Art Curtis ’71: Environmental Epiphany

Art Curtis ’71 has always enjoyed scrabbling in the dirt. Growing up in Pennsylvania, he spent his free time playing outdoors. “We’d play baseball in a farmer’s field or go running around the woods,” he recalls. “I’d come home from school, have a sandwich, then head outside until supper.”

He was also a “scientifically oriented” child who, given the option of physical or biological sciences in ninth grade, took both. He still remembers the topographical globe he received one Christmas. “Right away, I saw the coast of Africa could connect up with South America,” he recalls, “so I started doing a little reading about ‘continental drift,’” now known as “plate tectonics.”

At Wesleyan University, he took some government and world music classes but left after three semesters. “I was aimless,” he says. “I needed a break.” A self-described “hippie environmentalist,” he packed up his Datsun in 1973 and drove three days cross-country to live with cousins in Los Angeles, where an ad in Organic Gardening and Farming magazine landed him a job tending an avocado grove in Southern California.

Ready at last to tackle school, Curtis went on to earn a degree in soil and water science from UC Davis and a master’s degree in geology from Colorado State. He still nurtures a garden in his Colorado backyard.

Until his 2019 retirement, Curtis spent decades working as a mudlogger and wellsite geologist, probing, examining and analyzing rocks and collecting and synthesizing subsurface geologic data across the Rocky Mountains. He “geosteered” oil wells in Montana and North Dakota, using gamma ray marker data transmitted to the surface via pressure pulses in the mud. He worked as a geologist and geosteering supervisor for a Colorado oil company.

It was exciting, if harrowing, work. He once intentionally jackknifed his mudlogging truck-and-trailer combo to avoid going over a cliff while descending the Douglas Pass summit in Colorado during a snowstorm. He remembers fumbling on hands and knees on icy ground near Glacier National Park, trying to replace frozen gas-detection line segments. One job proved seminal: a stint at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, evaluating radioactivity in groundwater, surface water and soils caused by decades of poorly regulated waste disposal during the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. “We would walk from our offices to the cafeteria every day, near surface impoundments containing nuclear waste,” he recalls. Every employee wore a dosimeter, an instrument detecting and monitoring radiation exposure. No one’s dosimeter ever sounded an alarm, and Curtis began rethinking his youthful “anti-nuke” stance. “I realized, yes, [nuclear power] can be dangerous, but the risk is not uncontrollable,” he says.

Always an autodidact, Curtis began reading about humanity’s “historic energy transitions,” from animal and human power to wood-burning, coal-burning, petroleum and to oil and natural gas. “These transitions take a long time,” he notes. “We’re not going to eliminate fossil fuels in the next five to 10 years.” Nuclear power seemed a safe, clean, efficient next step in this long game.

The “seed was planted” for his postretirement mission: education about and advocacy of clean energy through nuclear power. His timing was fortunate: State lawmakers had passed legislation committing Colorado to 100 percent clean energy use by 2040. Curtis lauds the goal but disagrees with those who believe that “100 percent wind, solar and batteries is the best way to achieve this transition.” Overreliance on wind and solar power destabilizes the electrical grid, and weather is fickle. (Electricity generation in his solar-paneled home plummets with every cloud or storm, he says.) AI and cloud storage, he adds, will put a “big strain” on the grid over the next five to 15 years with their nonstop energy requirements. To run clean energy data centers, he says, “we’re going to need nuclear power.”

In 2023, Curtis joined the nonprofit Colorado Nuclear Alliance. “I really do believe in disseminating facts,” he says. “We’re fighting a long history of mis- and disinformation about energy.” The group espouses education and legislative advocacy, and recently celebrated a bill designating nuclear power a “clean energy resource” in Colorado. “We’re at a turning point,” Curtis says. By investing in nuclear energy, “we can tackle the issue of climate change, reduce our impact on the earth and bring the vast majority of the world out of poverty … if we do things right. It’ll take political will and the support of scientific research.”

And now, if you’ll excuse him, Curtis has an excursion planned. The Rocky Mountain Association of Geologists is leading a field trip to examine rock outcrops, and he is looking forward to getting his hands dirty.

This article was originally published in the fall 2025 edition of The Exeter Bulletin.