From Earth, With Love

I grew up in western Michigan, on the shore of Lake Michigan. I was always in the lake or going to the beach. In my hometown was another body of water that was contaminated due to severe runoff of phosphorus from farmland. Its name is Lake Macatawa — and the nickname for it was Lake Maca-toilet, because it smelled like rotting fish. It was a resource that was meant to be enjoyed, just like Lake Michigan, but it couldn’t be enjoyed. It was supposed to be a gift, and it was a threat instead. I started understanding that more deeply when I went on service-learning trips to West Virginia in college and witnessed another group of people living with dangerous water. They lived downstream from mountaintop-removal coal mining operations that had poisoned their drinking water. I started to ask, “Why is water a gift for some people and a threat for others?” I came to understand that how we treat the world around us is directly related to how we treat our neighbor.

One important childhood memory for me was going to the Comal River with my family. We would take trips at least a couple times a year [and go tubing]. I really enjoyed being in the water, even though I wasn’t a strong swimmer. Having those kinds of childhood experiences informed my appreciation for just spending time outside, and having that relationship with the land and the water in that way. At the Bloom Project, we organize our curriculum around a theme each year. In our first year, our theme was water. At our first camping trip, we were tent camping along the Guadalupe River. I remember one of our youth, who was 11, said the next morning that it was the best sleep that he had gotten. He talked about how soothing it was to hear the flow of the river. It’s moments like that where I’m able to witness [kids] developing their own relationships with their environment. That’s one memory that I’ve kept close.

I grew up in a community that was near a park, but also near a petrochemical plant. I had the balance of having access to a park, but also being impacted by environmental injustice. By the time I was 30, I had dealt with cancer twice. I’ve dedicated my life to working to improve the conditions in communities — working to build coalitions and build networks to build the power, so that we can put that power in the hands of folks who can really drive the change and the solutions for the communities they live in.

I grew up in a fairly low-income immigrant family. We lived in the heart of a city and access to fresh food was a challenge. But we had urban gardens before it was trendy. Nobody called it urban agriculture back then, but it was basically for the purpose of having affordable food. We would grow tomatoes and herbs on the fire escape, and cucumbers and eggplants up a trellis on the side of a building. I have some really strong memories of growing food in a concrete area. As I grew up, I thought about the challenges in cities — access to affordable, local, fresh food; to safe outdoor green spaces; to the community connections that make people happy and healthy.

[In March of 2019], I went to do a project on musk ox in Kotzebue, Alaska, in the northwest Arctic. I took along a friend and producer. We drove in on a snow machine on a frozen river, which is how you get around in the north. As I’m coming up onto the bank of the river, I can see something’s not right with the ice. It was probably 35, 45 degrees out, which is way too warm for that time of year. My instincts just kicked in. I flipped the machine 90 degrees, knowing that it would essentially trap me underneath. The sled [carrying my friend Will] broke off and kept sailing. And, out of the corner of my eye, I could see it — there was a rotting hole in the ice. In the back of my head, I was thinking, “Oh my God, what am I gonna tell his wife?” Fortunately, Will had passed by the hole and hadn’t actually gone into it. We had to call off the two-week shoot and go home. That was the year when I felt like I can’t shy away from talking about climate anymore.

I was asked to find a spot on the farm that was calling to me. I went to a patch of calendula flowers and sat there, surrounded by very tall, massive trees. All of the things around me felt magical in their seeming simplicity. A flower has a stem, it has petals, but it has so many systems working. I thought, “If someone steps on this, it’s all gone, so easily.” We have a responsibility to continually take care of these things so that we can eat food or just enjoy a pretty flower. One thing I might want to do when I graduate is be a psychologist — there are therapy programs that happen in the wilderness. There’s something about nature that makes life more happy.

I was born in Singapore. My father taught us about various things in the environment, and he loved to keep tropical fish. I migrated to Australia as a student and [fell in love with] the diversity of animals — kangaroos, wombats — and the Great Barrier Reef is such an amazing wonder. In 2017, I came across an article about the danger of losing the reef, and discovered that [multinational conglomerate Adani was] going to start a mega coal mine in Queensland. It upset me to think that my grandchildren may not be able to see the Great Barrier Reef in nature. They might have to go to the museum to see what was. So I connected with other people, went to central Queensland, and locked myself to a gate. That was my first activism. Since then, I’ve been arrested three more times.

Prince William Sound is all trees and bounty, the freshness of the air, the saltwater on your lips, the wind in your hair. We were heading out to sea, [my father and I], when I was 10 or 12 years old. One of the batteries in our engine room was no good, and he had bought a new one. These batteries are like 3 feet long, and they’re heavy — 70, 80 pounds apiece. He handed one up to me and said, “Throw this overboard.” I said, “I’m not going to throw that overboard.” And he said, “Why not?” I said, “We fish in these waters. Why would we throw our garbage overboard?” That was a turning point for me. I went on a campaign telling people it was wrong to throw garbage into the ocean. We’re one of the last Native fishing families left in the entire industry. When my mother told me I was the one, at [age] 10, that was going to help save our people and our way of life and everything Eyak, I took that literally. I felt I had to stand up for the ocean.

