February 13, 2023 • 31 mins
A mid-career pivot is terrifying enough, but what if you decided on a new interest midway through your PhD’s field research? That’s part of Karen Bailey’s story, who is today’s guest on The Ampersand. Bailey, who is an assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, discusses her training as an ecologist that took her to Africa, the effect of seeing parallels between one of the largest droughts in southern African history and her own community's struggle with food insecurity, and her subsequent research on equity and environmental systems. Along the way, we also discuss her love of podcasts, literature, fantasy movies and so much more.
Check out Bailey’s podcast the Creature Connection.
More on Bailey’s research.
Music by Nelson Walker.
Written and produced by Erika Randall and Tim Grassley.
Episodes recorded at Interplay Recording in Boulder, CO.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
(birds tweeting)
(thunder rolling)
- I imagine walking with Karen
in a field in Southern Africa,
the smell of petrichorrising off the earth
from a recent heavy rain.
She charts the accumulation of moisture,
before asking farmers howthey've been asked to adapt,
and still cultivate arapidly changing land.
(00:22):
(thunder rolls)
She turns to me, aknowing look in her eye,
and points out policies wethink help conservation,
but invisibilize the peopleasked to carry them out.
(birds tweeting)
I can't imagine Karenwearing a hand-knit hat
(00:43):
meant to look like Appa, the flying bison
from the animated series,"Avatar: The Last Airbender,"
or her walking into a crowdedDenver Comic Con conference,
beaming a smile, that only grows,
the more she talks on panelsabout mythical beasts,
feminism, and diversity.
What I learned about Karen,
is that she seamlessly steps(applause)
in and out of her interests
(01:03):
in conservation, socialjustice, Africa, equity,
fantasy, podcasting, and more.
She does this with anease that is so inviting,
it leaves me thrilled tofollow whatever thread
our conversation will take next.
You can't imagine this person exists,
until you talk to Karen.
(slow pizzicato string music)
(01:27):
On "The Ampersand,"
we call this bringingtogether the impossible
"The Alchemy of And-ing."
Together we'll hear stories ofhumans who imagine and create
by colliding their interests.
Rather than thinking of "and"as a simple conjunction,
in that conjunction junction kind of way,
we will hear stories of peoplewho see, "and" as a verb,
a way to speak the beautiful,when you intentionally
(01:48):
let the soft animal of yourbody, love what it loves.
As Saint Mary Oliver asks,
"what is it you plan to do,
"with your one wild and precious life?"
Oh, I love this question.
When I'm mothering,creating, and collaborating,
it reminds me to replace a singular idea
of what I think I should become,
with a full sensoryverb about experiencing.
(02:10):
I'm Erika Randall,
and this is KarenBailey, on The Ampersand.
- I started the podcast, orwas selected for this podcast,
focused on women of color creators,
(02:30):
during the summer of 2020.
As a black woman, right, I thinkI was particularly impacted
by the Black Lives Matter movement
and all the social unrestthat was happening,
following George Floyd's murder.
And I think I realized,
and this, actually, I think,
tracks well with my academictrajectory, as well,
but the sort of desireto link lived experiences
(02:50):
to creatures, as well.
And so, part of it was thereality that people of color,
queer folks, folks with disabilities,
are poorly represented in fiction.
And so often these persons,- They're hyper-fictionalized?
- Yeah, right?
They're either not there, right, or,
exactly.
- Or become magical.
- Exactly, yeah, exactly.
(03:11):
What I found as a lover of fiction
is that I had a tendency,
I think in part because of my interest
in ecology and wildlife,
but also not seeing myself represented
in the human characters.
I was sort of drawn tothe fictional creatures.
And so realizing that in the context of
all the sort of social justice issues
that were front-of-mind for everyone,
(03:31):
I wanted to talk topeople from backgrounds,
historically contemporarilyunderrepresented in fiction
about the creaturesthey connect to and why.
- And yeah, I think,
well, and like unicorns and queer bodies.
- Yeah.- That comes up all the time.
- Exactly.- As a bisexual woman,
people, "Oh, you're a unicorn."
- Right.- And like, okay,
yes and, but then when you try to look at,
in terms of venery, whatis a group of unicorns,
(03:52):
and I really tried to enterinto the Urban Dictionary,
a sparkle of unicorns.
- Nice.
- I really wanted to connectthat language to truth.
- I'm on board, I'm on board.
- But it does feel, I think that's true.
I think we have mascots,- Yeah.
- that are fictional.- Yep, yeah.
- Yeah, wow.
- So it was really fun.
I ended up interviewing, Ithink like six of my friends,
and we talked about the creature Appa
from "Avatar (04:13):
the last Airbender,"
which you're familiar,
and in that conversation we talked,
it was an interview withmy friend who's queer,
and she talked a lot about her sort of
battle with depression,
and how that kind ofmanifested in her perspective
surrounding Appa and othercreatures from that TV show,
I interviewed another friendabout the villain Ridley
(04:34):
from the "Metroid" video game series.
But a lot of it for him was just wanting
to not be normal, right?
And not wanting to be the man,
or like the person,
and wanting to be something unique.
- Well, it's an extreme form of and-ing
when we think about whatthis podcast is doing
and looking at the way folks and,
the fact that you have,
and it was really hard tofind out things about you
(04:55):
as a person.
When I was researching yourwork, I just kept like,
where's Karen from, andwhat's, where's Karen's weird?
And what, and how does that show up?
And as an artist, itkind of shows up for me,
it's like splashed all over,
even, you know, my researchstatements and things like that.
And, I was like, oh man, I'm gonna have,
I can't crack the code here.
So I'm super excited to getto talk to you in human form
(05:15):
and that we're across from each other.
It just brings me back towhy we're even here today
to talk about and-ing.
And I wondered, did you start,
in your becoming of yourself,
and your becoming onthis path towards and-ing
through looking at how,
at human experience andsatellite experience,
the stories of both,the stories of bodies,
the stories of data,
(05:37):
did you find that the human that you are,
the way that you getexcited led you to that?
- Yes, so I think it all,
I think it does all stem frommy sort of deep inherent love
of the environment.
And again, kind of goingback to the podcast,
the intro to it talks about the moment,
(05:57):
when I kind of realized
what the podcast should be about.
And it was when watching themovie "Princess Mononoke"
for the first time, whichhappened relatively recently,
and I'm a little ashamed of,
because it's a story about likea girl trying to, you know,
align the needs of people andthe needs of the environment.
And that's sort ofexactly what I do in life.
What I realized was,
the way that fiction andstories about really anything
(06:21):
are told to us,
and I guess I do latch onto fiction
and really the idea of the hero's journey,
because that's usually howyou're introduced to a new world,
is with this hero that, you know,
lost their family, has totravel to a new galaxy,
or to an entirely new land.
And it is that transportationinto a new land
that I find really fascinating
and I think is tied tomy sort of fascination
(06:41):
with the environment,
and sort of non-human beings in general.
But what I've sort ofrealized when I was thinking
about how these stories work,
is the protagonist,
by virtue of needing to tellthe story of this new world,
is foreign to it.
They're being dropped into the new world
the same way the reader is.
Right, and that's howthey sort of tell you, oh,
what does this mean, what does that mean?
(07:02):
That's how they can have
the sort of, you know,
- The transition.- The explanation, yeah.
But the creatures,they're of this universe,
they're of this world.
They're part of it.
And so you get to seewhat the world really is,
and what it means, and how it manifests
through those creatures,
in a way that I think isreally special and unique,
than sort of what the protagonist is doing
as a foreigner to the world.
