As humans, we are obsessed with labels, we categorize everything we see in order to feel like we understand what they are. These labels can be incredibly freeing and simultaneously constricting. Finding someone who can recognize and resonate with a label we hold closely to our heart can bring a great sense of comfort and satisfy our need to belong. Everyone has labels, identities, that they are proud of, that they want others to see, that are crucial to the way that they orient themselves in this world. While some labels are placed upon us, they only gain power when we choose to give them a space in our life. There are some labels that fit together nicely- a square peg in a square hole. But what happens when they don't? When we question the validity of the combination of labels we’ve decided are true for ourselves? When the dissonance of the multiple dimensions of who we are as a person is louder than the voice of any one label? Is there a way to reconcile the feeling that the conglomeration of our identities can’t function together?
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Growing up in the Los Angeles area, the environment, in the hiking-mountains-camping-in-the-woods-save-the-earth way, was not something I experienced or could conceptualize. The woods were not my backyard, and they always felt like a place I would never reach. A road trip to a national park never felt like an accessible reality. A road trip would mean an unnecessary long drive where my parents would have to risk getting pulled over at any moment, and have their undocumented status uncovered. A road trip would mean taking time off from work, only to spend extra money camping, when money was already scarce. The word “environment” wasn’t in my vocabulary and nature felt like it only existed in my imagination.
Even though I didn’t have the right language or knowledge to identify these feelings, I can remember constantly being captivated by the earth, even in the small doses I was able to experience it. Growing up, whenever someone was sick, I would be sent to the yard to pick some mint leaves to make the tea that I knew would make everything better. I would be in disbelief that a simple plant could overwhelm me with the fresh, not-quite-toothpaste scent that I came to associate so strongly with comfort and healing. Our flower beds were small, but I always managed to find some earthworms and rolly pollys to tickle my hand each in their own way. I knew that the beach was only a 15 minute drive away, yet every time I could taste the salt in the air as the ocean appeared over the horizon, my chest would swell and fill with excitement. I was known to be the first, and last, person in the water, regardless of the conditions that the Pacific tried to throw at me that day. While others ran around the playground at recess, you could find me stealthily crawling behind a moth in order to enclose it with my hands, and feel the flutter of it's scared wings against my skin for a moment.
While my family was impressed by my lack of fear for bugs or the ocean, they never labeled me as anything other than a weird kid. I often wonder if someone had shown me that the euphoria I experienced in those moments could be more than just a fleeting feeling, I could have found my way to environmentalism sooner.
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As an unsuspecting 15 year old, little did I know that a decision to submit one application would change my life forever. The summer after my sophomore year of high school, I was awarded with an Earthwatch Ignite fellowship that allowed me to go on a fully funded expedition to Jackson Hole, Wyoming to research songbirds for 2 weeks. In all honesty, I was less than enthusiastic about Wyoming, especially after hearing that other Ignite teams were going to places like Belize and the Bahamas. I remember thinking to myself, How is my friend about to spend two weeks in the BAHAMAS, and I’m going to middle-of-nowhere Wyoming? What is there to see in Wyoming?! But a quick reality check reminded me that I was about to go on a trip that my family couldn’t even picture in their minds. I decided to give Wyoming a shot and I couldn’t have ever imagined all of the moments I would experience while I was there, or the overwhelming sense of enchantment I would feel.
Before we even set foot in Jackson, I knew that the next 2 weeks would be unlike anything I’d experienced before. Even from thousands of feet up in the air, I was closer to mountains than I had ever been in my entire life. When I walked off the plane, mountain ranges stretched in every direction that I looked. The perfect baby blue sky was so different than the smog ridden horizons I was so used to seeing. All of us being from LA, we were all having trouble breathing the oxygen rich, clean air, and the smell of trees surrounded us everywhere we went. Every second my body tried to process how different it was, absorbing this place, and overloading with senses as I took it all in. I thought I would get used to it, but I never did. Every perfectly puffed cloud, every sunrise and set, even the taste of the water. I couldn’t get over how different this place felt.