The Chiricahua Mountains in southeastern Arizona was where I got my first opportunity to do field research. It wasn’t until I got into the field that I fully comprehended what it meant to be an ecologist and a herpetologist. My first summer out there was probably one of the best summers of my entire life. At the research station, there were a bunch of other scientists from all around the world coming in to do research on various plants and animals in the area, as well as volunteers. When I had a day off, I would go with other researchers to see what they were doing. I got to stay up all night doing bat stuff; I would go out with the toad people. It was a great time. All these like-minded people were gathering together because we love the environment, and we want to do our part in making it better — but also have a fulfilling experience while doing it.

Growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I would visit the woods and lake near my house after school. In this particular lake, [utility companies] would fluctuate the water level for hydropower. I didn’t know what I was seeing at the time, but I noticed that when the water level would go down, wildflowers would come back. There would be this beautiful ring of wildflowers where the water had been. That piqued my interest. I thought, “What is causing that? What makes these flowers resilient, but not others?” These questions formed my career. This resilience is how prairies form — when plants and animals proliferate after a disturbance like a flood or fire. I fell in love with that and fell in love with the importance of this mission — that without these species, our prairies are gone.

I fell in love with the outdoors in August 2019, after venturing out on my first hike. My friend Matt invited me out with his wife and their puppy to Castlewood State Park in Ballwin, Missouri. It was a short, 1.7-mile hike, but it was so perfect — the sunlight on my skin, the wind in my hair. I remember feeling free and happy. I wanted my family and friends to share in this therapeutic experience, but there was a lot of reluctance in the Black community. I was determined to change this mindset. From that vision, Black People Who Hike was born. When everyone can experience this same love for the outdoors, we will see a shift in how we go about caring for the environment. Outdoor recreation is the first step in creating conservationists. And in that process, they are not only saving the environment but saving their own lives.

In May of 2021, I was back home in the Bahamas doing research for a New York Times article about climate reparations. I was going through some of the places that were damaged by Hurricane Dorian in 2019. Fields of trees were snapped in half from the wind and blackened by rot. Swamps of mangroves were gray and brittle. I saw how long it was taking the land to heal, and how much people were suffering. It really shook me to my core to understand that we’re too late for the Bahamas. But it then transformed into, “We’re too late for some damage, but this shit can get a lot worse.” And it galvanized me. Witnessing how bruised the landscape was really brought home how things need to be done now to prevent that. It made the stakes so much clearer.

From ages 12 to 18, I lived on a farm on the outskirts of Lawrence, Kansas. I had 11 brothers and sisters. We grew wheat, fruit, and [raised] animals. We had to get our own firewood, our own eggs. We called this “living off the fat of the land.” Being responsible for the land means you take care of it, and it takes care of you. There’s an element of freedom in there — freedom and democracy. I would say that farming, agriculture, the whole process is democracy in action. Having those life experiences really shaped the way I look at the environment. There’s so much give and take — not necessarily compromise, but cooperation.

When I was about 22, I was going through a really hard time in life. I graduated college early and had my heart broken by a girl. I didn’t really know what to do with my time. I just got in my car with absolutely no plan. I went on this long road trip up and down the West Coast, and I found it to be incredibly healing. I realized my oldest and best friend is the Pacific Ocean. [I remember] walking down this trail, trying to find a meditative hiking pace, and then coming to this beach and feeling awestruck — alone on this Northern California shore — at a time when I needed it most. My biggest hope for the world is that we realize that the natural world is an illusion. It is us, and we are it. The suffering and pain that we’re inflicting on the natural world is just hurting ourselves.

Growing up a missionary kid and a pastor’s son, I was always in church. I was always surrounded by people who seemed to be on a different level of experience than I was. But then [as an adult], I was finally pursuing my dream, which was marine biology. When I discovered scuba diving, it was like this world that no one had ever told me about. Some friends took me [diving] at Carmel River State Beach. We come around a corner, revealing in front of us this bright patch where the sun is shining directly through the canopy and dancing on the sand. And it’s surrounded by a fairy ring of kelp. That sense of scale — the awe, the calm — everything stopped. That was the first moment where I was truly humbled by the universe around me, feeling small and big at the same time.

I grew up in rural Florida. My family was poor; we had one working parent and the other was disabled at home. Because I couldn’t do a lot of other activities, I spent a lot of time just hanging out in my yard, watching the birds and the plants and looking at the moon at night. That helped me feel like I belonged somewhere, because I didn’t feel like I belonged at school or in society. I founded Disabled Hikers in March of 2018. The specific incident that inspired it was when I was hiking a new section of a trail system that I was already familiar with and had done tons of research about. But I got out there and immediately encountered lots of barriers and steep stairs and sharp drop-offs. That wasn’t listed in any of the guides I read. It put me in a dangerous situation, and I wound up exhausted and in pain by the time I finished the hike. In that moment, inspiration struck. I went home and threw up a blog on WordPress, and before I knew it, it was taking off.

I initially grew up in the suburban D.C. area. At the time, there was a lot of undeveloped land and land that was developing — which, as a kid, was actually kind of a great thing. There were these safe spaces where my friends and I would go, [like] to the local pond to collect tadpoles. It felt really wild to us. There was a lot of opportunity for exploration in the woods that seemed unending, but probably weren’t all that big. I’m a faculty member at Stanford University — I run the Social Ecology Lab, [where] we study the relationship between people and the nature-rich world. A lot of research shows the importance of what’s seemingly unsupervised play outside, in these wildlike settings. I think a lot of that was probably really influential for me, [in developing] a sense of mastery, curiosity, and exploration.