(07:22):
And so I think that,
I think that's sort oflinked to my desire to maybe,
I think I kind of feelnot of the world in a way,
in like this world earth,
the real world,
in a way that animals andwildlife and plants are,
that's maybe where it all started,
is wanting to feel thatconnection to the earth,
and feeling it through, Ithink fiction and creatures,
(07:44):
and then wildlife and nature as well.
- So,
I have a thought my brain is going
in a thousand different ways,
'cause I'm so excited toget to meet you, Karen.
And I feel like as someone who, yeah,
I have to get into the body of it.
I wanna like, see, smell, taste, touch.
What does it look like
when I imagine you arein a farm in Africa,
what is the time?
(08:05):
I just, I would love to hear from you
what your body looks like
while you're doing the research overseas,
and then maybe what your body looks like
sitting at your computer, you know,
because that's important too.
That's part of the story.
- Yeah, yeah.- But can you talk to me
just about what that looks like?
- Yeah, two things came to mind,
and I think it's importantto talk about both,
because they're linked in my mind.
So I'm trained as an ecologist,
(08:25):
and my background is in wildlifeecology and conservation.
I was down in Eswatini trapping rodents
for my first field seasonof my dissertation.
And I had been doing itfor about three months,
and at the same time,
one of the worst droughtsin recorded history
was happening in southern Africa.
And so I was actually trappingrodents in maize fields
that were dying in grazingland that were not providing
(08:49):
sufficient, you know, foodfor cattle and livestock.
Very visible impacts to thelandscape that I was seeing.
You know, I would go to acommunity member's house
to trap rodents, or to ask for permission,
and just down the road would be Red Cross
distributing bags of maizeand oil and things like that
(09:10):
because people couldn'tsupport their families.
So I think it was just
that stark reality andbeing amongst the community,
but then also kind of again,
this point that I was makingearlier about the connectivity
between systems of oppression
and systems of environmentaldegradation being linked.
And I thought back to my mom who,
(09:30):
you know, she's from Memphis, Tennessee.
She grew up poor in the '60s,
and honestly had similarexperiences, right,
in terms of living withrodents, for example.
Not always having access toelectricity, for example,
right, that was her lived experience.
And then I'll often share aheadline to sort of illustrate
the impact of the drought,
(09:51):
which was sort of students,
pupils come to school just to eat,
was kind of the gist of the headline.
And me thinking back tomy experiences growing up
in south central, formerly south central,
now central Los Angeles,
and seeing the same thing, right.
Students who don't have food at home
and have to come toschool in order to eat.
(10:12):
And so really just linkingthe experiences of communities
in Eswatini and Southern Africa,
particularly experiencing this drought,
with the struggles that my communities
and communities of colorthat I had grown up with
were experiencing as well.
And so it was at that point that I,
like I finished my field season,
I came back to the U.S.,
I was in Florida in grad school,
(10:33):
and I just had thisreally intense breakdown,
and like reckoning.
- So you didn't have allthis articulated for yourself
until,- No.
- No.- Yeah.
- So this is post-breakdown.
- Yeah,- Yeah,
Where it just, that's where all
the constellation became clear.
- Exactly, exactly.- Yeah.
Yeah, and it was at thatpoint after, you know,
a while of kind of iterating
(10:54):
with my very understanding advisor,
I'll always be grateful tohim for supporting this shift,
- Yeah.- That I wanted to study
how people were responding to the drought,
what that meant for theirhealth and wellbeing,
what that meant for their relationships
with the environment,
the impacts on the environment.
And really just broadly thinking about
human-environment interactions,
as I often categorize my work,
(11:14):
as a direction that I wanted to pursue.
And so that's what I do now.
- I'm super interested in those moments
where we collide with,
I don't know if it's ourselves,
or if it's our next, or,
I'm really interested in those moments.
And I do think that this opening
to the more that startsto come up in our body,
(11:36):
like when, I remember forme, I wanted to be a dancer.
I wanted to be a professional dancer.
I wanted to be in New York,
but when I started working in film,
that's when I actuallystarted feeling connected.
So here I was, someone who worked
in three dimensions all the time,
but felt more in my story
with what I could manipulate in 2D,
and how I could tell a story
that I couldn't get my body to fully tell,
because it was fighting thestories in and of itself.
(11:59):
So I had to be able to enter
into different kind of portals of myself,
which film could do, that Icouldn't figure out how to do
besides just being moreawesome as a dancer,
but film, I could be lessawesome and more myself,
because I could, I don't know,
I could pull apart time.
- Yeah.- But I mean,
I remember just, yeah,
the feeling in my body where I had,
I felt like I had to make a choice.
(12:19):
And did you feel likeyou had to make a choice
between what you were doing with ecology
as you moved into also connecting teams?
Or do you feel like,
in that moment of breakdownwith your advisor,
in that moment ofprocessing and mentorship,
did it feel like you had to either-or it,
or did you feel like you couldcombine it but change lanes?
How did it, yeah,
and why did it feel so hard at first?
(12:39):
'Cause you describe it as a breakdown.
Why did it feel hard?
- Yeah, I mean, I think itwas hard for a lot of reasons.
One is just the reality of deciding to,
essentially I was decidingto kind of throw away
the last three months of field research,
the last three months ofdata that I had collected
in the midst of my dissertation.
And I think that's, yeah, that's major.
(13:00):
- That's major.
- That's a loss.
And then, yeah,
I think there's this sort ofprocess of kind of, you know,
there's some self-definitionthat goes along with deciding
to pursue a PhD in research
of a specific topic and thendeciding not to do that.
- Yeah, especially when it's something
that is shaping who you are.
(13:21):
- Exactly.- It's part of how you
communicate, it's part of how you connect.
- And then there was the reality
that I had been trained as an ecologist,
and at that point had,
I guess like one and ahalf degrees in ecology,
but then I decided tobe a social scientist.
So the challenge of going and pivoting,
and now having to take all these classes,
and read all these books,
and sort of reconfiguremy entire committee
to figure out how to do thatwork, and how to do it well.
(13:44):
So that was challenging too.
And then I think, but I did see it as,
I didn't see it as theend of being an ecologist.
I definitely thought itwas an opportunity to end,
and to be interdisciplinaryand kind of intersectional
(14:04):
in my approach to this work.
And I still hang out with ecologists.
I still call myself an ecologist,
although I will often qualify it.
And actually ecologiststell me to stop doing that,
I think because the discipline itself
is having a bit of areckoning in this moment,
and looking at its history,
and why more sort ofinterdisciplinary and-ing
(14:25):
couldn't happen to this moment.
So, yeah, I mean I thinkit was challenging.
At this moment, I think, I try and I work
with a lot of ecologists.
I am an ensuring that environmentaldata is being collected
in some way when I'm doing work,
even if I'm focusing on thesort of human and social data
piece of it.
But, you know, I still do and understand
(14:46):
how to do, and canadvise students in doing,
ecological research.
So yeah, it's felt more,
it definitely was a choice,
but it felt like a blendingmore so than a removal
or a cutting out some piece.
- In my imagination,
talking about rainfall and measurement,
I mean, I really, I didn'tsee you with rodents.
I saw you with rain.
Did you ever get to be with rain,
or did you mostly be with rodents?
(15:08):
- Yeah, I definitely got to be with rain.
- You got to be with rain.
And so thinking about,- I also love Toto, so just,
- I know,- It's my go-to karaoke song.
