Conservation at Chronic Illness Girly Pace
I've been thinking about what I want to be when I grow up again.
I have my master's in environmental studies and sustainability, and I've been circling the idea of eventually pursuing a PhD. I don't have a dissertation proposal hiding in a drawer yet, but I think I'm starting to understand the kind of scholar I want to become.
I want to tap into my inner Temperance Brennan.
Except instead of bones, give me native plants, fighting invasive species, climate adaptation, environmental justice, Indigenous knowledge, Land Back, and an unreasonable personal grudge against multiflora rose.
Also, Brennan is going to take more naps.
The academic version of what interests me might be something like this:
How can disabled, rural, or resource-limited people participate in sustainability, conservation, and climate adaptation through small-scale land stewardship, research communication, and accessible environmental practices?
But I think there's something bigger underneath that question.
Who gets to be an environmental steward?
There are a lot of assumptions hiding inside our ideas about environmentalism.
You can volunteer at the habitat restoration day.
You can hike into the field site.
You can spend Saturday removing invasive plants.
You can replace your lawn.
You can buy the more sustainable option.
You can drive your recycling somewhere if curbside pickup isn't available.
You can install solar panels, buy an electric car, build raised beds, plant trees, compost, attend meetings, join organizations, travel to conferences, and somehow still have energy left to remember which plastics your recycling program accepts.
Cool.
What if you can't?
I'm interested in an environmentalism that starts there instead of treating it as an unfortunate footnote.
Sometimes conservation looks like pulling three weeds
I live on a small piece of rural Missouri land, which means I have the privilege of being able to directly affect an ecosystem I care about.
It does not mean I have unlimited ability to do so.
Sometimes I can go outside and work.
Sometimes I can pull invasive plants by hand.
Sometimes I can identify what's growing, watch what's flowering, notice where water collects, or make plans for what I'd eventually like the land to become.
Sometimes my body informs me that today's contribution to conservation will be lying down.
So I lie down.
The plants will still be there later.
This has made me think differently about what counts as meaningful environmental work.
If I pull three invasive plants before I'm done for the day, there are three fewer invasive plants producing seed.
If I leave a patch of native vegetation alone instead of mowing it, I've accomplished something by not doing work.
If I learn to identify another species on my property, I understand my little ecosystem better than I did yesterday.
If I explain something I've learned to somebody else in language they can actually understand, I've contributed something even though I never put on a pair of field boots.
None of these things will single-handedly restore an ecosystem.
They don't have to.
Conservation needs people who can't give it 40 hours a week
This is where I think my potential PhD-shaped rabbit hole begins.
I want to know what environmental participation looks like when we stop designing it around the most physically, financially, and geographically privileged participant.
What can someone accomplish from a rural property with limited transportation?
What can a disabled person meaningfully contribute when their capacity changes from day to day?
What conservation practices have the greatest ecological benefit for the least physical labor or financial investment?
How can citizen and community science include people who can't hike a transect?
How can research communication itself become a form of environmental participation?
How do we make useful environmental knowledge available to people who don't have journal subscriptions, graduate degrees, reliable broadband, abundant free time, or the physical capacity to implement a 47-step sustainability plan?
And how much could we learn by taking seriously the people who already know their little pieces of land intimately?
There is another important limit to my expertise
Being interested in Indigenous knowledge does not make that knowledge mine.
Any serious version of this work would have to distinguish between learning from scholarship about Indigenous land stewardship and treating Indigenous knowledge as another collection of techniques for Western researchers to extract.
Land Back matters here precisely because conservation isn't only a question of how land should be managed. It is also a question of who has authority over land, whose knowledge is recognized, and who gets to make decisions about it.
I don't know yet exactly where that fits into the work I eventually want to do.
I do know I don't want to leave it out because it's complicated.
Maybe my niche is small environmentalism
Not small because it doesn't matter.
Small because it's the scale at which many of us actually have agency.
A yard.
A rented balcony.
A few acres.
A community garden.
A roadside.
A computer.
A neighborhood.
Three invasive plants you had enough energy to pull today.
Maybe my future research lives somewhere between conservation science, accessibility, environmental justice, climate adaptation, rural studies, and science communication.
Maybe there's a dissertation hiding in there.
For now, I'm increasingly interested in a simple proposition:
You shouldn't have to be wealthy, able-bodied, urban, professionally employed in conservation, or capable of working yourself into the ground to have a meaningful relationship with environmental stewardship.
The planet does not need me to destroy myself trying to save it.
The Multiflora rose on my property, unfortunately, will have to be destroyed at chronic illness girly pace.