It didn’t take long for me to realize how severely unprepared I was to embark on this journey - both emotionally and physically. My newly bought, cheap hiking boots made my feet sore within hours of wearing them. Our expedition briefing told us to bring long pants since we would be hiking through thick vegetation at times, but the only long pants I owned were sweatpants. This wasn’t obvious to my 15 year old self, but hiking in sweatpants every day for 2 weeks gets pretty darn sweaty. When our field assistant looked at my pants for the first time, she couldn’t help but look concerned, and told me she had spare pants I could borrow if I got too warm. When I read, “Make sure you can carry at least 2 liters of water” in our packing list, I thought that the large, adventurous looking canteen I saw at Walmart was my best bet. (Surprise: it broke on our first hike.) How was I supposed to know what a Camelbak was? Given that I had never hiked prior to this, I was pretty nervous about the prospect of hiking at least 4 miles every day. As I trailed at the back of the group on those first few strenuous hikes, and discovered the aggressive reaction my immune system has to pollen, I confirmed my fears that I was not cut out for this. As we reached the top of the hike with the greatest elevation gain we would do during the two weeks, our trip facilitator reassuringly told me “You know, for someone who’s never hiked before, you’re doing a great job keeping up with the group.” Those words were all I needed to reach the end of every trail. From then on out, I would lead the pack as we hiked from site to site on our search for songbird nests. There wasn’t a single mountain that could keep me from seeing everything Wyoming had to offer.
Every morning we would rise to the sound of our facilitator knocking on our cabin doors before sunrise, because the early bird really does get the worm. This also meant that we were on a pretty tight curfew, but for the 4th of July, they let us stay up late to watch a fireworks show. That was the only day that I actually saw a Wyoming sunset, because the sun wouldn’t set until past 10pm on most days. I was in awe of the fact that even as the sky darkened, you could still see the bright reds, radiating yellows, and warm oranges of the sun peeking out behind the Grand Tetons in the distance. As the earth transitioned from day to night, the world sounded different, as nocturnal animals started to claim their space for the evening. I don’t think there is anything that can compare to that midsummer night that I sat on the side of a hill, with the 10 people I was sharing this life changing experience with, but were nothing more than strangers days before, and saw what the night sky looks like without light pollution. In the distance, there was lightning striking the top of another hill as if the universe was screaming at me to pay attention. I looked up and was mesmerized by the endless blanket of stars that speckled the sky. You always hear about the Milky Way, but I never thought I would be able to see the band of bright light stretching across the sky for myself. The sight of what seemed like an infinite amount of stars that night has stayed with me ever since, and I can’t help but feel disappointed as I look to the heavens every night longing to see those blotches of light once again.
The Milky Way was not my only “first” in Wyoming. Every day I was checking things off my bucket list that I never knew I wanted to do. As I put on my boots on the porch of my cabin in the mornings, I would be greeted by families of deer passing by. Birds were always something that I took for granted, and now I was given the opportunity to slow down, and see them for the awe-inspiring creatures that they are. From holding a recently banded bird in my hand, to finding bright blue eggs in a robin’s nest, and watching fledglings quite literally spread their wings and fly, I treasured getting to develop such an intimate relationship with these birds. Bears, snakes, moose, and bison are some of the most memorable characters off of my “animals I’ve never seen before” list. As I experienced all of these firsts, I couldn’t help but wonder why no one ever told me about any of this. Why hadn’t anyone shown me that science didn't have to mean being inside? How could I be made to believe that places that seem so untouched by humans didn’t exist anymore? It felt like there was a whole world out there that was being hidden from me.
Jackson Hole quickly became the image of the environment that I would hold in my mind, and in my heart, for years to come. As I often say, it is where I fell in love with the earth, and, to this day, I still refer to my time in Wyoming as the best 2 weeks of my life. But when I got back to LA, there was no one to help me continue to foster this love, and nature returned to being just a fantasy. Science once again became something I would only experience in a classroom, and I would often long to be surrounded by the spectrum of green I had grown accustomed to seeing. I was teased so much for trying to teach my friends the few bird calls I took pride in knowing, that they quickly faded from my memory. As more time passed, Wyoming started to feel more like a dream than a reality I had lived. It wouldn’t be until years later when I first questioned what I actually wanted to do with my education, and my life, that I realized just how much Wyoming had changed me.