- This is something I was,
when I was talking to my fiance about,
I was like, I can't mentionToto, I can't mention Toto,
I can't mention the rains down in Africa.
I can't say.
And then all I wanted to do was say it.
(15:28):
But thanks for saying it.
We're gonna change ourtheme song for this episode.
- I support it.
It's a great song.
- Okay, great.
It was the song that mykid first held hands to
with the live percussion ensemble
of the Colorado Symphony playing Toto's,
thank you, I can now,
now we can really talk freely
that that's on the table.
(15:50):
But I just, so when I,
but I think about there'sthe collecting of rain,
and there's the collectingof satellite data about rain,
and looking at the graphs,
they line up.
Like the experience on the ground
and the experience in the air.
But what do you learn that's different?
A million things?
- Yeah, yeah.
So many different things.
And, I should note, right,
(16:10):
so we're, in thatparticular research project
we're collecting, we'resort of using satellite data
to tell us where therains are coming from,
or what they're doing.
We're collecting data,
and somebody who has
more sort of technical expertise than I do
is doing radio isotope analysis
to also tell us, okay,
did this rain come from the Indian Ocean?
Did it come from over the Congo Basin?
(16:30):
Yeah, really cool stuff.- Super cool.
- And then we're talking to people.
- Yeah.- And we're saying,
when when the rains come,
where do they come from?
Actually, I had a researchmeeting yesterday morning.
No one's in agreement,
not a single data set is in agreement
either with itself orwith another data set.
It's a mess.
- But is it kind of a beautiful mess?
Are they talking to each other in ways
(16:52):
that dimensionalize theproblem, the question?
- Woo, I mean, maybe we'll get to a point
where we can confidently say that.
- Yeah.- So part of the reason
we're doing this work is because,
and now we're sort ofnot in Southern Africa,
we're now in East Africa and Uganda.
It is a climatically complex area.
You have Lake Victoria,you have the Indian Ocean,
you have the Congo rainforest,
and it makes it hard to understand
(17:13):
what the climate is doing there.
- Yes.- So it's not that surprising
that not all of the differentdata sources are in agreement.
But I think we're still unsure of
what that tells us.- 'Cause it could all be
happening at once.
- Yeah, yeah.
Absolutely, yeah.
I think we're still unsureexactly what that disagreement,
for lack of a betterword, really tells us.
And we're trying to figureout what we can glean.
(17:34):
And I think, right,
the point of the work is
,regardless of what thedata says, farmers, right,
who are already under-resourced, right,
and are already vulnerableto changes on the landscape,
are making decisions, right,
about when to plant, and what to plant,
and how to harvest.
And they're making decisions
with lots of differentsources of information, right.
(17:55):
But we need to understandhow they're making decisions
and how they're incorporating
different sources of information,
and what the uncertainty
in all of those sourcesof information are,
in order to support their resilience
and support them changing their behaviors
in ways that aren't, youknow, unnecessarily risky.
It certainly points to thefact that, yeah, I mean,
it's difficult to findfacts and truth sometimes,
(18:17):
and to really understand the reality is,
and the fact that, right,
the reality from theperspective of a farmer
is gonna be different
than the perspective of a raindrop,
and different than theperspective of a satellite, right?
- I'm really interestedin that raindrop though,
with its trismic storiesof what water it came from.
- Yeah, yeah.
- I love that people aretalking to those isotopes.
(18:39):
- Yeah.
- You have mentioned so many places,
South Africa, and Memphis,
and south central,central LA, and Boulder.
After being in places thatare absolutely, I mean,
unlike one another,
but you did allude to the fact
that they are like one another.
(18:59):
And so can you make thosesame allusions in Boulder?
Or do you even want to?
- Yeah, that's a good question.
So maybe I'll start with
the sort of the how/why I'm here,
in part because I think
there's an important point to it
that isn't often brought up
when just thinking aboutjobs and the reality of jobs.
(19:20):
I am here in Boulder becauseI got a job in Boulder.
- Yes.
That's like, the main reason.
And I think it's important to note
that I was lucky enoughand had the privilege
to not be tied down toa particular locality,
that I could move acrossthe country to a good job
in Boulder, Colorado,
right?- Yeah.
(19:41):
- And everybody, you know,
who's finishing their PhD,
or everybody who is just finished school,
or whatever it may be transitioning,
doesn't have that luxury.
And so I'm certainly veryhappy to be here in Boulder,
but I could be anywhere.
- You feel any space thatcould support your research,
because you're moving,
you're satelliting from the university
- Yes,- that hires you.
- Exactly.- You're going out.
(20:01):
- Yeah.- Yeah.
- In terms of, I guessI'm interpreting your,
your question as how do I,
- I mean, I could justsay it, I could be like,
Boulder's so white.
- It is.- Right.
So we can just set that, wecan put that on the table,
yes.- I think one important
thing to note is sort of,
with the exception of the time
that I've spent on the African continent
(20:21):
since graduating from high school,
I have always been in the minority, right?
So in undergrad I went to a, you know,
probably more diverse than Boulder.
I should look at the numbers.
I went to Princeton for undergrad.
And then for grad school,I lived in Asia for a time.
Right, so I'm used to being
the only black person,
for sure.- Okay.
- And so what what comes alongwith that is, and I think,
I think I'm lucky in that this aligns well
(20:43):
with my natural personality,
which is finding and building community
where it doesn't exist.
So, you know, I'm currentlylike one of the organizers
of a meetup group forblack people in the area.
I, you know, am always looking out
for sort of communitiesof color where they exist,
and sort of bringing,
and other communities where I plug in.
(21:04):
- Yeah.
- So I think that's sort of the reality
that I've lived with for a very long time.
And so I've gotten good atkind of finding and building
that community,
particularly around people of color,
and also around, I think,being a scientist as well.
So yeah, I've done that here,
and it's definitely enrichedmy experience for sure,
(21:24):
and made it feel less isolating.
- And your community in the sciences,
it sounds like there's an influx
of different ways of thinking.
And does Boulder make space for you
in this way,
that you're trying to look at?
- Yeah, I think so.
(21:44):
- Do you, like,
do you feel lit right now inyour work and in your research?
- Yes, yes.
And I think again, now more than ever,
disciplines, schools, institutions, right,
are thinking about, you know,
why there are so few peopleof color, for instance,
in certain STEM fields, for example,
and really trying toreckon with the realities
(22:05):
around the way that we teach,
the way that we conduct research,
the way that we talk about our work,
and how that might have been exclusionary
for a really long time.
- Yes.- So, again,
I think now more than ever,
people are willing to thinkabout these intersections.
- Do you find that from students?
- Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah, we're piloting a newenvironmental racism course
right now,
(22:25):
and I think they're having
some really challenging discussions
around sort of race and class,
and gender and sexuality,and systems, right?
So they're talking aboutqueer and feminist theory,
and the intersections with the environment
and indigenous theory, andall these critical theories.
And I think that the studentsare absolutely receptive,
(22:46):
and I think want theseintersections in their coursework.
- That's so exciting to me.
I feel like, that again,
in the space where talkingabout climate change is so,
can be so hard, it's just,
it's heavy, when you intersect it
with these other spaces of identity,
- Yeah.- that there becomes,
besides just the world that we're all on,
(23:06):
there's the world we livein, and that's in us.
And it does feel likefrom that perspective,
it could really sparkstudents to stay in the work,
- Yeah.- and to have new discoveries.
- Yes.- Does that feel
true for you when you,- Yeah, yeah,
I think so, absolutely.
