Ever wondered how paleontologists reconstruct past climates? What can this knowledge be used for? Dive into this discussion with Dr. Raquel Bryant, an Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Wesleyan University to learn how microscopic fossils can be used in understanding how the ocean and its ecosystems respond to intervals of global warmth in the geologic past. Hosted by UF Agricultural Education and Communication graduate student Lexi Bolger, this conversation is sure to teach you something new about the importance of combining social science with the geosciences. This episode was made in partnership with UF’s Department of Agricultural Education and Communication.
Ever wondered how paleontologists reconstruct past climates? What can this knowledge be used for? Dive into this discussion with Dr. Raquel Bryant, an Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Wesleyan University to learn how microscopic fossils can be used in understanding how the ocean and its ecosystems respond to intervals of global warmth in the geologic past. Hosted by UF Agricultural Education and Communication graduate student Lexi Bolger, this conversation is sure to teach you something new about the importance of combining social science with the geosciences. This episode was made in partnership with UF’s Department of Agricultural Education and Communication.
Lexi
Welcome back to the podcast series Boundless Science brought to you by Streaming Science, a student driven program that works to connect you with scientists to learn how science impacts all of us in our everyday lives and interests. I am Lexi Bolger, a master's student in agricultural education and communication at the University of Florida, and I'll be your host today.
Lexi
Joining us in this episode is Raquel Bryant, an assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. We talked about her background in the geosciences, how tiny fossils can be used to reconstruct the geologic past, and her work in developing new methods to cultivate leadership skills among geoscientists and fostering radical earth learning environments. Through this podcast, I hope you gain insight into Raquel's research and the importance of combining social science with the geosciences.
Lexi
So if you want to just go ahead and tell me a little bit about yourself and your journey in the geosciences.
Raquel
I'm a micropaleontologist and paleooceanographer. So for my research, I look at really tiny fossils called foraminifera. They're actually fossil marine protists, so they're unicellular organisms, but they make a calcium test or shell made of calcium carbonate. So that means they get preserved really well in the fossil record. So we can look back hundreds of millions of years and look at these fossils, foraminifera, and how they change, how their species composition change, how their shapes change, how they change their shell, and infer their response to environmental perturbations.
So increasing sea surface temperatures all the way to increased productivity in the water column, to decreased oxygen or ocean acidification, how are they responding? Recording changes in the environment, in their communities and in their individual shells. That's kind of about my research. In terms of being a geoscientist, I'm really interested in making geoscientists better leaders so that we can really play an active role in being advocates and activists when it comes to climate change and especially just all of the unbalanced and unequal implications of climate change and the fact that there are certain communities that will bear the brunt of, you know, the the outcomes of a capitalist society.
I think we as geoscientists owe it to the community, the rest of the world, to use the skills that we learned studying the earth and earth systems and applying them to human systems, to health systems, to transportation systems so that we can make not only a world where we understand how our earth works, that we understand our relationship with the Earth a little better, and use that to chart a just future for all people.
Lexi
So you said you were a geoscientist. Can you tell me, like what the geosciences are and kind of like what a geoscientist does?
Raquel
Yeah. So I think geoscience for me is a really broad term, but I know for some people it really gets associated with like geology. But I think there's really a big difference between geology and geoscience. I think geology is a type of geoscience, but for me, geoscience is like anything that involves geospatial thinking. I think ecologists are geoscientists, I think certainly geographers are geoscientists and I think at the end of the day everybody is a little bit of a geoscientist.
The other thing that I like to say is that geoscientists are a time traveling storytellers. So we go in the past and try to understand what Earth looks like at different periods of the time. There are geologists who look at other planets, right, who are looking at time space, even in a different way. There are geoscientists who model the climate and think about the future or try to predict what things will happen.
And so we really like traverse all of space time to understand not only like Earth's materials and kind of how life came to be, but also just how systems interact. So how does the ocean impacts the atmosphere and then impact life? And how does that impact weathering the continents, right? Like how is the whole earth and subsequent environments all interconnected?
I think that's what geoscientists really studies.
Lexi
So kind of like more of like the Earth systems and like, like the air, land and water and like how they all interact.
Raquel
Right? And I think including that like people in our societies are all a result of that too. And like how does that interact as well?
Lexi
You said for foraminifera they were a marine protist. I actually used to study foraminifera when I was an undergraduate in college, so could you kind of tell me what a foram looks like and like, how do you look at forams?
