became the deputy undersecretary for operations at NOAA—the highest civilian position there—essentially in charge of ships, trains, planes, and people. On any given day, you could be dealing with everything from personnel issues to a research vessel in Alaska whose engine has gone out. It was soup to nuts.
While I was doing that, Shell was looking into drilling for oil in the Arctic and was coming to NOAA for advice about scientific data and environmental impact, predicting weather, and predicting sea ice movement. The Shell talk made a lot of folks at NOAA nervous, but it also made us realize we ought to do a better job of coordinating the Arctic side of our house. I was tagged around 2012–14 to develop a national strategy for the Arctic region.
PT: And then you retired for the first time?
KENNEDY: I retired in 2016, and I was out at my farm in Virginia twiddling my thumbs and going crazy. Three months later, I went back to work on an Arctic strategy within NOAA. We developed the first Arctic Science Ministerial; the third one will take place on 8 and 9 May, sponsored by Japan and Iceland. The ministerial brings together all the Arctic countries and other interested countries to talk about where we are with the Arctic, what are the needs, the priorities, and so on.
PT: What did you and your colleagues accomplish with the strategy?
KENNEDY: First and foremost—and this is where I also want to go with USARC—an appreciation of the depth and breadth of what is going on in the Arctic, and how significant it is for the whole world. There were spin-off programs that focused on better cooperation and sharing of data. And real progress was made in developing a national and international observational network. Because of the remoteness and harshness of the environment, observations are a real challenge. We also helped realize an international fishing treaty in the central Arctic. It bans fishing until we understand much better the environment, the ecosystem, and the species that are present.
I retired again in April 2020.
PT: It was another short-lived retirement. Tell me about USARC and your plans.
KENNEDY: The commission was established by the Arctic Policy Research Act of 1984. Its purpose is to establish priorities and communicate to Congress and the White House, and to internationally coordinate a better approach on the right things to do with the Arctic. We put out a report with goals every two years. The most recent report was delayed, so I am pushing to do that. And we are working on a five-year plan, which will be based at least partially on the goals.
PT: What do you see as USARC’s main priorities?
KENNEDY: The resilience, health, and well-being of Arctic Indigenous populations is one area in which we are trying to do more than we have in the past.
Arctic security was a big issue for the last administration—monitoring threats from other nations and not letting any kind of territorial grabs occur. The focus is on protecting borders and watching China and Russia. Security continues to be a cross-cutting issue.
Understanding climate change is a huge priority. Climate change in the Arctic is so dramatic: ice loss, permafrost loss, and changes in major species migration both on land and in the ocean. We need to understand the ecosystem.
PT: What do you see as the biggest challenge?
KENNEDY: The biggest challenge for me is to make the commission more of a front-and-center voice for the Arctic and to help the Biden administration look at the issues.
PT: You’ve known the Arctic for a long time; what changes have you seen?
KENNEDY: When I first started working in the Arctic, you could fly over at certain times of year and see solid ice. The reduction in the ice cover is dramatic. Another example is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In about 2012 I went on a tour there, and we ended up in an adjacent village. I was invited to go to a remote beach, where Indigenous folks push the remains of whales they’ve harvested out onto a spit of land. My hosts asked me to come and look at the polar bears. They were coming in huge numbers to feast on the carcasses of the whales because they couldn’t find enough of their usual food source, seals. (See photo above.) There were at least a dozen bears, and more kept coming. It’s turned into a tourist thing, but it shows the huge threat to polar bears’ existence.
