From Ignoramus To Activist: My Journey to Becoming an Environmentalist

A Late Afternoon on the Lake 

It is a soggy summer day in Tennessee. Not because it is rainy, but because the humidity is high as it always is. The heat index is over 100 despite the actual temperature being in the low 90s. I am 12 years old. My family starts our morning by getting things ready to take the boat out.

I am in charge of making sandwiches and cutting fruit. My mom is in charge of gathering towels. My Dad is in charge of getting the keys to the storage unit and gathering the necessary tools to have on hand for boating. I think my older sister is still asleep. 

We get all the things ready for a late afternoon/evening on a nearby lake in Mississippi. The lake we go to, Sardis Lake, is about an hour and a half away. We always take our time in the morning and head to the lake midday so as to avoid the worst of the UV rays when the sun is at its zenith between 10 and 2. 

As we drive, we move from urban to rural. There are small pockets of native swamps along the side of the interstate amidst farmland. We leave a place of concrete and pavement behind for a place of grass, trees, and water. 

After we arrive at the lake and get all the things loaded into the boat, it is finally time to get the boat on the water. It is still a hot and soggy summer day, but as is often the case, more clouds have rolled in and the sunlight is a little less bright. You don’t get rainstorms every late afternoon in Tennessee like you do in Florida, but the humidity forms into gray clouds and obscures the sun, turning the sunlight opaque most late afternoons/early evenings. 

We get the boat on the water and pick up speed and I feel the wind in my brown ponytail. We drive the boat around an island, finding a sheltered peninsula of water where the wind is blocked more and the water is glassy, perfect for water skiing. And the fun begins. 

We take turns slicing our skis through the reflective surface of the water and spraying the cooling water up our legs and sides. While I ski I glance down and the water is so flat and windless that I can see myself, seemingly parallel to the water. I feel free, despite holding onto the handle of the ski rope that is tied to the boat. I know I can let go of the ski rope at any moment and my body will slowly glide along the surface, gracefully sinking into the cooling water. 

Experiencing natural places was part of my childhood

My parents met in Southern California in the 1970s and backpacking the Sierra Nevadas was a regular aspect of their lives. My Dad’s military career took him (and thus our whole family) from California back east to Ohio and many southern states where wild nature is less accessible. As a result we did not have the opportunity for weekends of camping and backpacking much growing up, but my parents always found local preserved places that were decent for short day hikes. They also took us canoeing on rivers, including ones where water moccasins and alligators lived. When we took vacations, beautiful natural places were always included, from the Adirondacks of New York State to the Everglades of Florida and west to Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks in the Rocky Mountains and further west to Yosemite National Park. 

My Dad eventually retired from the military and became a pilot for FedEx and along with this new job came the opportunity for longer stretches of vacation. We regularly visited Eastern Oregon growing up as that is where my grandparents lived, and the summer I was 12, my parents decided it was time to take us backpacking in the Eagle Cap Wilderness in the Blue Mountains. 

Mom and Dad scrounged through their old backpacking clothes to find wool shirts and sweaters that would fit my sister and I. We flew to Boise and rented a car and stopped at the local REI, outfitting ourselves with new backpacking backpacks, hiking boots, wool socks and moleskin.

After driving to my grandparents in Cove, Oregon and taking a few days to get our packs ready, we crammed into my grandpa’s pickup truck and headed out for a trek. 

The climb up to Brownie Basin was along a creek most of the way. Switchback after switchback after switchback, we climbed. I felt like I climbed all the way from the ocean to the sky. Brownie Basin in June is a beautiful green meadow, full of blooming flowers and pockets of coniferous trees. So early in the year your boots sink into the soggy springy ground that is moist with snowmelt. It was the wildest place I had ever been and I was entranced. I promised myself I would find a way to live a life where I could be in the wild every weekend if I wished. 

I worked hard all of high school in the swampy flats of Tennessee to be able to go to college in a place where I could backpack in wild hilly places every weekend, so I could return to the serenity of the remote Brownie Basin if not the exact locale. And I succeeded, eventually making my way to Oregon State University which is 40 minutes from one mountain range and 2 hours from another. I found ample outdoor recreation in my college years, but there were other experiences beyond the wild ones that shaped me. 

From preservationist to ecologist

Before I turned 16, I fell more into the preservationist category of environmentalist. I wanted wild places protected and preserved for low-impact recreation and for their own value. I still saw nature as a place that I went to, not intrinsically part of my daily life unless I seeked it out, which I did regularly. When I was in wild, natural places, I felt intimacy with the landscape. But then I would leave those places and go back to my normal life and not necessarily consider how my individual choices impacted the nature both immediately surrounding me and further away. 

