Scientists looking for their space
Black conservationists decry their lack of voice in their chosen field
Darren Chapman was caught between two cities, and in the middle, there was the land. Chapman grew up in Phoenix and Los Angeles during the 1970s, going to school in each city for half the year. For Chapman, the long ride on the Amtrak was a breath of fresh air.
“I would sit and look out those windows and go, ‘Wow, man. Look at all of that — just land. Birds swooping,’” he said. “For me, it was the coolest thing in the world.”
For much of his life, Chapman, now 55, felt there were only two options: make a name for himself in the gangruled neighborhoods of LA, or conform to a predominantly white society in Phoenix that he was sure would never fully accept him anyway.
Though the world was different from the one in which his ancestors lived, their stories never seemed far behind him. His great-grandfather had been enslaved and forced to “sire” children who would also be enslaved. After emancipation, the family sharecropped in Texas where he later fathered his 25th and final child — Chapman’s grandmother.
Eventually, his grandmother, Jane Watson, met and married his grandfather, who was a catcher for the Austin Black Bears, a team in the Negro Baseball League. Watson caught his eye while he was “barnstorming” through Texas. They eventually moved to California, to a part of south LA now called Fruit Town, a nod to its agricultural roots.
There, Jane tended to a huge garden bursting with fruits and vegetables: kumquats, peaches, plums, turnips, collards and carrots.
Her garden would inspire Chapman’s path later in life: He founded a co-op gardening initiative in LA before moving it to and expanding it in Phoenix in 2005. But Chapman’s work and the work of others like him today shows that even environmental and conservation work can be fraught for someone who’s
“A lot of us had the same shared experience, especially with Christian Cooper, we wanted to show that police brutality and racism in America does touch into the natural world and does touch scientists.” Earyn McGee
Ph.D. student studying wildlife conservation and management at the University of Arizona
Black.
A doctoral student at Arizona State University worked with Black colleagues across the country to start #BlackBirdersWeek on Twitter and call out the conservation and science fields for doing little to support diversity and fight racism within their own institutions.
A leader in aquaponics and urban farming research who grew up in south Phoenix during the Civil Rights era watched his children head out the door to march in the Black Lives Matter protests in the city.
A man who started a community gardening initiative held space for conversations about enduring racism while his young workers stretched in a circle in the early morning hours before taking shovel to dirt.
As protests against racism and police brutality continue throughout the country and the COVID-19 pandemic increasingly spreads, disproportionately impacting minority communities, Chapman is one of many in the Black community feeling the electricity of this moment — and the anger of seeing entrenched racism continue to show itself.
Industries, environmental groups and political leaders have put out statements to proclaim their solidarity with the Black struggle. For many in the Black community, while the conversation is seen as necessary, the action is late.
A legacy rooted in the land
When Chapman was a kid in LA, his grandmother’s garden helped feed the neighborhood.
“You didn’t know that you came from a low-income family,” Chapman said. “You ate energy, if you can possibly imagine it. I don’t ever remember being hungry.”
The family would go to the outskirts of the city to hunt, then make cottontail stew with the vegetables they grew in the garden. His grandparents traded fruits and greens with their neighbors.
“I always remembered this really cool way of community coming together around agriculture,” Chapman recalled. “The land was abundant, and very kind.”
But as gang violence escalated in his neighborhood, Chapman fell into that way of life as a means of survival.
“You’re seeing people die that are your age, you’re being told in grade school that your life expectancy as a young Black man is 25 years of age,” Chapman said. “So you know that you’re in something that’s not good, growing up around the gangs, growing up around the violence. I needed to be able to defend myself. I didn’t want to be a guy who hurt anyone, but I did want to be a guy that you didn’t mess with.”
The nickname his grandmother gave him at birth, “Tiger,” would be earned on the streets.
In Phoenix, Chapman saw an opportunity for change. His fellow gang members were like brothers, but he knew the lifestyle was not sustainable.
“In that world, I am somebody and I have placement, regardless of what the endgame is,” he said.
“I don’t have to try to acclimate and fake and be something that I’m not. I can just be a kid from the hood who was accepted by other kids from the hood,” he said. “But I wanted to try to better myself and be part of a fabric of conformity that, maybe, would allow me to not kill or be killed.”
He got into Arizona State University. He taught at a school in Scottsdale his senior year. He thought he was doing everything right, but he kept getting pulled over by police officers for no reason he could discern besides his race.