Raquel
Forams are unicellular organisms, so they're just like one cell, but they make a shell. So some of them make shells out of like pieces of sand grain that they glued together, but a lot of them make shells out of calcium carbonate. So they precipitate this around their cell. And it's kind of just just like like a shell.
But we call it a test. And the foram will make chambers and as it grows, so as it's eating food and its cellular material is getting bigger and bigger, they'll make subsequent chambers and grow and add on to their shell. And this means that some of them, especially the ones that float in the top of the water column, they end up looking like popcorn.
Like when I show them to people, that's usually what people say just because of all the different like chambers. But there's actually a lot of different morphologies. And especially when you go to the time period that I study in the late Cretaceous, there's some very unique planktonic foraminifera. And of course there's there's also forams that live at the bottom of the seafloor like benthic forams. And they're not concerned with floating, really, and so they don't look as popcorn-ish. They take, again, also different morphologies depending on where they're living in relationship to the sediment.
Lexi
How do you get samples of forams? Like what's the process of that? Like you sorting through them as well.
Raquel
Because of this test that they make, they preserve really well in sediments and marine sediments. They preserve really well in sediments that are not rocks. So a lot of the forams that I look at actually come from out west, the western part of the US, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Kansas, Texas and there used to be an ocean there.
There’s not an ocean there anymore, but the remnants of that ocean, the archive of that ocean, are still there in those kind of western us states.. And so I take chunks of rock and crush them up, soak them and just wash them to kind of wash out all the clay and the really tiny stuff. And then what's left are the forams.
And so, you know, bigger pieces of minerals and other types of tiny fossils too -- ostracods and tiny bits of other marine life like fish teeth, cool things that you find. And then we look at those residues. So like what's left over after we washed the rock, we look at that under a microscope and that's how we pick out the individual foraminifera.
Lexi
So what's it like looking under a microscope for like 8 hours a day?
Raquel
It's so funny. It used to be, like, my life. I feel like I haven't done it in forever. Actually, my last two projects were not about actually looking at forams and picking them out of these rock residues. My last two projects were looking at papers that were already published, information about formative for those already published and like summarizing it and doing really cool math to pull out some patterns about the community assemblages.
And so I like to say that I'm trying to study the forams from the individual, like how one foram is changing its chamber shape and it's actually like its shell all the way to, you know, what's the ecology, the paleoecology of the benthic forams and what can that tell us about environmental change? So yeah, my last project, I actually did barely anything on the microscope, but when I first started doing research, I really enjoyed my microscope time because I'm really into music.
So to really just listen to as much music as you want when you're at the microscope, but also podcasts like this. I got into podcasts because I was spending 8 hours with the microscope. So that, yeah, I definitely had summers where every day I was just looking at the microscope. I would always know when it would be really bad when like everything starts to look like a foram, like you're eating like food and you're like, this like swirl of, like mashed potatoes.
It's like a foram or like you're looking at the clouds and you're like, that cloud looks just like the species. Then you're like, okay, I need a break cuz my eyes are seeing them everywhere.
Lexi
Forams are life, huh?
Raquel
Exactly.
Lexi
So you said that you were looking at these large datasets and like going back millions of years to the Cretaceous. So, like, what is so important about the Cretaceous? And like, how does it relate to, like, your research in, like climate change today and like formulating like parallels I guess between like today and in the past in the Cretaceous.
Raquel
So I think of it as like an extreme analog. So if we think about some of our worst case scenarios in terms of fossil fuel emissions and I'm talking like if we just as a society don't do anything which is kind of like what we're doing a little bit right, if we just keep not doing anything like what are some of the worst case scenarios?
Okay, well, in that case, we're going to a lot of carbon that's in the atmosphere and the further back we go in time, we get to places like the Cretaceous where there was a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, way more than there was today. You know, sometimes estimates say it's double the amount. And so when we think about, okay, what's like the worst case scenario, maybe we need to go to times like the Cretaceous to see how the earth responds, recovers, how the marine environment, how ocean circulation, right.
Like physical things like that, how it changes in response to this extreme warmth, because that will help us kind of contextualize some of the you know, maybe it's extreme, maybe it's the outer bounds, but like I said, we're not really heading we're not heading in the extreme direction the other way, too, like the doing all that we can to address climate change.