And one thing I talk about a lot
in terms of the discipline,
and specifically the sortof field of conservation
is the reality that what,
so there's this thing calledthe North American model
(23:27):
for wildlife conservation,
and that is essentially howwe can serve wildlife in,
well, the world over, at this point,
but is what establishedYellowstone National Park,
for example, right,
the world's first national park,
which is a really big deal andquite exciting at the time,
but right, that system of conservation
was established by a veryspecific type of person, right?
(23:49):
A white, hunter, male, generally wealthy,
sort of a mix of urban and rural,
with folks in rural areas hunting,
and then also folks from urban areas
going to rural areas to hunt.
But, right, they set upthis plan for conservation
that's now been replicatedacross North America,
and exported,- It served those bodies.
(24:10):
exactly, exported globally,
and was literally a specific,
the one type of individual
that was sort of there at the time
and had the most power,
that created conservationessentially as we know it today.
And I think there's been a lot of movement
in terms of thinking about other ways
to understand relationshipswith the environment,
community-based conservation,
(24:31):
community-based naturalresource management.
But it does all sort of still fit into
this foundational approach toconservation that, you know,
if we rewound the clock 300 years
and had different peoplesetting a system up,
it could look,
we can't even fathom whatit might look like, right?
Because of this realitythat's been created for us.
But I think that students are excited
(24:52):
to have those conversations
and think about what the alternatives are,
and think critically and creatively
and in ways that we haven't in the past,
to kind of move us forward
and sort of reckon withthe reality of that,
the origins of this field,
and the way that we thinkabout nature and conservation.
So yeah.
- Okay, that was amazing.
Thinking about,
it just makes me really thinklike, if we could rewind,
(25:14):
what would that movie look like?
- Yeah.
- Right, and if we couldwork with film students
to actually show a different shaping
of how we take care of our national parks.
- We should do that.
- We should do that.
We should make that film.
- We should do that.
- Truly, it's really exciting to me.
Okay, we're gonna make that film.
- Okay, so the quick and dirty
is a time for you toanswer some questions.
(25:35):
It has to, it has to be quick,
doesn't have to be dirty.
And I'm gonna ask youthings about and-ing,
in your life, in the world,
and you're just gonna lay it on me.
- Okay.- You feel good about this?
- No, but let's go.- Okay, okay, you can't lose.
Okay.
What is a way that youand in your daily life
that folks wouldn't expect?
(25:55):
- Well, I think you'd appreciate this.
I have a background indance, and I love dancing,
and so I think about sortof dance in everything,
and all things.
So yes.
- Okay, but then I have to follow up.
What styles of dance do you enjoy?
- So hiphop and Latin mostly.
- Okay, so you're coming over to dance.
- Yeah, let's do it.
- Let's do it, okay.
We have so many things.
Great, okay.
Is and-ing limited to yourpersonal or professional life?
(26:19):
- No.- No.
- No.- But how do you
necessitate and-ing thatmaybe crosses the streams
of personal and professional?
- Okay, it's supposed to be quick.
I mean, I think it goes back to,
I'm allowed to see myselfin this work, right?
Ecology and conservation
should not be removed from the scientist,
(26:41):
and the person doing the work.
And I think that that's reallyimportant for moving past
the sort of fraught history
of conservation and natural resources.
So yeah, I put people inwhere they often don't belong.
- Yes, just add people.
Okay, how do you and in thisone wild and precious life,
in terms of not thinking about
(27:01):
what it is you're meant to be,
but what is it you're meant to do?
- I don't know if thisgets into your question,
but I see myself as,
I am a force for joy.
And so I think about joy in all that I do.
Joy is the and
to all that I do.
- That's a hundred percent magic.
(27:23):
And I feel that vibratingfrom your human self.
I've had a really hardday, you wouldn't know it.
I got pulled over by a cop.
My mom's in the ER,
I was late to teach,
and I was in a threeand a half hour meeting.
And I am so happy beingin this space with you,
and learning with you.
I feel like there's agenerosity for me to mess up,
and not know, whether it'sabout the environment,
about science, about data collection,
(27:44):
about racism and how itworks in our country.
Thank you.
So I just wanna, this isnot the end of our time.
I'm just saying thank you now.
Okay, I'll thank you again also.
Okay, are there ways that you and,
when you wish you would only?
- Yes.
So I think because I think about people,
I think about equity, Ithink about the environment,
I think about convening andbringing people together.
(28:05):
I probably just do too much,
and I probably shouldfocus on a couple things,
as opposed to trying to doall the things sometimes.
- So I could be your time bouncer,
and I could just text you and be like,
whatever you're doing right now,
if it's not totally necessary,
can you stop doing that Karen Bailey?
- I'm not gonna, but you could.
- I'm still gonna say it.
And guilt doesn't work with you?
It works with me.
- I think it depends on the type of guilt.
(28:25):
- Okay, we'll work onthat in our friendship.
Okay, when has and-ing gone wrong for you,
and what did you learn?
- I don't know if I have aquick answer for this one.
I'm too much of an optimist.
It's all just a learning experience.
- I'll take that as an answer actually.
That when it's gone wrong,
it's actually going rightsomewhere else in the future.
- Yeah, exactly.
- Okay, so future Karen,
(28:46):
- Yeah.- feels great.
Okay.
Future Karen has learnedfrom the gone wrong
even in the moment.
- Yeah.- Okay, here's super fast,
bands with "and" in them.
- Benny and the Jets?
which I don't actuallythink that's an answer.
- Okay, that's not a real band.
That was from a song,
but that's okay, 'cause youdeal in not real things.
Also, I love it.
Favorite and-ing foods,
(29:07):
and they could be things you made up.
Like, I have some go-tos.
I wanna hear what yours might be.
- Oh, I love pizza,
pineapple on pizza.
That's, I stand by it.
I don't care if you don't like it.
- Great, I do like it.
We're gonna be fine.
- Okay.- Okay.
Words that have "and" in them.
- It's like, all I canthink of is "ampersand,"
(29:28):
and that's not helpful.
- 'And" is in "ampersand."
We're totally taking that.
Okay, your and-ing wardrobe,
you go to get dressedto show up full Karen,
how do you and?
- My earrings,
I always have big fun earrings,
and I try to include color and fun shapes,
and sometimes I have earrings
that say "Black Lives Matter,"
(29:49):
sometimes messages.
So my earrings for sure.
- Your earrings are your and-ing.
- Yeah, yeah.
- That's brilliant.
And-ers out there who you admire.
- Oh gosh, too many peopleare are coming to mind.
- This room just got reallycrowded with your imagination.
I just, so it's not thatyou're not going fast,
you're not just not going loud.
- Right?
I don't know.
I think I and the people whocan make science accessible,
(30:11):
or I appreciate the peopleand admire the people
who are and-ing in their science.
And I think that includes a lot of people,
which is why I amstruggling to name just one.
- Okay, we don't have to,
- Ayana Elizabeth Johnson comes to mind.
- I need to get to know them.
All right.
Final piece here.
Okay, if you had, this is your moment,
you're maybe at a podium, at a graduation,
or maybe you're just likesitting with students
(30:32):
who are about to go into the world.
You have a proverbial piece of advice
that begins with "and,"
like I would say, "andread more Mary Oliver."
(slow string music)
- And always see yourself,
your values and yourcommunities in your work.
(30:55):
- Karen Bailey is an assistant professor
in environmental studies
at the University of Colorado Boulder.
"The Ampersand" is writtenand produced by me,
Erika Randall, and Tim Grassley.
