I think there are fundamental power imbalances between the sexes that play themselves out in society. And I think science is just not immune to that - which actually isn't a very controversial stance if you think about it.
— Hope Jahren
It's very important to put children in an environment where they can take things apart; where they can break things and then learn to fix them; where they can trust their hands and know their capacity to manipulate objects.
As an environmental scientist, I think our first need is to feed and shelter and nurture. That has always required the exploitation of plant life, and it always will.
I grew up in my father's laboratory and played beneath the chemical benches until I was tall enough to play on them.
We must continue as in millennia past, nourishing the future as we feed ourselves and, each year, plant only the very best of what we have collectively engineered.
We must feed, shelter, and nurture one another as our first priority, and to do so, we must avail ourselves of our best technologies, which have always included some type of genetic modification.
One cannot rule out a blizzard in Minnesota after Labor Day, and so when I travel for Thanksgiving or any time in the fall, I am careful to fly into Des Moines instead of Minneapolis and then drive the 200 miles north to my hometown.
There is a fundamental and culturally learned power imbalance between men and women, and it follows us into the workplace. The violence born of this imbalance follows us also. We would like to believe that it stops short of following us into the laboratory and into the field - but it does not.
I am a scientist who studies plants. I like plants. I think about plants almost every hour of the day, and several hours of the night as well.
The absence of women within STEM programs is not only progressive, it is persistent - despite more than 20 years of programs intended to encourage the participation of girls and women.
What is a berry? It is an ovary swaddled within a sugary womb. Plainly put, a berry is the fruition of a flower - the ultimate tautology.
Plants are decisive to a fault. A stem produces a bud that flowers once and once only. It offers pollen that is either dispersed or goes nowhere. One pollen grain either enters a stigma or it falls upon stony ground. An ovum is either fertilized or the whole project stalls out.
The deadnettle is the Punxsutawney Phil of the plant world: short of stature but stout of heart. At the first hint of winter's wane, its stem rises from the ground, and a green, grasping hand of sepals unclenches to divulge two silky-white petals, one of which unfurls straight up toward the sky.
My father's schooling during the 1930s was heavy with memorization; eight decades later, he is reaping the benefits.
I think the best learning is done with active manipulation. And we need to be able to work with our hands; it's not just about using our brains.
My life is pretty small. Even as a successful scientist, I'm not a public figure. I like people - I just don't know that many!
I like weeds and hardy plants.
Even a very little girl can wield a slide rule, the cursor serving as a haft.
I love the quiet forest that stands between my lab and my home.
You can't drive through Iowa and not think about farming: No less than 85 percent of the land in the state is devoted to farms, many of them more than 1,000 acres. This is the place where seeds are sown. It's where farmers grow the corn that will be fed to pigs as grain or fed to you as syrup or fermented to ethanol for your gas tank.
A tree's wood is also its memoir.
I was a promising graduate student. I landed a position as a professor before I even started to write my dissertation. While I prepared to start my new job, I decided that I would begin by studying the brine that bleeds sideways within the rocks that underlie the inner Aegean region of Turkey.
The evasion of justice within academia is all the more infuriating because the course of sexual harassment is so predictable. Since I started writing about women and science, my female colleagues have been moved to share their stories with me; my inbox is an inadvertent clearinghouse for unsolicited love notes.
Like all professors, I also do a lot of extra jobs for which I was never trained, such as advising former students as they navigate the wider world.
In my Scandinavian-American family, we were conditioned never to sit, at least not comfortably. I was endlessly going back to work. We longed for the fleeting respite of being useful and regarded sleep as a reward for exhaustion, always to be deferred until after the sun goes down.
While both plants and animals awaken via distinct changes in metabolic functioning, most plants prefer to err on the side of caution, waiting for hints of full-on summer before they bloom.
My father was a physicist, while I am a biogeochemist. I live to study plants, and he has never had more than a generic interest in biology.
During the mid-1990s, I collected thousands of hackberry fruits from trees all across the Midwest. I chemically analyzed each seed in order to formulate an equation relating the hackberry's mineral makeup to the summer temperature under which it grew.
I think plants present an opportunity for people to look closely at something and get invested in something that's truly very much outside of themselves.
I have learned that nothing gets readers so fired up as saying something everyone knows is true.
Plants are not like us, and the more you study plants, the more different and deep ways you see that they are not like us.
There is nothing in the world more perfect than a slide rule. Its burnished aluminum feels cool against your lips, and if you hold it level to the light you can see God's most perfect right angle in each of its corners.
Regardless of politics, our world will continue to change rapidly.
I am not a farmer; I am a researcher who studies the plants that come to your dinner table, which means that I ask questions for a living.
A true scientist doesn't perform prescribed experiments; she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge.
I love rocks with the unconditional love that you lavish upon a newborn baby.
My experiences have also convinced me that sexual harassment is very rarely publicly punished after it is reported, and then only after a pattern of relatively egregious offenses.
You can pick wild strawberries with your eyes closed, locating them by smell, for they are two parts perfume to one part taste. An hour of searching might yield a handful if you're lucky. Wild strawberries can't be encouraged, nor can they be discouraged: They come to you unbidden and unearned. They appear, or do not, by the grace of the sun.
When I was 23, my Norwegian relatives taught me how to sit still. During the long sunlit evenings in the summer of 1992, my cousins would lead me across the farm to the edge of the forest, each of us lugging a folding chair. There, in a scraggly bramble of wild blueberries, we would set them down a few yards apart, each in our own little patch.
I am not the only scientist to be struck by the power and meaning of Lamium album in bloom.
My father was a scientist, and I grew up in his laboratory. Maybe I am like him, but he is not like me.
