ESA Interviews – Ana Elisa Perez-Quintero

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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.

Too poor for science

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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.

 

Translating geek speak

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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.

Remember that time in grad school

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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.

So where are all the queer ecologists? Gay lunch at ESA

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Every year at ESA, there’s a GLBT brown bag lunch. It’s a great place to to meet some cool people and to talk about career issues related to being queer. The two times I’ve attended, about 20 other people showed up. Most queer ecologists don’t go to the brown bag. Maybe they’re busy, maybe they’re not out in a professional context, maybe being queer has had no impact on their professional life, maybe they don’t know about the brown bag. If you’re reading this and you’re a queer ecologist, you should make time to come to the GLBT brown bag. It’s fun and it could help someone (maybe even you!).

One thing we discussed last year at the ESA brown bag was the age breakdown of the room. Most people were very young – graduate students and post-docs in their 20s. Maybe this is to be expected since older ecologists are both busier and less likely to be out. But I’d like to see more older queer ecologists at the brown bag. Quite frankly, young queer scientists could really use some mentors. It can be pretty hard to find someone to ask about same sex spousal hires or teaching evaluations influenced by homophobia or what the culture of science is like wrt queers.

I attended a Being Queer in Academia panel a few weeks ago, and I was struck by how the scientists on the panel didn’t volunteer their sexuality in a professional context nearly as much as the panelists representing the humanities, especially when it came to the classroom. While many of the representatives from the humanities spoke about feeling a responsibility to their students (especially their queer students) to come out to their classes (at least casually) many of the scientists said that since it had nothing to do with the subject they taught, they didn’t bring it up. For a long time as an undergraduate, I felt like there were no queer scientists anywhere, and I was so relieved and excited to find out that a scientist I admired was queer. Established ecologists who teach: if you come out to your classes – even if it’s just by having a rainbow sticker on your laptop – you’re doing something awesome.

One more thing about the age breakdown at the GLBT brown bag: We don’t know much about the careers of queers in ecology. ESA keeps track of the demographics of its membership, but I don’t think it ever asks about sexuality in its surveys. What if there were only young people at the brown bag because queer people get pushed out of academia and/or ecology? This may seem silly since most universities are relatively queer friendly places, but I think it’s very plausible that queers could get pushed out of academia even if universities were paragons of equality. Consider the fact that academics have to follow the jobs and how many of those jobs are in places like Laramie. By and large, most queers will be reluctant to move back to the homophobic small towns we ran from when we went to college ourselves. Since academic jobs are few and far between, this could mean queer people leave academia because the only jobs available are in places that would be very unpleasant and potentially dangerous for them to live in. That’s all speculation, though. I’d be curious to see any data or research on the careers of queer academics or scientists that could be used to figure out if that’s occurring or other ways homophobia could be affecting queer careers. And it would be awesome if scientific societies, like ESA, started including sexuality on its membership surveys.