If there are folks you'd like to hear from
on "The Ampersand,"
do please email us at asinfo@colorado.edu.
(31:16):
Our theme music was composedand performed by Nelson Walker,
a CU Boulder alum,brilliant cellist, composer,
and a fantastic dancer.
Episodes are recorded at Interplay Studios
in Boulder, Colorado.
I'm Erika Randall.
And this is "The Ampersand."
(string music continues)
(birds tweeting)
(thunder rolling)
- I imagine walking with Karen
in a field in Southern Africa,
the smell of petrichorrising off the earth
from a recent heavy rain.
She charts the accumulation of moisture,
before asking farmers howthey've been asked to adapt,
and still cultivate arapidly changing land.
(00:22):
(thunder rolls)
She turns to me, aknowing look in her eye,
and points out policies wethink help conservation,
but invisibilize the peopleasked to carry them out.
(birds tweeting)
I can't imagine Karenwearing a hand-knit hat
(00:43):
meant to look like Appa, the flying bison
from the animated series,"Avatar: The Last Airbender,"
or her walking into a crowdedDenver Comic Con conference,
beaming a smile, that only grows,
the more she talks on panelsabout mythical beasts,
feminism, and diversity.
What I learned about Karen,
is that she seamlessly steps(applause)
in and out of her interests
(01:03):
in conservation, socialjustice, Africa, equity,
fantasy, podcasting, and more.
She does this with anease that is so inviting,
it leaves me thrilled tofollow whatever thread
our conversation will take next.
You can't imagine this person exists,
until you talk to Karen.
(slow pizzicato string music)
(01:27):
On "The Ampersand,"
we call this bringingtogether the impossible
"The Alchemy of And-ing."
Together we'll hear stories ofhumans who imagine and create
by colliding their interests.
Rather than thinking of "and"as a simple conjunction,
in that conjunction junction kind of way,
we will hear stories of peoplewho see, "and" as a verb,
a way to speak the beautiful,when you intentionally
(01:48):
let the soft animal of yourbody, love what it loves.
As Saint Mary Oliver asks,
"what is it you plan to do,
"with your one wild and precious life?"
Oh, I love this question.
When I'm mothering,creating, and collaborating,
it reminds me to replace a singular idea
of what I think I should become,
with a full sensoryverb about experiencing.
(02:10):
I'm Erika Randall,
and this is KarenBailey, on The Ampersand.
- I started the podcast, orwas selected for this podcast,
focused on women of color creators,
(02:30):
during the summer of 2020.
As a black woman, right, I thinkI was particularly impacted
by the Black Lives Matter movement
and all the social unrestthat was happening,
following George Floyd's murder.
And I think I realized,
and this, actually, I think,
tracks well with my academictrajectory, as well,
but the sort of desireto link lived experiences
(02:50):
to creatures, as well.
And so, part of it was thereality that people of color,
queer folks, folks with disabilities,
are poorly represented in fiction.
And so often these persons,- They're hyper-fictionalized?
- Yeah, right?
They're either not there, right, or,
exactly.
- Or become magical.
- Exactly, yeah, exactly.
(03:11):
What I found as a lover of fiction
is that I had a tendency,
I think in part because of my interest
in ecology and wildlife,
but also not seeing myself represented
in the human characters.
I was sort of drawn tothe fictional creatures.
And so realizing that in the context of
all the sort of social justice issues
that were front-of-mind for everyone,
(03:31):
I wanted to talk topeople from backgrounds,
historically contemporarilyunderrepresented in fiction
about the creaturesthey connect to and why.
- And yeah, I think,
well, and like unicorns and queer bodies.
- Yeah.- That comes up all the time.
- Exactly.- As a bisexual woman,
people, "Oh, you're a unicorn."
- Right.- And like, okay,
yes and, but then when you try to look at,
in terms of venery, whatis a group of unicorns,
(03:52):
and I really tried to enterinto the Urban Dictionary,
a sparkle of unicorns.
- Nice.
- I really wanted to connectthat language to truth.
- I'm on board, I'm on board.
- But it does feel, I think that's true.
I think we have mascots,- Yeah.
- that are fictional.- Yep, yeah.
- Yeah, wow.
- So it was really fun.
I ended up interviewing, Ithink like six of my friends,
and we talked about the creature Appa
from "Avatar (04:13):
the last Airbender,"
which you're familiar,
and in that conversation we talked,
it was an interview withmy friend who's queer,
and she talked a lot about her sort of
battle with depression,
and how that kind ofmanifested in her perspective
surrounding Appa and othercreatures from that TV show,
I interviewed another friendabout the villain Ridley
(04:34):
from the "Metroid" video game series.
But a lot of it for him was just wanting
to not be normal, right?
And not wanting to be the man,
or like the person,
and wanting to be something unique.
- Well, it's an extreme form of and-ing
when we think about whatthis podcast is doing
and looking at the way folks and,
the fact that you have,
and it was really hard tofind out things about you
(04:55):
as a person.
When I was researching yourwork, I just kept like,
where's Karen from, andwhat's, where's Karen's weird?
And what, and how does that show up?
And as an artist, itkind of shows up for me,
it's like splashed all over,
even, you know, my researchstatements and things like that.
And, I was like, oh man, I'm gonna have,
I can't crack the code here.
So I'm super excited to getto talk to you in human form
(05:15):
and that we're across from each other.
It just brings me back towhy we're even here today
to talk about and-ing.
And I wondered, did you start,
in your becoming of yourself,
and your becoming onthis path towards and-ing
through looking at how,
at human experience andsatellite experience,
the stories of both,the stories of bodies,
the stories of data,
(05:37):
did you find that the human that you are,
the way that you getexcited led you to that?
- Yes, so I think it all,
I think it does all stem frommy sort of deep inherent love
of the environment.
And again, kind of goingback to the podcast,
the intro to it talks about the moment,
(05:57):
when I kind of realized
what the podcast should be about.
And it was when watching themovie "Princess Mononoke"
for the first time, whichhappened relatively recently,
and I'm a little ashamed of,
because it's a story about likea girl trying to, you know,
align the needs of people andthe needs of the environment.
And that's sort ofexactly what I do in life.
What I realized was,
the way that fiction andstories about really anything
(06:21):
are told to us,
and I guess I do latch onto fiction
and really the idea of the hero's journey,
because that's usually howyou're introduced to a new world,
is with this hero that, you know,
lost their family, has totravel to a new galaxy,
or to an entirely new land.
And it is that transportationinto a new land
that I find really fascinating
and I think is tied tomy sort of fascination
(06:41):
with the environment,
and sort of non-human beings in general.
But what I've sort ofrealized when I was thinking
about how these stories work,
is the protagonist,
by virtue of needing to tellthe story of this new world,
is foreign to it.
They're being dropped into the new world
the same way the reader is.
Right, and that's howthey sort of tell you, oh,
what does this mean, what does that mean?
(07:02):
That's how they can have
the sort of, you know,
- The transition.- The explanation, yeah.
But the creatures,they're of this universe,
they're of this world.
They're part of it.
And so you get to seewhat the world really is,
and what it means, and how it manifests
through those creatures,
in a way that I think isreally special and unique,
than sort of what the protagonist is doing
as a foreigner to the world.
(07:22):
And so I think that,
I think that's sort oflinked to my desire to maybe,
I think I kind of feelnot of the world in a way,
in like this world earth,
the real world,
in a way that animals andwildlife and plants are,
that's maybe where it all started,
is wanting to feel thatconnection to the earth,
and feeling it through, Ithink fiction and creatures,
(07:44):
and then wildlife and nature as well.