So I think it's important to explore these kind of things that seem really out there, like, oh, we'll never get to that much in the atmosphere. But like, I don't know, I think it's, one, a thought experiment, but also kind of just speculating, right? The different types of futures that we might be headed towards. And, you know, we have an archive where our world has been there before, so we ought to learn about the dynamics of that kind of world.
Lexi
And then so like you said, you work with like really large datasets and don't really get into the nitty gritty of lab work as much anymore. So how has it been like transitioning from being like a graduate student, I guess, to being like in control of your own lab and like in academia?
Raquel
I think the biggest thing is just setting up my lab space., what I like to call my studio, just for other people to use, because kind of like you said, like I'm not really doing the nitty gritty anymore. That's kind of what happens when you grow up to be a PI. You aren't allowed to do the fun things anymore.
I mean, like you're allowed, but like there's so many things that you have to do now to run and make everything, like, logistically function, to train people to do all the other stuff you have to do is professor that you don't get as much time to do the nitty gritty. And so you set it up so students can do it.
But that itself is like, I want to be like pedagogical with it. I want it to be like fun. I want it to be like, aesthetic in a way too, right, cool, like shareable. I think right now, social media, like people kind of like narrating their life and micro-blogging their life. I think science is like such a story.
It's really like a really good landscape for stuff like that. So just making making it an inviting space for students to come in and realize like, yeah, I'm not driving this anymore. And it is like it's your place to kind of step into. That's been really hard because there isn't really a playbook in particular. I think everybody does it differently PI to PI, but also with a lot of things in science,
I'm not trying to do it like anybody else. And so then that's the other thing is like I don't really have examples, but it's a lot of like being intentional about spaces that I never thought would be possible in science. And then just like going and making them.
Lexi
So like in terms of like setting up your lab, are you centering it around like different aspects of research you'd like to explore or more like what skills that you would want to teach your graduate students, or?
Raquel
Yeah, that's a good question. So I have one graduate student and then I have a handful of students who are working on a group independent study together. And I did actually split them into two different research groups. Kind of, weirdly, like, how I’ve given folks responsibilities and roles in my group is really based on their positionality, like what part of college are you in?
Are you like about to graduate? And like the skills you need to work on are like writing and managing and coordinating and leadership? Or are you a sophomore and like you're looking for research skills that you could do a senior thesis, right? And how can I like give you a project where you can like, step into it and get something out of it?
And so I have like the upperclassmen kind of working on a project on spatial analysis. And so it's just what I was talking about with these big data papers, like, okay, you're not going to be at the microscope, you're not gonna be washing anything, but, like, go on Google Scholar, go on all these like data repositories and find some cool data we can summarize and do cool math on.
And that's something that like, regardless of the dataset, this is like coding experience. This is like spatial thinking experience. It's like literature review stuff, right? This is that stuff that could be transferable. So my thinking was like, okay, if upperclassmen do that, it's not like so much of a waste of their time to learn about forams and if they're never going to touch them again.
And then the other project is much more like nitty gritty type, like measuring individual foraminifera and understanding like very nuanced morphometric change over periods of time. And I think the other part of that is just giving it to groups, too, and not having like one student being like, this is your job, finish this project, do this, start this project.
It's kind of like, Hey, here's your group assignment. Like, can you work together over the next few weeks with help from me, but really like kind of having it be team-based. That's also been my approach. And then the other thing is I have so many different projects going on that kind of expand beyond the bounds of just, like, paleoceanography, related to some of the advocacy work that I do.
And so I ended up also hiring students just to like be coordinators of my studio and the projects and kind of help out with different things. So like right now, students are working to digitize this archives conference that I held over the summer. So that's something I wanted to do but I wasn't going to do, right? And then having students just be like, Hey, I want to experience working, working with you.
I want to just like hang out and learn more about what you're doing, like what this stuff means to you. You know, what is justice and geosciences. And that's been a cool way to introduce people to, to like the other stuff that's not just science that's going on in my group.
Lexi
So your lab is kind of more focused on combining like the social sciences with the, like more hard sciences, like geology.
Raquel
Yeah, it's definitely about pursuing really innovative, rigorous science. So like what the NSF loves to say, like, is like the intellectual merit. Like, why are we doing this science? Like, what gap is it filling? You know, what new tools is it using, right, with the broader impact of it. Okay. Now how is this benefiting society and kind of going back to our conversation about like, you know, why the Cretaceous?
