I am not ashamed to admit I was an inquisitive child. I had a voracious appetite for learning. My father was a zoology major and a medical doctor. My mother was a math major then math teacher then stay at home mom and dad’s office manager. My parents never felt my education should or would be confined to the classroom. They took a very active role in guiding our learning at home as well as at school. I would say my home schooling was much more of a liberal arts education. My mother loved to read, but only fiction and definitely not science fiction. My father loved to read anything really but held a special passion for history. Dad would read on his bed every night with my sister and me reading as bookends on the neighboring pillows. He would help us with words we didn’t know or provide a context for a confusing situation. I was the only child who gravitated towards math and science, and they both fed my hunger. My dad got me an algebra book in fifth grade. Who does that?
But I found it hard to be a true scholar in my small town. I was enrolled in the gifted program at my school and had sort of a ready made micro community of similarly inquisitive children. But as we entered middle school (what my dad called the seething cauldron of hormones), social hierarchies formed, and I never quite seemed to fit into any of them. I had political opinions that weren’t very popular, so I tried not to share them. They would surface at points, and it would cause friction and fractures in my friend groups. I had a few extremely close friends but I kept many more at an arm’s length. As we entered high school with college applications looming, even my close friends in the classroom began to compete, and further fractions occurred. I almost tried to transfer to college a year early just to escape, but my parents and teachers convinced me to persist. In the end, I am thankful I got to build some important core memories in my senior year.
I found it hard to be a scientist in the rural south. For one thing, there was very little opportunity outside of academic research for aspiring young science professionals like myself (a medicinal chemist) or my husband (a medical device engineer) to find gainful employment. Actually there were very few places in the country where both of us would be able to find employment, and that played a role in my application process for graduate school. The only southern location that met our criteria was in North Carolina, and I didn’t even apply to Chapel Hill or Duke. I guess I always knew I was leaving.
But aside from need for employment (which came later), it was also hard for me to live there as I grew and matured. From my studies, I believe the science is completely settled on climate change. The overwhelming majority of scientists across disciplines agree. Human consumption is driving chemical pollution and warming temperatures that endanger every life form on this planet but especially the poor in coastal climates most immediately. But I have held my beliefs around climate for a very long time. When I was in fifth grade, I bought a book at a book fair called“50 Simple Things You can Do to Save the Earth.” I was hooked. I walked the neighborhood with my little wagon collecting aluminum cans. I made my parents drive me and my bags of stuff to the drop off site for recycling. I took all of the six pack plastic rings and cut them all for the turtles. I felt so empowered, so motivated by these simple strategies, and then no one joined me. I didn’t understand why no one else was interested in doing such simple things to improve the health of our planet. It was discouraging.
In the rural community of my childhood 20 years later, I still see only modest course correction. Now on trips to the south, I hate parking in the lot of a grocery next to a sea of cars that don’t even get 20 miles per gallon. And people are filling the trunks of them with one time use disposable garbage like the plastic bags holding the groceries of plastic beverage bottles and prepackaged dinners. I question how I can help people see that the choices we make around cars and consumption endanger the security of the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the coastal communities of the planet we share. I wish I could communicate that since we probably all hope to live in a region with safe water, secure food resources, and one virtually free from the threat of natural disaster, we probably should avoid consumption patterns that endanger all of those goals.
In urban California, my little life is very different. When my husband moved here 12 years ago, we sold my car and bought our first Prius. We have been a one car family ever since. We live near transit, and one of us bikes or transits to work or for a while we carpooled. We have solar panels on our house, and haven’t had an electric bill in 7 years. It seems every other car on the road around us is a Prius or now an electric model. Many homes and businesses are retrofitted with plugs for plug ins powered by solar panels that cover the parking structures. The grocery stores in my city (and most cities that make up the Bay Area) won’t give you a free bag. You have to bring your own or pay $0.50 for each paper one. Plastic is forbidden. I shop at a store where my milk comes in a glass bottle that I return every week. I have alocal butcher shop where the meat is locally and sustainably farmed and gets carved in front of me. I have curbside green waste composting, recycling, and landfill pickups which is kind of amazing. It is a hot compost, so you can even compost chicken bones! On top of that the city site for vast array of other reuse initiatives like electronic recycling and community free exchanges is but a mile up the road. California certainly has a representative democracy, but we also have a lot of decisions like the grocery bags and the green infrastructure improvements like solar panels and electrical outlets at public places like schools funded through local and state ballot initiatives. Rural and urban communities alike could begin to adopt some of these if citizens propose, support with signatures, get the votes, and then implement a local or state tax funded initiative to make their state and local economies greener. This would be important grassroots organizing for real cultural change, but to be successful, it will take building a real dialogue around the need.