- So,
I have a thought my brain is going
in a thousand different ways,
'cause I'm so excited toget to meet you, Karen.
And I feel like as someone who, yeah,
I have to get into the body of it.
I wanna like, see, smell, taste, touch.
What does it look like
when I imagine you arein a farm in Africa,
what is the time?
(08:05):
I just, I would love to hear from you
what your body looks like
while you're doing the research overseas,
and then maybe what your body looks like
sitting at your computer, you know,
because that's important too.
That's part of the story.
- Yeah, yeah.- But can you talk to me
just about what that looks like?
- Yeah, two things came to mind,
and I think it's importantto talk about both,
because they're linked in my mind.
So I'm trained as an ecologist,
(08:25):
and my background is in wildlifeecology and conservation.
I was down in Eswatini trapping rodents
for my first field seasonof my dissertation.
And I had been doing itfor about three months,
and at the same time,
one of the worst droughtsin recorded history
was happening in southern Africa.
And so I was actually trappingrodents in maize fields
that were dying in grazingland that were not providing
(08:49):
sufficient, you know, foodfor cattle and livestock.
Very visible impacts to thelandscape that I was seeing.
You know, I would go to acommunity member's house
to trap rodents, or to ask for permission,
and just down the road would be Red Cross
distributing bags of maizeand oil and things like that
(09:10):
because people couldn'tsupport their families.
So I think it was just
that stark reality andbeing amongst the community,
but then also kind of again,
this point that I was makingearlier about the connectivity
between systems of oppression
and systems of environmentaldegradation being linked.
And I thought back to my mom who,
(09:30):
you know, she's from Memphis, Tennessee.
She grew up poor in the '60s,
and honestly had similarexperiences, right,
in terms of living withrodents, for example.
Not always having access toelectricity, for example,
right, that was her lived experience.
And then I'll often share aheadline to sort of illustrate
the impact of the drought,
(09:51):
which was sort of students,
pupils come to school just to eat,
was kind of the gist of the headline.
And me thinking back tomy experiences growing up
in south central, formerly south central,
now central Los Angeles,
and seeing the same thing, right.
Students who don't have food at home
and have to come toschool in order to eat.
(10:12):
And so really just linkingthe experiences of communities
in Eswatini and Southern Africa,
particularly experiencing this drought,
with the struggles that my communities
and communities of colorthat I had grown up with
were experiencing as well.
And so it was at that point that I,
like I finished my field season,
I came back to the U.S.,
I was in Florida in grad school,
(10:33):
and I just had thisreally intense breakdown,
and like reckoning.
- So you didn't have allthis articulated for yourself
until,- No.
- No.- Yeah.
- So this is post-breakdown.
- Yeah,- Yeah,
Where it just, that's where all
the constellation became clear.
- Exactly, exactly.- Yeah.
Yeah, and it was at thatpoint after, you know,
a while of kind of iterating
(10:54):
with my very understanding advisor,
I'll always be grateful tohim for supporting this shift,
- Yeah.- That I wanted to study
how people were responding to the drought,
what that meant for theirhealth and wellbeing,
what that meant for their relationships
with the environment,
the impacts on the environment.
And really just broadly thinking about
human-environment interactions,
as I often categorize my work,
(11:14):
as a direction that I wanted to pursue.
And so that's what I do now.
- I'm super interested in those moments
where we collide with,
I don't know if it's ourselves,
or if it's our next, or,
I'm really interested in those moments.
And I do think that this opening
to the more that startsto come up in our body,
(11:36):
like when, I remember forme, I wanted to be a dancer.
I wanted to be a professional dancer.
I wanted to be in New York,
but when I started working in film,
that's when I actuallystarted feeling connected.
So here I was, someone who worked
in three dimensions all the time,
but felt more in my story
with what I could manipulate in 2D,
and how I could tell a story
that I couldn't get my body to fully tell,
because it was fighting thestories in and of itself.
(11:59):
So I had to be able to enter
into different kind of portals of myself,
which film could do, that Icouldn't figure out how to do
besides just being moreawesome as a dancer,
but film, I could be lessawesome and more myself,
because I could, I don't know,
I could pull apart time.
- Yeah.- But I mean,
I remember just, yeah,
the feeling in my body where I had,
I felt like I had to make a choice.
(12:19):
And did you feel likeyou had to make a choice
between what you were doing with ecology
as you moved into also connecting teams?
Or do you feel like,
in that moment of breakdownwith your advisor,
in that moment ofprocessing and mentorship,
did it feel like you had to either-or it,
or did you feel like you couldcombine it but change lanes?
How did it, yeah,
and why did it feel so hard at first?
(12:39):
'Cause you describe it as a breakdown.
Why did it feel hard?
- Yeah, I mean, I think itwas hard for a lot of reasons.
One is just the reality of deciding to,
essentially I was decidingto kind of throw away
the last three months of field research,
the last three months ofdata that I had collected
in the midst of my dissertation.
And I think that's, yeah, that's major.
(13:00):
- That's major.
- That's a loss.
And then, yeah,
I think there's this sort ofprocess of kind of, you know,
there's some self-definitionthat goes along with deciding
to pursue a PhD in research
of a specific topic and thendeciding not to do that.
- Yeah, especially when it's something
that is shaping who you are.
(13:21):
- Exactly.- It's part of how you
communicate, it's part of how you connect.
- And then there was the reality
that I had been trained as an ecologist,
and at that point had,
I guess like one and ahalf degrees in ecology,
but then I decided tobe a social scientist.
So the challenge of going and pivoting,
and now having to take all these classes,
and read all these books,
and sort of reconfiguremy entire committee
to figure out how to do thatwork, and how to do it well.
(13:44):
So that was challenging too.
And then I think, but I did see it as,
I didn't see it as theend of being an ecologist.
I definitely thought itwas an opportunity to end,
and to be interdisciplinaryand kind of intersectional
(14:04):
in my approach to this work.
And I still hang out with ecologists.
I still call myself an ecologist,
although I will often qualify it.
And actually ecologiststell me to stop doing that,
I think because the discipline itself
is having a bit of areckoning in this moment,
and looking at its history,
and why more sort ofinterdisciplinary and-ing
(14:25):
couldn't happen to this moment.
So, yeah, I mean I thinkit was challenging.
At this moment, I think, I try and I work
with a lot of ecologists.
I am an ensuring that environmentaldata is being collected
in some way when I'm doing work,
even if I'm focusing on thesort of human and social data
piece of it.
But, you know, I still do and understand
(14:46):
how to do, and canadvise students in doing,
ecological research.
So yeah, it's felt more,
it definitely was a choice,
but it felt like a blendingmore so than a removal
or a cutting out some piece.
- In my imagination,
talking about rainfall and measurement,
I mean, I really, I didn'tsee you with rodents.
I saw you with rain.
Did you ever get to be with rain,
or did you mostly be with rodents?
(15:08):
- Yeah, I definitely got to be with rain.
- You got to be with rain.
And so thinking about,- I also love Toto, so just,
- I know,- It's my go-to karaoke song.
- This is something I was,
when I was talking to my fiance about,
I was like, I can't mentionToto, I can't mention Toto,
I can't mention the rains down in Africa.
I can't say.
And then all I wanted to do was say it.
(15:28):
But thanks for saying it.
We're gonna change ourtheme song for this episode.
- I support it.
It's a great song.
- Okay, great.
It was the song that mykid first held hands to
with the live percussion ensemble
of the Colorado Symphony playing Toto's,
thank you, I can now,
now we can really talk freely
that that's on the table.
