Accept me!!

While visiting my family over Christmas, I described to my father one of my dreams of owning a restaurant on an organic farm, a place that would integrate ecology, food, and people. “Why,” he asked, “if you want to be a cook, are you applying to a Masters program in Zoology?”

Who knows if I’ll ever have that farm kitchen, but even if I do, the people I meet in Namibia, my understanding of Mongolia’s steppe ecology, and what I learn of religion and nature in Thailand can’t help but help me. You can never know the course your life will take; you can only prepare for anything.

Many things interest me—a few I’m even good at—and I tend to pursue multiple paths simultaneously. But on closer examination, a common thread emerges in my life: everything that has fascinated me, everything that I have been deeply committed to, is somehow attached to the point where nature and culture intersect. All that we do as humans is influenced by the natural world around us, and we continually impact and change that world. The role nature plays for us as individuals and communities differs from place to place, but invariably, that relationship reflects how we identify ourselves and construct our values.

At the Aldo Leopold Foundation, I help people make those connections. Whether it is assembling the content of our member magazine, writing interpretive panels for exhibits, leading tours, or crafting interactive tools for our website, I tell people about Leopold and his ideas; ultimately, it is a story of ourselves and our society’s relationship to the natural world. Learning more about conservation and environmental education around the globe will help me to communicate those complex ideas more effectively to diverse audiences.

I love my job. If I stay in the same field of work, the benefits of participating in the GFP Masters program are clear. As I talk with people about their relationships to nature, I will have a well of knowledge from around the world to draw on. That mosaic of perspectives will make my explanations and stories stronger, more richly tailored to both the situation and the listener. I know already, for example, that I weave a more textured narrative about the life of a Monarch butterfly for having visited their mountain wintering grounds in Mexico, where they cling to the misty trees like heavy clumps of orange leaves.

But even if I change paths, my life and my frame of reference will have been expanded by my experiences. No matter where I am or what my job title is, I will, by virtue of my own love of learning, be a teacher. The landscapes and people I will see and meet as part of this program will become a part of me, and they will alter, in ways large and small, the course of my life and the content of what I have to give to others.