Bart Elmore is a Professor of Environmental History at Ohio State University and the author of three books, including Citizen Coke, which grew out of his dissertation on Coca-Cola's environmental footprint. Before that, he left a corporate law job after nine months, failed to kayak from Atlanta to the Gulf Coast, and taught ninth-grade English while obtaining his teaching license.

In this conversation, we talk about the graduate seminar that reoriented his entire path, recognizing when a prestigious job is doing you harm, and the childhood pull toward science that resurfaced decades later in the book he's writing now.