Why study this? I'm not saying that studying the Cretaceous is like going to save the world. Like, I don't there's no like, direct through line between that, right? Me picking my dead plankton and somebody’s, like, house not being flooded, right? Like, that's not the connection I'm trying to make, but it's like, if I could be a scientist that is training students and future scholars and future scientists to think about the earth and their connectedness with it, to acknowledge and honor like traditional ways of knowing, to incorporate racial justice into like their environmental remediation and or like all the different like fields they end up going into.
I feel like that that's like the broader impact of me studying ancient Cretaceous climate systems, right? It's not necessarily that that's going to fix something or that's going to convince a policymaker to make some change legislatively. But like I could inspire a student who goes on to be that policymaker, right? It's kind of like this more investment in what I call two radical earth learning environments, just like making a landscape where everybody is welcome to learn about the earth and like in a way that centers our, like, communities and relationships to it so that we're moving away from this like extractivist, capitalist kind of notion about our relationship with the earth.
So that's, that's why I want all of my students to be pursuing science in tandem with pursuing the broader impact of the research as well. So totally, everybody's coming and doing everything all at once. But it's kind of fun too, because I think I mean, I've been talking about forams for like -- I think I was reflecting, I guess it's been like ten years now.
So there's like things that I'm like, Oh, this is just how it works, right? This is the forams is that, this is it. And connecting with students who just learned what a foram is maybe when they came to my group, right, that that's not going to be a strong of a connection but connecting over like, oh like what kind of arts and crafts do you like?
What kind of music do you like? Right? Like there is a human, human connection and maybe that's the scaffolding for okay, did you know this cool thing about a foram, or do you ever think about this, about the science? You know, like it doesn't need to be the other way around always. I like science is the most important glue that binds the research group together. I’m like, what's what's your favorite song?
Like, Let's go out to eat. I'm always like, How are we going to eat? Let's have a research meeting, then go get dinner. You know, like actually building community and then like scaffolding the science from there. That's also kind of why I ask my students to kind of pursuit both things when they're coming in.
Lexi
I definitely relate to like wanting to incorporate the more like human side of things into science because like, that's kind of why I'm pursuing communications now. So in running your lab and connecting with the more human aspects of your students and what their interests are and like letting them run from there, how does that kind of relate back to what you were talking about in like the justice of in the Geosciences, like how you're pursuing that?
Raquel
I think part of it is just opening up the pathways to the fields. Something I always talk about is that there's this like notion that to be a geoscientist and specifically like a geologist, like you had to have grown up like hiking. I always make a joke like you were hiking since you could walk, right? You were camping since you were born.
You've been to a national park every year of your life, right? Like, there's just this motif that you are somebody who is this particular type of person who like certain types of things. And that alone is very exclusive and alienating and isolating for people who might not identify, one, might not identify at all with that right there, just have a different life history.
But two, like, who might find that completely offensive and like for their own, right? Right. It's like kind of glorifying this really white, patriarchal, ableist like colonizer identity and slapping it onto a discipline and saying like, you have to fit that mold to be accepted here. And so I think opening it up and saying like, Oh, no, we're going to read like black studies pieces in this geoscience class and I'm going to show you like how it's connected and we're going to talk about like why it might feel weird to scientists.
We're reading this but why it's probably important that we feel this way, right? Like, and that might...you never know who that actually invites into your space by having a different way of doing the science. So I think they're really it's really related like letting people bring their whole selves, right? Be their true selves in higher ed and then like not have to leave any of those identities at the lab door, you know, as it may be, and not have to like, right, like not have to not feel like, oh, I can't be an activist and a scientist or I can't be a dancer and a scientist, or I can’t be a mom and a scientist or like just like making all of those kind of like identities that feel like they're in conflict with what it means to do science and geoscience in particular, just kind of like breaking those down.
Lexi
Were you ever interested in being like a dancer and being a scientist or like, a singer? You mentioned that earlier.
Raquel
Yeah, I never, ever wanted to be a scientist. That was not something that came up like senior year of high school when I was like going to college and then thinking about stuff. Growing up, I was very sure I was going to be an international pop star. Like, I don't even mean like, Oh, like a singer. No, I was like, going to be Britney Spears.
That was my vision of my life. So like, lots of singing. I mean, like, I went to a performing arts high school, like in in high school, half of my day was spent in different choirs and singing group. I sang a lot in college. I sang in my a cappella group. And yeah, like, there's like, nothing better to me than music and singing and particularly performing on stage.
