From Seed to Harvest
Dr. Hoover in a green infrastructure practice at Purdue University
By: Fushcia Hoover, PhD
Planting the Seed
Growing up a child of the city under the tutelage of my mother’s green thumb, it’s no wonder I chose to dedicate my career to exploring relationships between people and their environment. Examining how humans change and cultivate our environments, how nature responds and shapes us in turn, and thinking about the ways social systems of oppression blanket this relationship like an uninvited house guest who left on their shoes, pushes me to ask how I can shape my research questions and approaches to build supportive relationships between the two. I have always been fascinated with what was going on around me, between me, to me, and how that differs from person to person.
watching my mom’s supernatural ability to bring life where there was seemingly none, green where there was gray, and beauty from the love and care of her hands by turning barren dirt into rich soil is truly magical.
My mother bestowed many of her gifts, talents and love for the earth on me. She is a gardener as her father was before her, and watching her supernatural ability to bring life where there was seemingly none, green where there was gray, and beauty from the love and care of her hands by turning barren dirt into rich soil is truly magical. While my sister and I were relegated to weeding as children, we watched and learned, wondering when we would get the chance to cultivate life. I still rely on her wisdom for questions or concerns over my own ever growing community of plant babies.
I was an avid reader as a child. Science fiction like Animorphs introduced me to a world of insects, animals and excitement that the encyclopedia supplemented. I consumed books about time travel, spirits, immortality and fantasy. The Wizard of Oz series sparked thoughts of worlds parallel to our own, while the Little House on the Prairie collection illustrated a time when one’s survival depended on the land and an inherent respect for its life giving resources. I delighted in reading about the simple pleasures of that time like maple syrup chilled in the snow. My appreciation and connection to the land and its gifts stem from my mother’s childhood stories of days spent prepping and canning vegetables and fruits from the garden.
I also remember feeling like no one understood me or the things that I was curious about. I remember a boy being shocked that instead of squirming at the ants and beetles scurrying from under a rock he pulled, I leaned in fascinated with their lives under a rock. I constantly had questions about my world and it always felt like the world was asking questions of me, demanding to know why I was always where I ‘didn’t belong’. Curiosities around how people experienced their world, what makes us different, existentialism, and why the sky is blue were always swirling in my mind. Perhaps this is why I gravitated towards pursuing a PhD. In a lot of ways, a doctorate is thinking about complex problems and the pursuit to understand and solve them. I was a deep thinker then and I’m a deep thinker now.
Making the Invisible Visible
Entering graduate school, I wanted to incorporate three things: the environment, cities, and communities of color. Growing up in St. Paul, MN, I spent most summers at camp, a lake or climbing a tree, and as an adult, I biked, took the bus, or walked to my destination. Being outside and roaming the city is where I feel the most connected to myself. After attending a private predominately white university (PWI) for undergrad, I returned to my high school alma mater to serve as a tutor and mentor for an education access program. I experienced a reverse culture shock returning to a majority student of color environment, casting into light the four years of conditioning and isolation I experienced at a PWI. This, coupled with listening to my Black and brown students’ experiences with their teachers’ racism mirror the experiences they felt outside in the world around them led to my commitment to engage in research that would center their voices and improve their environments.
Once in my graduate program, I experienced resistance and apprehension to the interests and topics I wanted to integrate. For example, studies on individual’s environmental perceptions and attitudes is really useful to understand adoption practices, land management decisions, and predicted behavior. In all the studies I read, racial demographic data was either never collected, or studies were done in non-Black racially homogenous communities where ethnic minority information was not collected. This seemed like a glaring hole in the data, particularly knowing that people of color have relevant and valuable perspectives, attitudes and perceptions of their environments. As a result, I embarked on creating a multi-part study that centered Black attitudes and opinions on the environment, stormwater-related flooding, environmental justice, and city planning processes.
Harvest: Manifesting Futures
My questions are increasingly rooted in understanding the relationship and institutional effects we have on and with our environment. I explore how environmental decisions negatively impact people of color, low-income communities, and Black folk in particular. I use stormwater practices called green infrastructure (GI) to explore these relationships and think about implications for climate change and equity. GI are practices that using plants to slow, reduce or temporarily store rain during a storm event to prevent it from entering the sewer system. Depending on the type of sewer system, it may also serve as a natural filter to clean and improve the quality of the water before it enters stream and lakes. Additional benefits of GI are often promoted by local through federal governments as a cure-all for urban social ails. While it’s important to acknowledge those benefits, we must also examine how the use of these practices replicates, and follows similar racialized infrastructure processes that disenfranchise, harm, or ignore people of color (e.g. redlining or gentrification.).
While much of my research sits within the world of water resources and urban flooding, my interests expand to public health, policy, politics (cause there’s a difference), structures of power, cultural narratives, and new ways of conceptualizing how we prioritize people and the environment. I want to create new worlds and new ways of living in relationship with nature and its many gifts that don’t rely on scarcity, one-way extraction for profit, or colonial ways of thinking. Nature and the environments we create are spaces to be valued, protected, and shared. As an engineer and applied scientist, I continue to look for ways to bring my ideas into the physical world through collaborations across disciplines, practices and vocations.
One of the ways I am manifesting my imagined world into a physical one is through the founding of EcoGreenQueen, LLC. Two things were increasingly apparent: first, researchers, particularly those in STEM fields didn't have the skills to incorporate methods outside their discipline, and therefore were often ill equipped to integrate environmental justice into their work. Second, organizations and companies were in similar situations, where they might be interested in environmental equity and justice but unsure how to include it or what practices to implement. After years of interactions and experiences in both situations, I realized these were not only skills I possessed and have been cultivating for over a decade, but I could teach and distill them to others. Thus, EcoGreenQueen was born, and what originally started as a twitter handle became a fully-fledged consulting business dedicated to guiding, empowering and supporting the integration of environmental justice into science and engineering practice and research.