In the acknowledgements for some super annoying software I am being forced to use at a workshop this week is this gem:

I, Arthur Gilmour, thank Jesus Christ for His forgiveness and personal support over many years. As He has said Behold I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear my voice and open the door I will come in, and sup with him and he with me. (Revelation 3:20). I thank the Lord for the privilege of collaborating with several very gifted people including those involved in the ASReml project, acknowledging their acceptance, generosity, patience and perseverence toward a boy from Boree Creek. The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament (earth) shows His handiwork. Psalm 19:1 Be exalted O God, above the heavens: and Thy glory above all the earth. Psalm 108:5.

This totally makes up for the two hours of hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing the program induced this afternoon. My favorite part is the parenthetical clarification of “firmament.”

I interviewed awesome ecologists at the 2011 Ecological Society of America meeting in exchange for reader donations, which paid for my conference attendance. This is the last – but certainly not the least – in a series of posts about those interviews.

I met Ana-Elisa through the SEEDS program. Every year, ESA’s SEEDS program brings a group of undergraduate students with diverse backgrounds and interests to ESA. The SEEDS program has a lot of special events for the students and matches each student with a meeting mentor. The formal support of the program and the informal support from all the other amazing SEEDS students makes a big conference like ESA more fun and productive and way less overwhelming. Ana-Elisa is very involved in SEEDS at ESA and really brings the students together into an energized community. SEEDS isn’t the only place she does this.

Activist

She’s worked tirelessly to get protection for the Northeastern Ecological Corridor in Puerto Rico and inspired a great deal of community and political support. Some of her work on the NEC is detailed in this video, made when she won a Brower Youth Award in 2010.
As part of her effort to develop and save the NEC and to solve other ecological and environmental problems in Puerto Rico, Ana Elisa founded GAIA, sort of an umbrella organization to facilitate action by many smaller environmental groups. Impressively, Ana Elisa was just 15 when she started GAIA with a few other dedicated young activists. With her passion for Puerto Rico’s people and environment, GAIA has accomplished a great deal.

Despite all she’s accomplished, Ana Elisa is far from boastful and speaks candidly about some of the challenges she and GAIA have faced. She feels that GAIA lacked focus early on and tried to do too much at once. They were also ignorant of the rules governing nonprofits; the confusing maze of bureaucracy they faced limited GAIA’s effectiveness. With the experience of starting GAIA under her belt, Ana Elisa is approaching Puerto Rico’s environmental problems with vision and energy.

She has a strong sense of place and believes that local environmental movements are essential; we must know what’s happening on the ground to our own communities to come up with effective solutions. At the same time, local movements are small and disorganized and lack political power. This is where Ana Elisa and GAIA come in. Environmental problems are local, but everyone everywhere has similar problems. She believes we must work together at multiple scales and build coalitions. One of the challenges of doing this in the environmental movement is that there are all these urgent crises that need to be worked out at the same time that we need to focus on building coalitions so that we can actually solve problems. This isn’t an easy task – it’s like trying to set up a fire department while the town is on fire.

Activist scientist

Ana Elisa combines her environmental activism with ecological research in the emerging field of action ecology, which explicitly includes humans and leads to both environmental and social change. For example, in a project with her advisor Helda Morales, Ana Elisa considered how different weed management strategies influenced ecological diversity and agricultural production and then worked with farmers to record and communicate their strategies, preserving and sharing at risk traditional knowledge. One of the things holding organic farming back is a loss or lack of knowledge of exactly this type [h/t Eric]. Now you can google it!

What does an ecologist do, anyway?

Last year at ESA, Doctor Zen pointed out how conflicted ESA seems:

Ecology seems to be a field locked in heated argument about whether it is an academic research science, or a mix of science and political action group. The society, and its members, seem to be utterly conflicted, from the point of view of this onlooker.

Ana Elisa and scientists like her may represent a possible resolution to ecology’s internal conflict – as long as we leave plenty of room for science that’s just for the sake of knowing.

I went to an awesome conference in my subfield a few weeks ago. The location was gorgeous, I got my own room, the talks were all well prepared and about stuff I’m gaga over. There were enough acquaintances attending to feel comfortable and enough new folks to make some useful connections. Plus, the conference sponsors gave away lots of free and super nerdy books.

I also got to interact a lot more with two postdocs from my university who I had developed little science crushes on and started to really admire. When I prepare for discussion groups, I try to work through the material as deeply as they do. When people ask me questions, I try to respond as carefully and thoughtfully as they do. When they say a book really made an impression on them, I go read it. So, naturally, I was pretty excited to spend more time with them.

The thing about role models, though, is that they can really let you down.

I took a walk with these postdocs after a long day of talks. Somehow the conversation turned from cool research in my subfield to poverty and homelessness. Specifically, how the homeless people one postdoc saw couldn’t possibly be homeless because they were sitting out in the rain instead of finding shelter. Then the other postdoc jumped in, and suddenly they were talking about how annoying it is to have to walk around homeless people on the sidewalk, how offensive it is for homeless people to ask you for money, and just generally being disparaging of the poor and especially the homeless.

I’ve never been homeless, but we were poor enough that my mom used to put water in the milk to make it go a little further. I’m now one of the most financially stable people in my family, and I’m a fucking graduate student. My family isn’t lazy or buying lots of fancy toys, they’re just really unlucky. (Things are a little better for them now. With a lot of hard work and a little good luck, they aren’t putting water in the milk anymore. My mom even saved enough money a few years ago to visit me!)

Anyway, at some point in the last six months, I’d started to identify with these postdocs, to see some part of myself in them. And that made me feel more confident (or at least hopeful) about my own potential. When they started talking about the poor like they had some sort of disease, all that vanished. Suddenly, they were just impossibly clever and talented people that I had nothing in common with.

Later I got angry, told myself how ignorant and privileged they were and got right back to doing my work and loving it.

But in the moment, I couldn’t say anything to them. Instead, I just muttered an excuse and took a different trail, irrationally terrified that if I opened my mouth they would know that I’d been poor. Being poor is nothing to be ashamed of, but when people talk like those postdocs it is so hard not to be hurt and humiliated. If I hadn’t looked up to them, personally and professionally, it would have been easier for me to deal with their poor-people trashing. I still would have been hurt and angry, but I wouldn’t have spent even a second questioning my ability to do my job.

If you say something and then I say, “WHAT?! You don’t know about <some cool thing>!?!” you might think that I think you’re stupid for not knowing about <some cool thing>. Actually, I am just really, really excited that I get to tell you how cool <some cool thing> is.

When you took a class from your supervisor and wrote almost all of the term paper in one intense weekend with three whole days to polish and check references and then accidentally overwrote it with an old outline backup 24 hours before the deadline?

One day this is going to be a funny story.

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