I come from a family of immigrants, and grew up in a community of immigrants–hard working people who’s very blood, sweat, and tears were the underlying structure to my home town’s agrarian and service economies. I’ve had the fortune and privilege to receive a Bachelor’s of Science in Biology from UNC Chapel Hill, and the continued privilege to perform fieldwork in conservation and ecology for 4 years following my undergraduate experience. In that time, I surveyed oyster reefs in the Gulf of Mexico, censused trees of the Appalachian foothills, led a crew of technicians in collecting black bear DNA in coastal NC, and tracked elusive wild turkeys in east Texas. I had an inside view on the other side of the television shows I’d grown up on–glamorous sunsets and sounds like you’d expect, paired with the murderous heat and storms of the Southeast.

Romantic as fieldwork is, I found myself significantly more interested in the communities who’s backyards I’d traipse through. They showed a lot of interest and willingness to participate, but viewed my work in their local environment to be something unique, strange, and inaccessible. Nature was something that happened where I and my truck were, not in their backyards, not on their commutes, and especially not inside their air-conditioned homes. Consequently, they also didn’t see where environmental disasters and environmental solutions might become a factor in their everyday lives.

In summer 2023 (the hottest year on record until 2025), I experienced the effects of record heat while collecting hair follicles in swamp ecosystems to update NC State’s coastal black bear population estimates. I was pre-disposing myself to all the wrong kinds of heat risk factors my USGS training had warned me of: high caffeine consumption, limited water supply, little sleep, and no buddy-system. But, I  had access to air conditioning in my truck and housing. That same summer, on the opposite side of our study area, in central NC, a migrant farm worker who did not receive the same amount of precautionary training, had limited water access, no access to shade, and no mandated heat protection breaks collapsed, and later died in a hospital. He had a predisposition to heat illness, and so in taking on a job that was meant to pay the bills for his family in Mexico, he died near my hometown in Johnston County, North Carolina. The farm would be inspected for safety compliance after his death–it was the second time in three years the farm had failed a heat safety inspection.

The mortal effects of climate change are here, and the presumptions of the tolerances of workers, our human bodies, and our built and natural environments need to change. While presenting me with many opportunities to experience nature and test my survival limits, fieldwork also showed me the many ways that working people and small-town residents are seeking an opportunity to understand what’s happening in their local ecologies and environment, and to apply their lived experiences and knowledge. I am personally interested in applying the interdisciplinary knowledge from the Master’s in CCS program towards strengthening community resiliency and improving existing frameworks for community participation in environmental stewardship and actions.