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The summer before my freshman year at Stanford, people would often ask me what I was planning on studying. In high school, I always heard “Hey you’re pretty good at chemistry” and “You know, you seem to like biology,” so naturally I would very confidently respond with, “I’m planning on majoring in Biochemistry with an Environmental Focus!” I was too clueless to realize that 1. I had no idea that biochemistry did NOT mean studying both biology and chemistry, 2. Stanford didn’t even have a Biochemistry major, and 3. I was always pretty adamant about including the phrase “environmental focus,” but never found it all that significant. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I had bamboozled myself into thinking that I liked chemistry. For so long, I had defined myself by being passionate about this thing that I no longer liked, and suddenly felt incredibly lost.
During the program I did that summer, I found myself talking about Wyoming a lot. As I voiced my panic of not knowing what to major in, one of my mentors suggested that I explore some of the environmentally focused majors Stanford offers. As I read up on the Earth Systems Biosphere track, I found myself feeling comfort. Ecology? Conservation? Ecosystems? Human interaction with the environment? This sounds like all of my favorite things from biology without any of the stuff I hate! I decided to take a leap of faith, and let myself follow a path that was still partially in the dark. I decided to study Earth Systems.
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My sophomore year I was feeling overwhelmed and burnt out by everything Stanford was throwing my way. The sophomore slump was hitting me hard, and I knew that the remedy would be to get away and attempt to actually start following my passions. I decided to “study abroad” at Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey, and for the first time immerse myself in a setting that would be environmentally centered. Considering that I definitely see myself as a terrestrial ecosystem kind of gal, going to Hopkins to be in full time marine biology mode was out of my comfort zone. Even though it is only an hour and a half from campus, I felt like I was in an entirely different world. The beauty of Monterey took me by surprise and I reveled in the experiences Hopkins had to offer. The first few days, I couldn’t help but take pictures everywhere I went. From the station, the ocean was just a few steps away. I could walk, or rather clumsily stumble, into the tide pools for the first time to find my professor’s favorite snails, hold on to the rock like a mussel, and shake hands with a sea anemone. From the point, I would watch sea otters play in the kelp forests, treasure the glimpses of seal pups on the beach, and hope to be the witness of a whale breaching in the horizon. Cormorants were the first birds I had seen dive into the water, rather than swim at the surface, and I learned to look out for the orange beaks of the Oystercatchers as they swooped down for a snack. The library was definitely the main attraction. The western facing room with giant glass windows that cover the wall is the best place to watch the sunset while the waves crash against the rocky shore. For the first time since I left Wyoming, I felt like I was once again given the opportunity to feel connected to the earth. I could feel the waves of the ocean starting to pull on the strings of my heart once again.
Hopkins was the first time in my education that environmental conversations were the main course, rather than the peppermint you sometimes get at the end of a meal. I soon realized that for someone who claimed to study environmental science, I hadn’t spent all that much time actually discussing environmental issues in an academic setting. In my first week, I started to think deeply about conservation and its implications. While I knew I had a lot to learn, I was excited that I finally had the space and resources to develop these ideas.