(15:50):
But I just, so when I,
but I think about there'sthe collecting of rain,
and there's the collectingof satellite data about rain,
and looking at the graphs,
they line up.
Like the experience on the ground
and the experience in the air.
But what do you learn that's different?
A million things?
- Yeah, yeah.
So many different things.
And, I should note, right,
(16:10):
so we're, in thatparticular research project
we're collecting, we'resort of using satellite data
to tell us where therains are coming from,
or what they're doing.
We're collecting data,
and somebody who has
more sort of technical expertise than I do
is doing radio isotope analysis
to also tell us, okay,
did this rain come from the Indian Ocean?
Did it come from over the Congo Basin?
(16:30):
Yeah, really cool stuff.- Super cool.
- And then we're talking to people.
- Yeah.- And we're saying,
when when the rains come,
where do they come from?
Actually, I had a researchmeeting yesterday morning.
No one's in agreement,
not a single data set is in agreement
either with itself orwith another data set.
It's a mess.
- But is it kind of a beautiful mess?
Are they talking to each other in ways
(16:52):
that dimensionalize theproblem, the question?
- Woo, I mean, maybe we'll get to a point
where we can confidently say that.
- Yeah.- So part of the reason
we're doing this work is because,
and now we're sort ofnot in Southern Africa,
we're now in East Africa and Uganda.
It is a climatically complex area.
You have Lake Victoria,you have the Indian Ocean,
you have the Congo rainforest,
and it makes it hard to understand
(17:13):
what the climate is doing there.
- Yes.- So it's not that surprising
that not all of the differentdata sources are in agreement.
But I think we're still unsure of
what that tells us.- 'Cause it could all be
happening at once.
- Yeah, yeah.
Absolutely, yeah.
I think we're still unsureexactly what that disagreement,
for lack of a betterword, really tells us.
And we're trying to figureout what we can glean.
(17:34):
And I think, right,
the point of the work is
,regardless of what thedata says, farmers, right,
who are already under-resourced, right,
and are already vulnerableto changes on the landscape,
are making decisions, right,
about when to plant, and what to plant,
and how to harvest.
And they're making decisions
with lots of differentsources of information, right.
(17:55):
But we need to understandhow they're making decisions
and how they're incorporating
different sources of information,
and what the uncertainty
in all of those sourcesof information are,
in order to support their resilience
and support them changing their behaviors
in ways that aren't, youknow, unnecessarily risky.
It certainly points to thefact that, yeah, I mean,
it's difficult to findfacts and truth sometimes,
(18:17):
and to really understand the reality is,
and the fact that, right,
the reality from theperspective of a farmer
is gonna be different
than the perspective of a raindrop,
and different than theperspective of a satellite, right?
- I'm really interestedin that raindrop though,
with its trismic storiesof what water it came from.
- Yeah, yeah.
- I love that people aretalking to those isotopes.
(18:39):
- Yeah.
- You have mentioned so many places,
South Africa, and Memphis,
and south central,central LA, and Boulder.
After being in places thatare absolutely, I mean,
unlike one another,
but you did allude to the fact
that they are like one another.
(18:59):
And so can you make thosesame allusions in Boulder?
Or do you even want to?
- Yeah, that's a good question.
So maybe I'll start with
the sort of the how/why I'm here,
in part because I think
there's an important point to it
that isn't often brought up
when just thinking aboutjobs and the reality of jobs.
(19:20):
I am here in Boulder becauseI got a job in Boulder.
- Yes.
That's like, the main reason.
And I think it's important to note
that I was lucky enoughand had the privilege
to not be tied down toa particular locality,
that I could move acrossthe country to a good job
in Boulder, Colorado,
right?- Yeah.
(19:41):
- And everybody, you know,
who's finishing their PhD,
or everybody who is just finished school,
or whatever it may be transitioning,
doesn't have that luxury.
And so I'm certainly veryhappy to be here in Boulder,
but I could be anywhere.
- You feel any space thatcould support your research,
because you're moving,
you're satelliting from the university
- Yes,- that hires you.
- Exactly.- You're going out.
(20:01):
- Yeah.- Yeah.
- In terms of, I guessI'm interpreting your,
your question as how do I,
- I mean, I could justsay it, I could be like,
Boulder's so white.
- It is.- Right.
So we can just set that, wecan put that on the table,
yes.- I think one important
thing to note is sort of,
with the exception of the time
that I've spent on the African continent
(20:21):
since graduating from high school,
I have always been in the minority, right?
So in undergrad I went to a, you know,
probably more diverse than Boulder.
I should look at the numbers.
I went to Princeton for undergrad.
And then for grad school,I lived in Asia for a time.
Right, so I'm used to being
the only black person,
for sure.- Okay.
- And so what what comes alongwith that is, and I think,
I think I'm lucky in that this aligns well
(20:43):
with my natural personality,
which is finding and building community
where it doesn't exist.
So, you know, I'm currentlylike one of the organizers
of a meetup group forblack people in the area.
I, you know, am always looking out
for sort of communitiesof color where they exist,
and sort of bringing,
and other communities where I plug in.
(21:04):
- Yeah.
- So I think that's sort of the reality
that I've lived with for a very long time.
And so I've gotten good atkind of finding and building
that community,
particularly around people of color,
and also around, I think,being a scientist as well.
So yeah, I've done that here,
and it's definitely enrichedmy experience for sure,
(21:24):
and made it feel less isolating.
- And your community in the sciences,
it sounds like there's an influx
of different ways of thinking.
And does Boulder make space for you
in this way,
that you're trying to look at?
- Yeah, I think so.
(21:44):
- Do you, like,
do you feel lit right now inyour work and in your research?
- Yes, yes.
And I think again, now more than ever,
disciplines, schools, institutions, right,
are thinking about, you know,
why there are so few peopleof color, for instance,
in certain STEM fields, for example,
and really trying toreckon with the realities
(22:05):
around the way that we teach,
the way that we conduct research,
the way that we talk about our work,
and how that might have been exclusionary
for a really long time.
- Yes.- So, again,
I think now more than ever,
people are willing to thinkabout these intersections.
- Do you find that from students?
- Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah, we're piloting a newenvironmental racism course
right now,
(22:25):
and I think they're having
some really challenging discussions
around sort of race and class,
and gender and sexuality,and systems, right?
So they're talking aboutqueer and feminist theory,
and the intersections with the environment
and indigenous theory, andall these critical theories.
And I think that the studentsare absolutely receptive,
(22:46):
and I think want theseintersections in their coursework.
- That's so exciting to me.
I feel like, that again,
in the space where talkingabout climate change is so,
can be so hard, it's just,
it's heavy, when you intersect it
with these other spaces of identity,
- Yeah.- that there becomes,
besides just the world that we're all on,
(23:06):
there's the world we livein, and that's in us.
And it does feel likefrom that perspective,
it could really sparkstudents to stay in the work,
- Yeah.- and to have new discoveries.
- Yes.- Does that feel
true for you when you,- Yeah, yeah,
I think so, absolutely.
And one thing I talk about a lot
in terms of the discipline,
and specifically the sortof field of conservation
is the reality that what,
so there's this thing calledthe North American model
(23:27):
for wildlife conservation,
and that is essentially howwe can serve wildlife in,
well, the world over, at this point,
but is what establishedYellowstone National Park,
for example, right,
the world's first national park,
which is a really big deal andquite exciting at the time,
but right, that system of conservation
was established by a veryspecific type of person, right?
