Meet Marali Kalra, twelfth in the 2019 series of rider profiles. Get to know the riders for the PA to DC rides as the series unfolds, then follow the trips! Learn more. Donate.
I’m originally from Allentown, where I attended Lehigh Valley Friends Meeting. At the moment I’m in State College studying natural resource engineering at Penn State. I like hiking, doing karate, and playing the violin, though not usually all at once. In my spare time (plus some time I can’t spare) I read. This will be my second time biking to DC with PA IPL.
I tend to shove climate change into the same mental category as wrinkles and insurance payments — it’s coming, and it’s going to be unpleasant, but I don’t have to deal with it for a few years yet. However, the more I learn in my classes, the more I see that many of the environmental systems I take for granted have already been altered or damaged by humans.
The parcel of woods where my family is building a house, for example, was a trimly landscaped park a few decades ago, and the site of an iron mine before that. So although climate change is not visible in my everyday life, I know it is still there, threatening future generations with the prospect of whole winters without any snow days.
If this ride includes half as many daunting, exciting, and vaguely ill-advised things as the last one I was part of, then it will be a marvelous experience. I’m grateful for this chance to learn from people who are working on climate issues, and I hope I’ll be able to make some small contribution to the effort.
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