The summer I turned 16, I took two big, impactful trips. The first was a two week trip to western Europe. Due to the repeated historic human settlement across all of Europe, there are not wild places in the same way that the United States has wild places. However, I felt more connected to nature while in the urban environments of Europe than in urban environments of the U.S. Green spaces and common gathering spaces are regular features of European cities. They are more pedestrian centered than most cities in the U.S. and thus have many features of sustainable urban planning without even necessarily meaning to. 

I recall walking in Lucerne, Switzerland and taking the gondola nearby to Mt. Pilatus. I was surrounded by beautiful mountains and water but I was on a city street, and I felt connected to the natural world around me, not separate from it as I did in my home city of Memphis, TN. I did not realize it at the time, but looking back now I think this was the beginning of my change from a preservationist to an ecologist. 

The second trip was a Girl Scout Wider Opportunity (high school aged Girl Scouts from all over the U.S. meet up and take a unique trip together with a certain theme) to the Puget Sound. The theme was “We all live downstream.” This local Girl Scout Council and the nonprofit organization Sound Experience hosted this wider op. The premise of this wider opportunity was that we would all take a 6 night trip on a historic sailing vessel and learn sail training and environmental education, especially about water. Then we would take what we learned off of the ship Adventuress and learn more about the land piece of the watershed that feeds the Puget Sound. After the full trip, every participant would return home and develop a program in our local Girl Scout council about water quality and water issues. 

This trip was life-changing for me. The education was all about the interconnectedness of the species that live in the Puget Sound area. We studied tidepool critters, learning about their adaptations and the different tidal zones. We learned about marine mammals and salmon, how the land habitat affects the creeks home to the traveling salmon which then affects the ecosystems of estuaries and oceans. We experimented with how different routine things–washing the car, fertilizing grass, construction–impact water quality, which affects all the lives in and near the water, including humans. 

There was this one lesson, Who Polluted the Puget Sound. The teacher or another participant would read a little card, something like “John washes his car in his driveway and the soap goes down the storm drain” or “Farmer Jack harvested his crops and tilled the soil and left it void of seeds. The first fall rainstorm came and washed the soil into the river that borders his farm.” 

And with each card, some items were added to the pot of water that represented the Puget Sound. Coffee grounds to represent dirt. Soap bubbles to represent soap. Grass clippings to represent grass. By the end of the lesson, the pot is just disgusting and not like any water you want to swim in or that a marine animal would want to live in. That lesson taught me to look at my individual actions in a completely different way than I had before. 

Sound Experience frames their ship, the Adventuress, as a metaphor for the earth. While we were learning about the marine habitat and organisms and riparian zones and watersheds, we were also tracking the ship’s use of resources and laboring together to raise sails and tidy the ship, feed everybody and entertain each other without the use of technology. 

Using the ship and the people on the ship as a metaphor for the world was powerful, both in the environmental realm and the human realm. I saw the labor and energy that went into keeping the ship sailing and in good condition, just like the human labor and energy that powers the world. We tracked our fuel used and our waste production, food and garbage and sewage. We tracked how much water we used. It really emphasized the finiteness of the Earth’s resources. 

Path to a profession

I took the lessons about interconnectedness forward with me. I initially majored in Animal Science: Pre-Vet, but after being a party to castrating squealing piglets, I realized the hands-on work of animal husbandry was not for me. I switched my major to basically Ecology, though it was called Bioresource Research: Sustainable Ecosystems. I also added a minor in Natural Resource and Environmental Law and Policy. 

As part of my degree, I had to conduct an undergraduate thesis. I studied butterfly bush, a nursery crop that was invasively spreading to wild river bars and former industrial sites. I did a mix of horticultural and ecological research. I was able to give presentations to land managers about my research and thoroughly enjoyed it, the education piece. I did not particularly enjoy the research piece. I learned I like to educate others about what science tells us, but not necessarily do the research of science myself. So after college I pursued a career in environmental education with children. After doing that for 5 years I taught middle school science for 2 years and then began raising a family full-time. 

I am still raising a family full-time, but they are in school a decent chunk of time now so I have space to pursue my own interests again. One thing I learned through my journey as a parent who struggles with mental health issues is that I have to write in order to be emotionally well. So I have decided to turn my soul’s need to write into a career, and have decided to be a science communicator/educator but with adults this time. 

Where I am now

And that brings me to where I am now, pursuing a certificate in science communication and considering how to get into policy-making about science and environmental issues. 

I know I must write, and I am doing that in multiple ways, through this blog and through writing as a volunteer for local non-profits, and in my classwork. I also believe that I want my writing to have an impact, and I see entering the world of policy as one path to impact. I want to be in the room with policy makers, communicating what science says is a good solution to a problem while also considering the sociological and human factors of implementation and real systemic change, because that is what we really need. There are many crises all converging at once, and I want to respond to those crises with science based but reality driven solutions.