Britt began traveling at a young age, fortunate to visit everywhere from rural American towns and Polynesian islands to the industrialized cities of Asia and Europe. As a teenager, she spent two months backpacking across China— at the time in the throes of radical social, economic and environmental change— and it was out of this formative experience that she launched herself onto a path focused on sustainability, teaching, and connecting with both the people and natural environments that together make up communities.
Her college years took her to all corners of China and across East and Southeast Asia where the human and environmental impacts of unbridled economic development were all too clear. Britt's graduate studies, first at Harvard and next at UCLA, helped her to home in on the political dimensions of water resource issues in contemporary China, examining power, voice, inequality and the human side of rapid environmental change. With industrial North China as her base, Britt conducted her dissertation research on the South-North Water Transfer Project, the largest water management project in human history.
In 2012/2013, Britt became both a parent and a professor of environmental geography. For the next several years, the simultaneous experiences of seeing the world through the open, curious eyes of her own children and teaching university students about the pressing sustainability challenges she'd studied up close in China was a powerful one. While her children began looking to her for guidance on how to interact with the non-human world all around them, Britt watched her adult students grapple with the question of what to do about the current state of the planet, its ecosystems, and its human communities.
The answer became clear: our collective culture must change if human-environmental stewardship is to replace destruction, and this shift in mindset must begin with children. How we relate to the world around us as children— from the smallest spider to the most complex ecosystem— scales up and ultimately translates into the values we bring to bear on the world as adults. Children must be encouraged not to think of nature as something wild and pristine, existing only in places separate from humans, but, as William Cronon has written, to find and celebrate the, "...wildness in our own backyards, [...] the nature that is all around us if only we have eyes to see it."
Drawing on the ideas of thinkers like Cronon, Robin Wall Kimmerer and Aldo Leopold, along with her students and her own young children as inspiration, in 2018 Britt founded CityWild, a nonprofit organization aimed at inspiring curiosity about the natural world through fun, exploration, and hands-on learning for kids and families, including those from underserved and historically marginalized communities.
Through high-quality, science-based, age-appropriate, hands-on sustainability programming, the overarching goal of CityWild is to give children of all ages the opportunity to connect to the nature all around them in their daily lives and to recognize themselves as members of a larger ecological community that includes plants, animals, insects, rivers, forests, and so on. Above all, CityWild works to foster the innate curiosity of children, especially those in urban areas, about their world. From curiosity comes learning, from learning comes respect, and from respect comes stewardship and advocacy.
Britt continues to teach and mentor undergraduate and graduate students interested in sustainability, environmental justice and equity, political ecology and environmental education and to write professionally in these spaces. She is also a children's book author, writing both fiction and non-fiction that foster curiosity about the natural world for kids and families.