As a small child, my plan was to become a marine biologist.
I loved animals and the ocean. As I grew, my interests expanded but I continued
to be interested in the environment and ecology. My major in college was
environmental science. I thought that if people just had clear facts, we could
convince everyone to do the right thing, and protect the environment. Over time
realized that despite clear scientific evidence, humans often choose to prioritize
other things.
After college, I began working in environmental education,
thinking that education was the solution. If I could just get people to care
about the natural world the way I did, to see the wonderful diversity of life
the way I did, they would want to help protect it. I worked for almost a decade
in science and environmental education. I enjoyed being outside, making science
accessible to people, and sharing what I loved.
I ended up going to graduate school and becoming a geographer because
of what I noticed visiting schools all over northern California. What I saw was
the incredible disparities between schools and neighborhoods in terms of how
much science education children got and even how much opportunity they had to
play outside. Some neighborhoods were paved over and devoid of opportunities to
learn about living things.
When I started graduate school, I wanted to become landscape
architect and design enriching landscapes for children and youth. If I wasn’t a
geography professor, I would likely be a landscape architect today. If it wasn’t
for the financial crisis in 2008, which decimated jobs in landscape
architecture, I might have continued and gotten a job in a design firm or with
a planning office. Last summer I was sitting, sipping gin and tonics, with two of
my close friends, who are also geography professors, and we discovered that we
had all wanted to be landscape architects. So there you go, I'm secretly a frustrated landscape architect.
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