Belowground Activity

This essay was originally written for and published in Loam Magazine: Reawakening Resilience.

Soil has always been among my favorite things. Its sweet and full smell has always been intoxicating. The colors within it span a spectrum from creamy taupe to vibrant ochre and the bright black of a dying ember. When held, its cold weight in your hand is a reminder of how much water, and life, it contains. I came to love soil because of intuition, disposition, and luck. My hands met soil because my parents bought a house in the suburbs after years of living in an East Coast city. They moved to a place with groves of trees and occasional farms because they wanted a good life for their children. The good life, it seemed, was nearer to soil. So through happenstance and proximity, I become acquainted with the earth’s skin. As my parents dug deep into the ground to plant gardens in our new suburban space, I found myself increasingly familiar with the dead and dying material under my often-bare feet.
In college, I found myself thinking more about how to turn my familiarity with nature and love of asking questions into a career. I was fortunate to find people who encouraged that interest, and I found my way to graduate school to study forest ecosystems. But as I went from being a lover of nature to an expert, I began to see that my aspiration to be an ecologist was not just anomalous, but a disturbance to a much larger structure. It wasn’t just unique that a young girl with brown skin and thick, curly hair fell in love with soil, or that she even that she transmuted that love into a job. It struck me that the rarity of women of color becoming environmental experts was no accident, but by design.

Read More