I have a family of three with a toddler and a 20 gallon trash can with a weekly pickup that is rarely full which I find kind of remarkable. When my parents visit, they never quite know which receptacle should receive their refuse. It is almost never trash. They should defer to their 2.7 year old granddaughter. She has proven a quick study. In short, I am able to live the life of a low carbon footprint that I have longed to live since I was 8, and it is incredibly easy because I am surrounded by similarly concerned people who have enacted local and state changes that help our community behave responsibly and sustainably. I guess I could say it’s like in moving to CA, I really came home.
I also found it hard to have a diversified historical perspective in the rural south. I must admit I wasn’t really a student of history when I lived there. I mean I took required classes and even some AP history classes at my high school, so I didn’t really have to take them in college. It wasn’t until I voluntarily took a few in college around topics that interested me that I knew very little about (The Arab-Isreali Conflict and Modern Egypt) that I appreciated how woeful my historical preparation was. Whole segments of the world and moments in time were missing from my education and there were contextualizations that were fairly suspect in hindsight. From high school, I knew almost nothing about the Middle East or Asia or Geography really. I think the Ottomans were mentioned once or twice. I mean, when we were in high school, my husband and his very close friend interviewed for the same scholarship. The question was asked, “With which historical figure would you most like to dine and why?” My husband said Eleanor Roosevelt. Our friend said Andrew Jackson, a personal hero of many of the young men at my school for his brash tactics; anecdotes about him were the stuff of legend. The interviewers looked a little taken aback. I mean, what about all the stuff with the Indians? I wonder how much of it our friend actually knew. My husband got the scholarship. I hear from my sister that standards (at least the ones in GA) are improving these types of deficiencies for today’s GA students. Having not been involved in K-12 education in almost 20 years, I can’t really comment, but I was encouraged to hear that feedback from her!
When I first came to Berkeley and had a thicker accent, people would ask me if in the south we called it the War of Northern Aggression. I casually laughed, but in all seriousness, when I took AP US history, my highly respected instructor painted the civil war as merely a war fought over economic differences. I’ll say. The southern side wanted to enslave humans for greater economic gain. The Northerners felt that was inhuman and untenable. Thus, war ensued over economic differences. Am I oversimplifying the cause of the Civil War? Perhaps. But human slavery was the right the states fought for, it was the key economic difference, and some thought that it was a war worth fighting. As far as I am concerned, have your civil war reenactment only if you hold it next to a presentation of the implements of enslavement and the stories of the true heroes of the 1800s, the abolitionists. It would be hard to deny the importance of the war if you had run your fingers along the spikes of the masks used to cage the heads of the enslaved.
I was actually loathe to ever use the term states’ rights until my now state of CA is fighting to preserve first the rights of immigrants with the Muslim ban and increased ICE aggression, more recently the coast from offshore drilling, and most recently people for their right to legal weed all from intrusion of the federal government as they seek to undo seemingly every regulation put into place by the previous occupant of the White House. So now I am kind of ok with states’ rights conceptually for the first time in history.
To be honest, there weren’t a lot of moments I tried to start conversations or interject a controversial point about science or history when I lived in the south. While topics around our dinner table, these weren’t the substance of the conversations I overheard in social settings. This portion of my discontent only really became evident with the perspective. But I question why? Did I just not hear them, or were they not topics of discussion? My parents’ closest friends in my childhood were largely from their church community. Social gatherings were often church related. It is fairly logical that science and history would play a limited role in the kinds of conversations that would be initiated amongst a mixed group of rural southern Baptists. In the spirit of southern hospitality and considering the audience, these topics would have been taboo.
Now as an adult, there is rarely a social gathering I attend in which I do not engage in a discussion around science, or history, or culture. I almost always come away with some new insight or some new piece of culture that I must add to the growing list of things I don’t have the bandwidth to fully consume. In my social sphere, I am still a student. This is probably due to a selection bias. Most of our closest friends we met during graduate school or in our employment or in a local prenatal yoga group I joined anticipating the arrival of our child and a need to connect more concretely to my community. I have yet to realize the dream of hosting one of those interdisciplinary salons in the homes of professors portrayed by Hollywood, but I think we have come close. It is a personal goal of mine. It is important to have goals.
I question whether I could create the kinds of stimulating social gatherings if I were still a rural resident. My husband and I somehow found each other when we lived in our rural community. We would be able to find others like us, I am sure. But in doing so, would we just create an echo chamber of like-minded individuals? That wouldn’t really change community culture all that much and might leave us to feel as isolated as we did when we were in high school. Instead, could I encourage this dialogue in a broader audience? I am trained in hypothesis driven research with data, findings, models, and further hypotheses, and it is hard for me to accept how evidence-based positions had very little traction in a faith based society. Could I navigate those treacherous waters in a non-threatening way? I am not sure if I could and still be a successful professional and fully part of my small community. I am sure I would try.
Prelude to this posting: A Defector’s Southern Discontent