Who is Lorne Trexler from Heat and Light: A Novel?

Lorne Trexler is an environmental activist and chairs the geology department at Stirling College. He meets Rena Koval while hanging anti-fracking posters in an organic market in Pittsburgh, and he helps her organize events in Bakerton to make residents aware of the potential hazards the Dark Elephant drilling poses. He is “lean and wiry, handsome in a long-haired way” (85). When he was younger, students remarked at his agility in field work, and moving around the campus, “his obvious pleasure in the movement of his body, his kinetic and masculine grace” (276). Lorne’s geology student Amy Rubin was taken by this masculine grace during a summer field work program, and, despite the fact that he was an adult and her faculty advisor, they began an affair.