A re-introduction

I first began substack-ing in January of 2024 during my last term of college and feeling aimless, understimulated, and disappointed. I believed I was a failure because I hadn’t got what I expected out of my college experience, academically or socially. I had always wanted to be both a scientist and a writer but had ended up only pursuing the former. I was terrified that the door had closed on the latter. (I still am to some degree).

Someone suggested to me that I start doing this. No expectations of any sort of audience; just to practice writing and put it somewhere. To have a reference point in case I ever wanted to prove to a potential employer that I could write.

So I did. I drew up a logo and started writing. And it was fun. I was enjoying the time spent dedicated to reading and synthesizing stories and articles of contemporary environmental happenings. It was exciting to witness myself getting (what I considered) better at writing.

And then life got good and I fell off. A task assigned to myself designed to challenge me to read and write about environmental news fell to the wayside as I gained direction, purpose, and fulfillment in life.

I graduated from college in June. I had finished classes in March and then immediately jumped into working as a field technician on some projects for the University of Oregon. In April, I lived at a Long Term Environmental Research (LTER) center on the western slope of the Oregon Cascades. I was helping an incoming master’s student set up houses for mason bees. We also collected some monitoring data about the early spring floral resources in the region (surprise: not much). I was simultaneously working on finishing up my undergraduate thesis. For my thesis, I analyzed bumble bee foraging networks across a gradient of canopy cover in the Oregon Coast Range. I presented this at the end of May.

I then switched from Oregon’s bee ecology lab to its plant ecology lab and spent a few weeks at the Sierra Foothills Research and Extension Center in northern California collecting grass biomass to later be weighed. These data would be put into models relating biomass to seed production to better understand how these species reproduced under myriad circumstances (pressure from other plants, grazing, drought, nitrogen deposition, etc.). We started work at 6am to avoid the 100° heat. I spent the afternoons applying for jobs, putting the finishing touches on my thesis paper, and swimming in the lake. I spent the weekends hiking at Yosemite and Sequoia. On my last Friday in California, I submitted an application for an internship with NASA DEVELOP. The next day I drove the seven hours back up to Eugene. On the following Monday, I started working on a different project with a PhD student in the same lab.

I spent the rest of the summer monitoring flower phenology, putting little bags on flowers to exclude pollinators, counting open flowers in each plot, collecting the ripe fruits, and counting seeds. I also leaned into enjoying my last summer in Oregon, applying for (even more) jobs, and thinking about graduate school. In August I learned that I had been accepted into the NASA DEVELOP internship program. I would be moving to Fort Collins, CO. But before that, I threw a going away party and crossed some hikes off my Oregon bucket list.

I moved to Fort Collins and quickly fell into a new rhythm of life. Work was demanding: I often felt as if I was fumbling in the dark as I read countless papers about satellite remote sensing and coded figures relating rangeland plant communities using satellite data in order to inform management decisions. But I loved the community I worked in; weeknights were spent at natural resource professionals happy hours or trailer running groups. I reconnected with a former boss at the USDA in Fort Collins. I spent weekends running long runs in the mountains in preparation for a 50-mile race in October.

Upon the end of the internship, I left Fort Collins. I was confident that I had secured a second one which would start at the end of January, but it was only the middle of November. I decided to kill time and my savings account by going to Thailand for three weeks, Florida for two, and Puerto Rico for one. And then I settled back into my parents’ house in Maryland to recoup said savings account.

The internship began and I thought I would revamp my substack then. But the feeling of fumbling in the dark returned. The project was difficult, and this time I was without any happy hours or trail running groups to refill my cup. I was burnt out and counting down the days to when I would return to Fort Collins.

That day came in the middle of April. The boss I had reconnected with in the fall recommended me to her colleagues and I was offered a position as a research assistant. Despite the turmoil and uncertainty in the federal government and the changes (for the worse) to my terms of employment, I was overjoyed at the prospect of returning to my community in Fort Collins. No more fumbling in the dark - I would send my summer in wide open fields hanging out with plants all day (and collecting data about them of course).

After a bee-line along I-70 I arrived in Fort Collins, I stayed with a friend I had met in the fall until I could move into my new place. We went camping in Moab to help make the most of my two inter-employment weeks. I started work on April 21st feeling rejuvenated and excited to lend a hand in researching grasslands. I felt a little out of place with my attitude as the rest of the office seemed suppressed by the uncertainty and grief engendered by DOGE’s decisions. Nevertheless, there was an air of hope fueled largely by a pervasive passion for the research we were doing.

In returning to Fort Collins, this time with community and habits and a sense of direction already built in, I felt the urge to write again. And so now we are here, revamping my substack. It will look different this time. Frankly, there are too many new things happening and un-happening and re-happening on a daily basis for me to keep up, let alone write about. Moreover, the things happening in this country (and outside of it) are atrocious and overwhelming and infrequently climate related, at least directly. So I intend to pivot to writing more longform stories and musings, and to have them be more personal and grassland-rangeland (or, as someone in my circle referred to it recently, “grangeland”) ecology-focused. After all, that’s what I spend the vast majority of my time doing and thinking about. The most pressing environmental matters in the news typically regard (1) breaking news about how climate scientists regularly realize that we are actually quite a bit more fucked than we thought we were - for instance, that even the most aggressive goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C would still be too warm for polar ice sheets, or that areas in Alaska previously protected via Biden-era legislation are poised to be drilled for oil.

- and (2) the energy transition (or lack thereof). For news and discussions pertaining to this theme, I recommend subscribing to a newsletter by Heatmap News and/or listening to the Volts podcast, as I have basically no business pretending that I actually know how to talk about these things

And with any good revamp comes a good rebrand. I’m renaming my substack from “Artemisia” to “Prairie Tales.” I like that it’s fewer syllables and more playful. I like that it better encapsulates my goal of storytelling. It also reflects my shift in ecological focus. In making Artemisia, I was inspired by the grassland-sagebrush steppe ecotone of eastern Wyoming that I had worked in in the summer of 2023. These days, however, I work anywhere from that ecotone to the mixed-grass prairie of south-central Wyoming to the short-grass prairie of eastern Colorado. In pursuing a PhD I am considering projects in any of these, and/or the tall-grass prairie remnants in Kansas and Colorado, as well as any dryer herbaceous-dominated ecosystems.

• Prairie. Isn’t that a pretty word? Rolls off the tongue like a fat little moon. Prairie must be one of the prettiest words in the English language. No matter that it’s French. It’s derived from the Latin word for “meadow” plus a feminine suffix. A prairie, then. Is a female meadow. It is larger and wilder than a masculine meadow (which the dictionary defines as “pasture” or “hayfield”), more coarse, more oceanic and enduring, supporting a greater variety of life. - Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Nevertheless, I anticipate an irregular cadence in my publishing. Longer form stories and musings, after all, take more time and only happen with a catalyst. Additionally, as much as I love telling stories, I also enjoy living them. I am no longer in the chapter of my life where projects such as these serve to fill the void left by disappointing life circumstances. I fully intend to lean into the work, people, and adventures knocking at my door this season in Fort Collins, but hope and intend to make time to pursue writing.