As beautiful and relaxing as Hopkins was, it was equally intimidating. I knew that there were professors who are changing the world, and are hotshots of the conservation world, casually walking around the station. I felt like I had no right to question what they had to say about conservation, especially not in that first week. Afterall, I was just one of the undergrads that would come and go in 10 weeks time, and these people spend their entire lives thinking about their work. For one of my classes, we would hear from a series of seminar speakers, and would be gifted the words of some of the best scientists in the field. As an added bonus, my class would get to have lunch with each speaker. We hit the ground running with our first speaker Carl Safina who’s a pretty famous author who writes about human relationships to the natural world. His lecture focused on animal consciousness, and during our lunch he talked about his adventures while doing research for his book. Towards the end of the lunch, someone asked him, “What do you think is the biggest detriment to the environment right now?” Without a trace of hesitation in his voice, he sat up with all of the confidence in the world, and responded with, “Poor people! Poor people are so awful for the environment. They use fossil fuels like crazy! We really need to fix that.” As I looked up in disbelief, I saw Larry Crowder and Barb Block — two of the best scientist Hopkins has to offer, and people who had the power to mold the world of marine conservation, but more importantly my professors, and my window into environmentalism at the time — nodding their heads in agreement. They didn’t say anything to challenge what Carl Safina had put out into the world. No one said that his statement was privileged and narrow minded. No one said that it was problematic. No one said that he was wrong. And neither did I.
A silence fell over the room, but I could hear that outside the window, the world continued even though a piece of mine had just been shattered. I felt a sharp pain in my chest as I continued to hear “poor people are destroying the environment” in my head. For the first time, I felt that environmentalism had explicitly rejected me. I was poor, therefore the world of conservation didn’t want me. I didn’t belong to the same club as these world renowned scientists. The pain and sadness I was feeling transformed into frustration and anger. Over the next 10 weeks at Hopkins, that anger would grow as I expanded my knowledge of conservation. It was over the course of that quarter that I realized that all of the people who claimed to love the environment, only did so because someone showed them how to love the environment. They all grew up, in one way or another, developing their connection to the earth, or really the ocean. It was then that I realized the disparity of access to the environment, and how transformative first hand experiences could be. This was the beginning of discovering my passion for environmental education, but it would still be months before I realized how institutionally biased environmentalism can be.
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Throughout my Junior year of Stanford, I’ve had the opportunity to really dive into what it means to study the environment, and finally feel that I have strongly rooted environmental knowledge. However, that has also meant constantly discovering the complexities, and problematic history of environmentalism that has erased so many narratives, voices, and identities. The mere act of declaring something a “wild space” feels disingenuous when indigenous communities have tended and molded the land for millenia. I’ve struggled to continue to love the redwoods that are so deeply admired in California after knowing that John Muir chose to protect them because he saw them as “the noblest of a noble race.” (Which is a symbol for white supremacy if I’ve ever seen one.) As a child of immigrants, it pains me to see how the language that is used around invasive species parallels language that is used to talk about immigrants in this country. It saddens, but doesn’t surprise, me learning that people of color are the least likely to visit a National Park in the United States. As a self proclaimed environmentalist, I feel a duty to be vegetarian, yet don’t feel like I have the right to encourage others to do the same when vegetarian lifestyles are expensive and often inaccessible. It would feel incredibly hypocritical to chastise someone for their food consumption, when I know that food insecurity is a common narrative amongst the low income community. The more I learn, the more it feels that this world is not one that belongs to me, because it was not made with me in my mind.
At the same time, the longer I exist in this world, the better I feel about the space that I take up here. So what if I don’t own Patagonia, and still have never been camping? No one can deny the fact that I love being outside so much that sometimes I just genuinely want to hug a tree. When I plant tomatoes at the farm and feel the soft soil between my fingers, I feel like I’m planting an anchor that connects me to the land. My affinity (some might say obsession) for hummingbirds has inspired others to slow down and notice a creature that is amazing without anyone asking it to be. Nothing makes me happier than getting to teach 5th graders about the bugs and soil at the farm on Friday mornings. When they hear me pronounce their Spanish names correctly, I know that they see a little piece of themselves in me. Even if it's just for a moment, they feel that this whole nature thing doesn’t just have to be a field trip. Maybe it's the first sign of environmentalism in their life that they’ll remember years down the road.
My labels — my identities — were something that I hid for so long so that I wouldn’t have to feel explicitly rejected from the thing I love the most in this world. I know that my labels will push and pull each other as they create the tension that frames the life I choose to live; but learning to make room for them and watching how they grow and intertwine is a journey that I’m happy I get to take myself on.