Caught in a perpetual “ebb and flow,” as Chapman put it, he floundered between contorting himself to fit into a predominantly white world that seemed to treat him differently no matter what he did, and a dangerous life on the streets that would likely leave him dead at a young age.
While he wrestled with gang-related violence, addiction, and multiple stints in detention centers and jail in LA, he realized in Phoenix the false promise of hard work leading to a “white picket fence, or the American Dream as I thought it was” for someone who looked like him, Chapman said.
After an incident with a police officer during his senior year at ASU, Chapman returned to LA. There, he felt the constant pull of what he calls the “abyss” — the dark world of gang violence and depression where, despite its dangers, at least he had a place. He thought it was his only other option.
“I was thinking the way to go is back into the depths of my despair, ugliness, darkness,” Chapman said. “Because at least there, I was going to die fairly. Here, in this other world, I wouldn’t even see it coming. I was like a deer in the headlights.”
As he sat in a cell at 25, an age he didn’t expect to make it to, Chapman had a realization.
“I’m thinking that I’m wasting my life, I might as well be dead because this ain’t living,” Chapman said. “I saw my grandparents hunt jackrabbits in the middle of Los Angeles. It worked for them. So I realized that there were ways to do things that may be very different than the traditional white picket fence way of doing things.”
Chapman’s grandmother would often tell him, “Son, you can’t change the world.” But there was always a hidden option: He could build another one. His nickname, Tiger, would later come to represent something other than only toughness, scrap and bite.
It would come to represent “Tenacity, Integrity, Greatness, Empowerment and Resilience.” The seeds of the Tiger Mountain Foundation, a nonprofit Chapman founded to help people in south Phoenix, had been planted. The foundation works closely with formerly incarcerated people and those with substance abuse issues in its overall mission to grow and sell fresh produce through community gardens.
‘There’s more of us than you think’
When Earyn McGee saw the viral video of a white woman threatening to call police on Christian Cooper, a Black man, while he was birding in New York’s Central Park, she felt a familiar mix of outrage and sadness. A 25-year-old Ph.D. student studying wildlife conservation and management at the University of Arizona, she has experienced the ways racism plays out in the mostly white spaces of science and conservation.
“Christian Cooper could have been literally any one of us,” McGee said. “As grad students, as people who do research out in the field, a lot of times we are out there in jeans and a T-shirt. It’s not like we have official clothing.”
For support, she reached out to her #BlackAFinSTEM colleagues, a group of Black scientists, students and educators at universities around the country who have built a community on social media. She helped co-found #BlackBirdersWeek on Twitter to boost visibility of Black nature enthusiasts and highlight the value of racial diversity in conservation.
The kickoff of the social media push coincided with mass protests against police brutality in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, a Black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer pinned him by the neck for nearly nine minutes, despite his cries of “I can’t breathe.”
“A lot of us had the same shared experience, especially with Christian Cooper, we wanted to show that police brutality and racism in America does touch into the natural world and does touch scientists,” McGee said.
“A lot of times people are like, ‘It’s not really a science issue when these things happen,’ when in fact, it is. So we wanted to say, hey, we’re here. There’s a lot more of us than you think there are. And when it impacts us, even just one of us, it impacts the scientific community. Because Christian Cooper could have lost his life.”
McGee started #FindThatLizard, a social media game where participants are tasked with finding a camouflaged lizard in a photo. She spends much of her time on trails and in neighborhoods in Tucson finding lizards to photograph. As a Black woman, the fact that she could be racially profiled doing this work is often in the back of her mind.
“I’m always worried that somebody is going to think, ‘She’s trying to case my house, or she’s taking a picture of my house to come back later.’ All you have to get is that one person who’s going to call the cops and you’re the next hashtag.”
Throughout her academic career so far, McGee has dedicated herself to improving access for students of color and increasing diversity in conservation. As a graduate student mentor to the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars program, she takes undergraduate students out into the field with her on research trips. She is responsive on social media through her #BlackAFinSTEM community.
Including more voices, experiences
That’s how she got in touch with Jaida Elcock, a recent graduate of Northern Arizona University with a talent for science-themed TikToks. Elcock studied biology and was just accepted into a Ph.D. program at the University of Washington, where she plans to study sharks, rays, and other underwater creatures.
“Not many people are thinking about sharks because we view them as villains,” Elcock said. “I figured if there were a group of animals that needed me more than another, sharks would probably be that group.”
