2018 Conference

Individual Paper Presentation

I am an alumni of American University's NRSD program and a sustainable landscape professional in New Orleans, Louisiana where I design low maintenance, responsible landscapes for homeowners, museums, schools and neighborhood collaborators.  We focus on locally grown (sometimes self-grown) native, perennial plants to encourage rainwater retention, biodiversity, food production, habitat for beneficial species and the human community.  

After numerous years of impossibly low-paid internships and work in sustainble urban agriculture, urban forestry, environmental education in primary and secondary schools, I decided to build my own small scale landscape business to teach people that while 'the environment' as a whole may feel uncontrollably damaged and threatened, we as citizens still have control over our own backyards which may eventually be patchworked into sustainably run towns and regions. With this business, I attempt to address not only the environment but also the social landscape.  My workforce is made up of at-risk women such as myself: women coming from broken homes, dealing with past trauma, single mothers and women with long past criminal histories that are attempting to put their lives together and need meaningful employment and work relationships.  I grew up on welfare, from a defunct farming family in a rural defunct mining town in Southern Illinois and I am the only one to have attended and graduated from college.  During graduate school at American University, I quickly realized my situation was not the norm, and that anyone with any less support (of any kind) than I had would never have the opportunity.  Now I feel it is my responsibility to use what priviledge I do have to raise others who do not.