I've also realized, like, you know, people like to go mountain biking or scuba dive or whatever. Like, I love singing and being vulnerable and having like a bunch of people like, watching you. Like, I get why that's terrifying for some people, but that's kind of like my personal thrill. Like I just really like performing, which is why, actually, class has not been that bad.
Like lecturing. Like I feel like a lot of professors are like, Oh I’m so nervous. Like every time they lecture. To be fair, I was like super nervous the first day, but it was mostly like I was like, What the heck do I have to teach people? Like, I don't know anything, like, what am I going to tell them? But then after I realized, I'm like, Oh, I actually have a lot I want to tell them, and they don't know this stuff.
It's like, right, that so that bias of like when you've done your dissertation and you're in that mode, you just like, you don't know what's like common knowledge or not anymore. But then after that, it wasn't, it wasn't nerve wracking at all. It was just it's a performance. It's like fun, it's like a story. And I'm just I'm just the narrator of the story.
And so I'm just telling it's just like singing. You're telling songs with with you telling stories with your songs and I'm telling stories with my lectures now.
Lexi
So is that why in your Twitter bio, you call yourself an ocean storyteller?
Raquel
Oh, definitely. I feel like another thing is just like the ocean is such an important thing for me, like an idea. It's like this unknowable but so familiar and like, omnipresent, yet really precious, right? You know, we try to explore other planets, have oceans like none of them have oceans like us, right? And it's responsible for so much of the coolest life.
I mean, everything in the ocean from forams to, like, all the cool cephalopods. And like, the origin of life, right? Like, or like humans and how we, like, navigate the ocean. And that's kind of like, been foundational in how our world is set up today, right? This globalized world and even like imperialism, right? So like, the ocean just is a thing.
And even me, like I grew up loving the beach and I study ancient oceans. And so I feel like part of it is like telling histories about an ancient ancestor, like the ocean, Being able to, like, talk about how it was in the late Cretaceous is another way to just talk about how important it is, right? Why am I doing all this work to try to figure out how something was 100 million years ago. Unless it like, must be this really important thing. And so I definitely think telling stories about the ocean is like another way that I express just how, like, intimately tied up I feel like my personal life history is with the ocean.
Lexi
How would you say that storytelling could be used to, like, create action around either like science or like climate or climate change? Like, just broadly like.
Raquel
Yeah, so this actually really relates perfectly to the conference that I was a co-convener for this past summer, Justice in Geosciences. One of our keynote speakers on our last day, which was thinking about the future, her talk, Nalleli Cobo, that was her name. Her talk was called like storytelling to advance the climate movement. So exactly what you're asking about and in this case it was her personal story, like how she grew up in one of these so called sacrifice zones that's being polluted by a company where profits are more important than people.
But, you know, instead of accepting that fate, Nalleli, ever since she was a kid, like decided to fight back and advocate not only for herself, right? But this was about her community and for her was about her future. She was thinking about having a family and like what she wanted her life to be, right. She didn't want her life to be something that was like truncated because of money from some oil industry.
And I think it was really powerful. A call to arms for everybody at the conference to see someone so young who's accomplished so much and like used kind of like the the support of a community, but also the motivation of like stewarding your community to accomplish so much in their life. So I definitely think like not only like, like storytelling and being able to identify like role models, right, but also like storytelling so that we can see how it's also a story of the earth, right?
Like, and we are the villains right now. We're pushing Earth to, you know, an extreme to, to, to a tipping point. And that's another story, right? And when we put it in the context of other times in Earth's history, when life has changed it, right? You know, the evolution of photosynthesis that produces oxygen completely changed the planet and messed up life for a lot of other organisms.
But like the magnitude and the scale at which we as humans are changing is completely different. Right? And then we're also hurting each other in how we're changing it, right? And there's like these stratified outcomes. So I think storytelling about that is really the way that, that we call people to place themselves in it as a character, as an actor in that story.
Lexi
Yeah, I think storytelling, as you're saying, is like a very powerful medium to get people involved and like, yeah, as you said, build community and bring people together. So like you also mentioned your conference. Could you tell me a little bit more about what your conferences and what the goals were?
Raquel
Yeah, it's it's actually something that's ongoing. So phase one was this conference that we held this past summer in August 2022. It was called the Second National Conference on Justice and Geosciences, and it was held and hosted. We worked with the American Geophysical Union, which is one of the it's the largest geoscientists, planetary scientists, professional society, but they hosted us at their headquarters in DC this past summer. And we had support from a number of different universities and private foundations and the National Science Foundation, importantly.
