How Ecology Changed My Life
Looking back, I suppose it started long before I knew what the word ecology even meant. Growing up in Florida, I spent a lot of time outdoors, playing in creeks, fishing in the Everglades with my dad, camping with my family, and spending at least one weekend a month in the woods with the Boy Scouts. Being outside simply felt natural.
But it was really in high school, when I took a course called Ecology, that everything clicked. I had taken chemistry and struggled through physics and some of the other science courses, but ecology was the one. We built a nature trail out in the woods as one of our projects, learned how the pieces of the natural world fit together, and actually spent time outside instead of just staring at a chalkboard.
Since I was already into hunting, fishing, camping, hiking, and wandering around in the woods, ecology quickly became my love. It explained the places I already cared about.
In college, one of my first courses was Environmental Health, which opened my eyes to all the ways humans are messing up the planet and damaging the environment we depend on. I immediately got into volunteering for local cleanups, road cleanups, pond and stream assessments, and just about anything else related to conservation and environmental stewardship.
Even then, when it was time for college, I was still planning to chase an engineering degree because that was what the high school guidance department had pushed me toward, based on my SAT scores and the grades I could get when I actually applied myself. It wasn't until one memorable outdoor experience with plant medicine that I realized an education in the environmental sciences was really my calling.
I eventually finished a bachelor's degree in biology, but I still couldn't see myself spending my life as a lab rat in a white coat doing genetic research. What I really wanted was to be outdoors. So I traveled, worked computer jobs and whatever else I could find to support the travel bug, and kept circling back to rivers, wetlands, forests, mountains, wildlife, and conservation.
The environment has been at the forefront of my free time ever since. It shaped my education, my volunteer work, my travels, my years with the USGS, my time with watershed associations and land trusts, my service on a Conservation Commission, and countless hours spent exploring the outdoors.
Along the way, that interest eventually led to co-founding the Ashburnham Conservation Trust, helping preserve roughly 6,000 acres of conservation land, serving on a Conservation Commission, working with watershed associations, volunteering on environmental projects, and spending 21 years with the U.S. Geological Survey studying rivers, floods, and water resources. Looking back, that high school Ecology class may have had more influence on my life than any other course I ever took.