(23:49):
A white, hunter, male, generally wealthy,
sort of a mix of urban and rural,
with folks in rural areas hunting,
and then also folks from urban areas
going to rural areas to hunt.
But, right, they set upthis plan for conservation
that's now been replicatedacross North America,
and exported,- It served those bodies.
(24:10):
exactly, exported globally,
and was literally a specific,
the one type of individual
that was sort of there at the time
and had the most power,
that created conservationessentially as we know it today.
And I think there's been a lot of movement
in terms of thinking about other ways
to understand relationshipswith the environment,
community-based conservation,
(24:31):
community-based naturalresource management.
But it does all sort of still fit into
this foundational approach toconservation that, you know,
if we rewound the clock 300 years
and had different peoplesetting a system up,
it could look,
we can't even fathom whatit might look like, right?
Because of this realitythat's been created for us.
But I think that students are excited
(24:52):
to have those conversations
and think about what the alternatives are,
and think critically and creatively
and in ways that we haven't in the past,
to kind of move us forward
and sort of reckon withthe reality of that,
the origins of this field,
and the way that we thinkabout nature and conservation.
So yeah.
- Okay, that was amazing.
Thinking about,
it just makes me really thinklike, if we could rewind,
(25:14):
what would that movie look like?
- Yeah.
- Right, and if we couldwork with film students
to actually show a different shaping
of how we take care of our national parks.
- We should do that.
- We should do that.
We should make that film.
- We should do that.
- Truly, it's really exciting to me.
Okay, we're gonna make that film.
- Okay, so the quick and dirty
is a time for you toanswer some questions.
(25:35):
It has to, it has to be quick,
doesn't have to be dirty.
And I'm gonna ask youthings about and-ing,
in your life, in the world,
and you're just gonna lay it on me.
- Okay.- You feel good about this?
- No, but let's go.- Okay, okay, you can't lose.
Okay.
What is a way that youand in your daily life
that folks wouldn't expect?
(25:55):
- Well, I think you'd appreciate this.
I have a background indance, and I love dancing,
and so I think about sortof dance in everything,
and all things.
So yes.
- Okay, but then I have to follow up.
What styles of dance do you enjoy?
- So hiphop and Latin mostly.
- Okay, so you're coming over to dance.
- Yeah, let's do it.
- Let's do it, okay.
We have so many things.
Great, okay.
Is and-ing limited to yourpersonal or professional life?
(26:19):
- No.- No.
- No.- But how do you
necessitate and-ing thatmaybe crosses the streams
of personal and professional?
- Okay, it's supposed to be quick.
I mean, I think it goes back to,
I'm allowed to see myselfin this work, right?
Ecology and conservation
should not be removed from the scientist,
(26:41):
and the person doing the work.
And I think that that's reallyimportant for moving past
the sort of fraught history
of conservation and natural resources.
So yeah, I put people inwhere they often don't belong.
- Yes, just add people.
Okay, how do you and in thisone wild and precious life,
in terms of not thinking about
(27:01):
what it is you're meant to be,
but what is it you're meant to do?
- I don't know if thisgets into your question,
but I see myself as,
I am a force for joy.
And so I think about joy in all that I do.
Joy is the and
to all that I do.
- That's a hundred percent magic.
(27:23):
And I feel that vibratingfrom your human self.
I've had a really hardday, you wouldn't know it.
I got pulled over by a cop.
My mom's in the ER,
I was late to teach,
and I was in a threeand a half hour meeting.
And I am so happy beingin this space with you,
and learning with you.
I feel like there's agenerosity for me to mess up,
and not know, whether it'sabout the environment,
about science, about data collection,
(27:44):
about racism and how itworks in our country.
Thank you.
So I just wanna, this isnot the end of our time.
I'm just saying thank you now.
Okay, I'll thank you again also.
Okay, are there ways that you and,
when you wish you would only?
- Yes.
So I think because I think about people,
I think about equity, Ithink about the environment,
I think about convening andbringing people together.
(28:05):
I probably just do too much,
and I probably shouldfocus on a couple things,
as opposed to trying to doall the things sometimes.
- So I could be your time bouncer,
and I could just text you and be like,
whatever you're doing right now,
if it's not totally necessary,
can you stop doing that Karen Bailey?
- I'm not gonna, but you could.
- I'm still gonna say it.
And guilt doesn't work with you?
It works with me.
- I think it depends on the type of guilt.
(28:25):
- Okay, we'll work onthat in our friendship.
Okay, when has and-ing gone wrong for you,
and what did you learn?
- I don't know if I have aquick answer for this one.
I'm too much of an optimist.
It's all just a learning experience.
- I'll take that as an answer actually.
That when it's gone wrong,
it's actually going rightsomewhere else in the future.
- Yeah, exactly.
- Okay, so future Karen,
(28:46):
- Yeah.- feels great.
Okay.
Future Karen has learnedfrom the gone wrong
even in the moment.
- Yeah.- Okay, here's super fast,
bands with "and" in them.
- Benny and the Jets?
which I don't actuallythink that's an answer.
- Okay, that's not a real band.
That was from a song,
but that's okay, 'cause youdeal in not real things.
Also, I love it.
Favorite and-ing foods,
(29:07):
and they could be things you made up.
Like, I have some go-tos.
I wanna hear what yours might be.
- Oh, I love pizza,
pineapple on pizza.
That's, I stand by it.
I don't care if you don't like it.
- Great, I do like it.
We're gonna be fine.
- Okay.- Okay.
Words that have "and" in them.
- It's like, all I canthink of is "ampersand,"
(29:28):
and that's not helpful.
- 'And" is in "ampersand."
We're totally taking that.
Okay, your and-ing wardrobe,
you go to get dressedto show up full Karen,
how do you and?
- My earrings,
I always have big fun earrings,
and I try to include color and fun shapes,
and sometimes I have earrings
that say "Black Lives Matter,"
(29:49):
sometimes messages.
So my earrings for sure.
- Your earrings are your and-ing.
- Yeah, yeah.
- That's brilliant.
And-ers out there who you admire.
- Oh gosh, too many peopleare are coming to mind.
- This room just got reallycrowded with your imagination.
I just, so it's not thatyou're not going fast,
you're not just not going loud.
- Right?
I don't know.
I think I and the people whocan make science accessible,
(30:11):
or I appreciate the peopleand admire the people
who are and-ing in their science.
And I think that includes a lot of people,
which is why I amstruggling to name just one.
- Okay, we don't have to,
- Ayana Elizabeth Johnson comes to mind.
- I need to get to know them.
All right.
Final piece here.
Okay, if you had, this is your moment,
you're maybe at a podium, at a graduation,
or maybe you're just likesitting with students
(30:32):
who are about to go into the world.
You have a proverbial piece of advice
that begins with "and,"
like I would say, "andread more Mary Oliver."
(slow string music)
- And always see yourself,
your values and yourcommunities in your work.
(30:55):
- Karen Bailey is an assistant professor
in environmental studies
at the University of Colorado Boulder.
"The Ampersand" is writtenand produced by me,
Erika Randall, and Tim Grassley.
If there are folks you'd like to hear from
on "The Ampersand,"
do please email us at asinfo@colorado.edu.
(31:16):
Our theme music was composedand performed by Nelson Walker,
a CU Boulder alum,brilliant cellist, composer,
and a fantastic dancer.
Episodes are recorded at Interplay Studios
in Boulder, Colorado.
I'm Erika Randall.
And this is "The Ampersand."
(string music continues)
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