But basically I always struggle when I tell this story because this is one of those, you know, I just talked about storytelling and like, I don't know where this story really starts. And like I mentioned, it's still ongoing. So sometimes it's hard to tell chronologically. But the goals of this conference were to get geoscientists and others, like anybody, really invested in the history and the future of the Earth and its inhabitants together to think about what we want.
The next 50 years of action in the geosciences to be, right? Like if we fast forward to 50 years and we're looking back at this moment, what kind of regrets are we going to have? What kind of foresight will we have and how can we think about the future to plan our actions now? And how can we think about, instead of performative actions that are about a year or a month, how can we start thinking about accountability and say, in 50 years, I want to do this and this is what I want to do in year five and year 15?
Like how can we actually set up timescales that will accommodate for the types of large scale system change that we actually want to see in our fields? And in a lot of ways, we convened this conference to honor a legacy of activism and advocacy in the Geosciences. So in 1972, a group of geoscientists led by Randolph Bromery who was the first black chancellor at UMass Amherst.
And that's where I did my Ph.D. He convened a conference called the First National Conference. So that's why we called ours, the second National conference. So theirs happened in 1972 and then we had our conference this past summer, 50 years later. But at that first conference, the participants gathered to talk about this exact same issue, like what are the barriers to broadening participation in the geosciences and why are those barriers there, and how is that related to white supremacy and capitalism and colonialism?
And in fact, there are just as many civil rights folks at this conference as folks from academia. And so the conveners really saw how the political moment informs geoscience and how geoscience plays a role in the political moment as well. And in a lot of ways, when I was a graduate student, I was made to feel like the things I was talking about, like diversity in geoscience was some like brand new thing or some like cherry on top or some like alternate like, yeah, that's what you're doing because you're actually not that serious about science.
And then I saw this example from the past where it's like, Oh, no, somebody who is super serious about science and super serious about higher Ed was also super serious about this, and they're having the same kind of conversations. And, you know, these conversations were given like a huge platform to be talked about. But then at the same time, like all this time has passed, like nobody knew about that history.
And so the second conference that we held was also just like, call attention to this legacy and celebrate it in a different way that hopefully can't be as easily, I don't know, kind of forgotten, and in the archive and in the wash of time and actually like underscored as a like, oh wow, all these geoscientists and allies got together to like do this big things must be important, you know.
Lexi
Yeah, I think that is such an awesome, awesome conference. I'm sad I didn't get to attend, but yeah. So what is your, what is either your personal or like collective kind of vision for the next 50 years of the geosciences? Like if you just want to like spitball here, like what your vision is.
Raquel
Yeah. Like that question I saw and I was like, Oh my God, how have I never really thought about that for myself, because it is like, it's like one, I keep asking other people to think of that, but two, it's like I know, like I do have a vision of it. That's kind of what I'm heading towards. I've just never articulated it.
One major thing, it's just...In my head. It's always like this phraseology of like ruins, like, you know, like, I want to know that like, something was there before, but I also want to know it got, like, destroyed and toppled over, right? Like, I want to see the ruins of, like, old institutions and especially the kind that, like, have barriers specifically for black students and native students to, like, learn about their environment.
That's really like when I think when vision like what I see in my head, that's what represents like changing in my field. But just like it's more than like a DEI program, it's like abolition of what we think is geoscience and kind of a a death of ego, of a sort of like this geologist as the conqueror, you know, as the extractivist, you know, as the oilmen, as oil baron, as the blood diamond seller, right?
Like, how can we completely eradicate those kinds of like, iconographies from what it means to study the Earth and embrace things like community organizer and like, I even think just like like a big sister, right? Like these nurturing, like, how do we, like, learn from the earth and ecosystems about, like, taking care of each other, like stewardship.
So, yeah, that's like very poorly articulated. But.
Lexi
No, I thought that was great. That was beautiful. But thank you for your time, Raquel. This was awesome. I enjoyed speaking with you.
Raquel
Thank you. You too. Your questions were so great.
Lexi
This episode was made in partnership with the University of Florida Department of Agricultural Education and Communication. Thank you for joining us on today's episode of Boundless Science. We hope you listen to more episodes at Streaming Science dot com.