cv file linked above, short form narrative provided below
My childhood home, South Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2008
My mother kneeled down into the soil and gestured for me to approach. It was early morning in Minneapolis, and I waded to her through our jungle of a garden. I hovered over her shoulder and watched as she snapped a stalk of Asparagus. She offered a bite. It was crisp, cool, and surprisingly sweet. “Remember to ask permission,” she would always say.
Occidental Arts & Ecology Center, Occidental, California, 2016
Eight years later, at the age of sixteen, I find myself on a farm in Northern California, receiving my Permaculture Design Certification. I am standing between rows of berms and swales which sweep across the hillside. I am holding a woven basket filled with herbs. Eden gestures for me to join her. She is growing older and grunts as she gets down on one knee. She lifts the flowering head of Calendula. She shares what Calendula is used for and then snaps the stalk below the calyx. Eden closes her eyes, and I hear a whisper of her gratitude. She turns to me. “Always say thank you to the plants,” she tells me.
Malcolm Knapp Research Forest, British Columbia, Canada, 2019
At eighteen, I left Minneapolis for Vancouver to study in the Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia. I’m sitting on the branch of an old pine with my new friend Gracie Conway. On the forest floor below us sit our peers, notebooks open, filled with sketches and measurements of the forest around us. Gracie always told me that the universe is ultimately abundant. I smile big.
The summer before I moved back to Minneapolis, the world was on lockdown, and the fires in British Columbia were so severe that we couldn't leave our homes in fear of damaging our lungs. Vancouver had the worst air quality in the world.
I was in class on Zoom, reading over the poetry of a 16th-century Irish writer. I remember looking out my bedroom window in Kitsilano, Vancouver, and seeing the sun hidden behind a thick veil of smoke. I moved home that winter.
I transferred to the University of Minnesota that following summer and pursued a degree in Environmental Science in the College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences, spending the next two years trying to reconnect with hope and with meaning in a world on fire.
Katagiri Plant Genomics Lab, St. Paul, Minnesota, 2021
I work in a plant genomics lab. The plants I meet are grown in shallow flats, not in the earth. In the lab, I autoclave the soil, sow the seeds, stabilize the conditions, and try to learn more about them. Though sometimes I get looked at funny, I still speak to my plants. I like to think of research as a form of translation, learning from something that cannot speak for itself as we do. This is why I love the natural sciences. Through these disciplines, one participates in an eons-long conversation between humans and the world around them. As if to say; “Who are you? Where are you from? What do you do?”
present
In the last months of my undergraduate degree I wrote my thesis on agroforestry systems, attempting to integrate the teachings of my mother with the lessons of Eden, Gracie Conway, and all of my mentors and teachers at the University of British Columbia and the University of Minnesota.
In a world on fire, I have come to understand that creation is as inevitable as destruction. My work now engages in the crafting of new systems. In reconciling our grief, in welcoming joy, we can build futures that are ultimately abundant.
