Sense of Place
My passion for plants and ecology started when I was a kid, climbing through the gulch in my grandmother’s backyard with my sister and cousin and marking the biggest trees on our hand-drawn map so we could find our way through the blackberries. We also searched the beach for treasures and creatures; our greatest find was a small octopus, washed up in the afternoon. By high school, I was volunteering with a neighborhood park’s restoration group, this time climbing through different gulches and recording wildlife at different beaches. When I left for college, environmental sciences was the obvious choice. I learned a lot at the University of Oregon, but one professor’s question has always stuck with me: why do so many students travel out of state to study ecology when ecology is inherently rooted in a sense of place? I became an ecologist because I fell in love with the forests in my backyard, yet as an ecologist I have found myself travelling further and further away.
After college I followed the seasonal work route, first as an interpreter at Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming, where I learned about communicating with diverse communities, bringing passion to public audiences, and how different local groups interact with a place like the tower. I worked as a research assistant on the Tongass National Forest in Juneau, Alaska, re-joining the research field. The forests of southeast Alaska also felt more like home, more like the ecology I grew up with. My graduate research at University of Colorado – Denver built on my experience on the Tongass, and I studied Alaska yellow-cedar decline. My field work, primarily in Oregon and Washington, brought me back to the forest I knew. After reassessing my goals during the pandemic, I knew it was time to go home.
Ecological research is incredibly important, particularly as we navigate threats such as climate change, habitat loss, and overexploitation. I found, though, that as COVID pushed my research to be more focused on models than what I saw in the field, that what we need is also to have a sense of place. We need to understand the guiding principles and understand how things are changing, but we also need to remember the ecosystems we grew up in and fell in love with. As someone who wants to work in the environmental field, I’m going to bring my sense of place with me, and I’m going to share that with as many people as I can.