But as a young Black woman in a field dominated by white males — who are sometimes called “shark bros,” — her work itself is something of a revolution.
“It’s so important to see representation of many different groups of people in science,” Elcock said. “If you’re excluding Black people and people of color from science, you’re going to lose out on so many perspectives that you would never have gotten otherwise, and that could be an incredible loss for the scientific community.”
Jazmyn Winzer, an undergraduate student of McGee’s studying biology and Africana Studies at University of Arizona, has found the current moment to be too little, too late.
“Just because you decided to talk about it today does not mean that it is different for me,” she said. “When they shot Trayvon Martin, I had to start wearing, like, brightly colored sweatshirts. This isn’t a new concern for me. I’m always concerned about this because I’m Black. Then there are supplemental concerns because I’m also a woman.”
Winzer, Elcock, and McGee experience too often how pervasive the lack of inclusion is for people of color in the sciences. Winzer once noticed she was the only person not greeted when entering an all-white seminar classroom and left class when a professor offhandedly mentioned slavery. Elcock has dealt with jokes about Black people not being able to swim when she’s in marine biology classes and McGee has had people outright tell her she’s where she is because of affirmative action.
In a moment, they have had to decide whether or not to speak up when subtle discrimination is directed at them or a racist comment is made and they’re the only Black person in the room.
“You have to make a split-second decision of, ‘Am I going to say something about this today? Am I going to let it go? Am I going to hate myself for letting it go?’ I’ll wait and look around and nobody else is as offended or outraged as I am,” McGee said.
A sustainable and equal world
On a recent morning, before the summer heat became too overwhelming, a group of people, mostly young Black men, put shovel to dirt and gingerly placed saplings into the ground on newly shaped berms, designed to funnel rainwater to the plants’ roots.
Those final touches were the culmination of a greening project in south Phoenix that transformed a barren strip of land into a desert-adapted landscape, one that will improve air quality in one of the most polluted sections of the city and reduce temperatures in a neighborhood that can be up to 13 degrees hotter than one with more trees and vegetation just two miles away.
The Lindo Park-Roesley Park neighborhood in south Phoenix was identified in 2018 by researchers from the Nature Conservancy, Arizona State University, Maricopa County Department of Public Health and other groups as one of 31 “hot spots” in the Phoenix metro area where community members have experienced exceptional difficulty with heat.
In the neighborhood, a coalition of community garden organizations, including Darren Chapman’s Tiger Mountain Foundation, turned a once-vacant lot into a flourishing community garden. Chapman and his coalition of young farmers implemented the final greening touches.
“I remember this all used to be dirt,” said 16-year-old Daniel Herron, who is part of Tiger Mountain’s workforce development program, which employs young people to help grow, harvest and market the fresh produce from the organization’s various community gardens. “We transformed it with a lot of time and hard work and effort to get it to look like this. I feel accomplished.”
“This is like a second home to us,” said Michael Petit, Herron’s 10-year-old brother.
This place, a 19-acre urban farm called Spaces of Opportunity, is one of Darren Chapman’s new worlds. It’s a way for him to build and extend his vision of a more equal, sustainable, and accepting world.
“What Darren wanted to do was bring a lot of people in from the community, from different ethnicities, primarily Black, African American over here, but we have people of all color, all races helping us out,” Herron said. “Basically we wanted to put out the message that no matter what you look like, it shouldn’t determine the way you should be treated.”
The brothers have worked for Chapman for a few months, but they plan to stick around as long as possible. Petit already describes himself as Executive Director In Development.
For Chapman, who spent much of his life thinking there were only two options, two worlds — gangs or an unattainable white picket fence —Tiger Mountain has allowed him to realize he can forge new paths, and he can help others do so too.
“What I see often is folks who are embracing themselves, embracing others,” Chapman said of the impact he sees on his Tiger Mountain participants and the surrounding community.
Still, the minefields of the world today infringe upon Chapman’s dream. Just a few years ago, he says, he was pulled over by police in Scottsdale after attending a board meeting there.
“He was beside my car, he had his hand on his gun and I had my hands up in the air,” Chapman said. “I was ready to get the heck out of Scottsdale. But we’re going to create our own world where we can be OK. So I’ve come to realize this: that’s how we make our lives matter. We don’t ask people anymore, we work from a sense of placement and empowerment. And then we’ve got something cooking.”