My name is Tesia. I have had a decade-long career in the wildlife field, either working as a biologist, or a technician, or being in grad school for wildlife or Veterinary Sciences. I've spent the last three years out here in the Intermountain West doing fieldwork and getting well-acquainted with the Rockies. Right now, I work for the National Wildlife Research Center, basically studying the environmental transmission of wildlife diseases. I think grad school is challenging in many ways, but I think being in the wildlife setting doing something that I enjoy and love, and I love learning about is really nice. Why am I in this? I think a lot of people have these very eye opening moments about when they discovered the field. But for me, it wasn't a discovery so much as it was a connection. My parents are both immigrants; one of the things my dad would do when we were little was take us out and we would look for cicada nymphs. And I didn’t even know what they were in English because I couldn't speak English. So the only way for me to connect with anything over here in the U.S. or for them to connect with anything was that they found value in connection in nature, like being able to walk around and smell gardenias. If I think about it, it was my dad's way of understanding here and how it related to being home. 

For the longest time, work never really felt like work. I didn't really have complaints about work because I genuinely was going out there. And I remember in San Francisco, what I did was just inventory all the wildlife and plant life in the preserve. So we would just flip over logs and look for salamanders and then document them or look for snails and document them and monitor plants. And that was what I did out there. Oh my god, otters. Right? So cute, and then so violent. And not so much the violence, just the utter mayhem. But they come off very charismatic. You know, people are like, “Wow, that's so cute. They're so sweet. They're so endearing.” But they're more just existing. And maybe, I think maybe because I'm like, “Oh, both can exist,” but just utter chaos. They exist to play. I think that's so exciting. 

I want to be able to give power back to smaller communities, maybe at a local level to make more sustainable decisions in order to become more climate resilient. The more marginalized communities that live on the outskirts of people who are making decisions–policy makers–are not living in the outskirts of towns that are experiencing some of the drastic effects of climate change first. So they don't really know how dire the situation is or how dire the situation has been. I grew up in a very low-income area of New Jersey, and my family and I didn't have a lot of resources. We grew up in a more urbanized area, and one of the things that we experienced a lot when I was growing up–and this was 30 years ago–was water contamination. Spill over and leakage of pollution, or the Hudson would flood, things like that. So it was something that I experienced growing up. So I always kind of knew that climate change was happening. It wasn't something that I had to accept, it was something that I was living with. A lot of people will leave this field because the burden of the things that we do; and the burden of the things that we know, in the wildlife field or in climate science, can be a lot. But we have to believe that it can change, otherwise you lose momentum in wanting things to change. I'm a firm believer in action, and I very much believe in sharing knowledge. And I think that science is meant to be shared. I think I go to work every day, and still really–maybe I'm a little delusional for this–but I go to work every day and I still really believe that what I'm doing is important. I want to see change in my lifetime.