The Renewable Energy Wildlife Institute is thrilled to welcome our newest staff member: La’ Portia J. Perkins, Project Manager. La’ Portia supports REWI’s work in developing science, tools, and strategies for wind and solar siting and operations that minimize impacts on wildlife and wildlife habitats. La’ Portia manages projects under the goals of REWI’s science program. She has over five years of experience in wildlife conservation science and outreach programming. She has worked with South Carolina Adopt-a-Stream, South Carolina DNR, Virginia Tech’s “Digging in the Crates” Program, Defenders of Wildlife, and Hillsborough County’s Environmental Lands Management. As part of her original thesis, La’ Portia led a project in collaboration with Tall Timbers Research Station and Land Conservancy, in which she interviewed Black farmers and landowners in the Southeast to gain insights into their current and historical relationships with prescribed fire in the long-leaf pine ecosystem. She earned a B.S. in Wildlife and Fisheries Biology with a minor in Environmental Science and Policy from Clemson University and an M.S. in Forestry from Virginia Tech.
Julia Worcester, REWI Communications Manager, sat down with La’ Portia to talk about what she’s looking forward to at REWI and the experiences she brings with her.
Julia Worcester: What drew you to work at REWI?
La’ Portia Perkins: I knew the history of (then) AWWI and understood that the organization occupies a niche space, facilitating conversations about renewable energy and wildlife. I followed the organization while I worked with the renewable energy team at Defenders of Wildlife and was curious about what the future would look like for wind and solar technology and growth given the infrastructure bill. I felt particularly drawn to organizations that were working toward net 0 carbon goals and a sustainable, eco-conscious future. I saw the posting for this position at REWI, which fits my skillset and allows me to use my previous experience as a field technician along with my quantitative research skills (including research I have done on avian bird strikes to military aircraft). I wanted to put that experience into effect because we’re all working towards 30×30, which is vital work that will happen in my lifetime. This sustains my passion and vision for the world – a place where everybody, from the guy who gets a coffee every morning at a diner to an executive sitting in a boardroom, understands where their energy comes from and knows that they can have clean air and water in the process.
JW: What are some of your hopes for REWI’s science program over the next few years? How would you like to see it grow?
LP: I hope that, ultimately, the projects we are working on provide new insights into bird and bat fatality and give us a better understanding of how we can put in position more safeguards and improve turbine construction as energy needs grow. I’m also excited to see where we grow in terms of solar energy projects. An important question to me is the severity of the impact that we could place wildlife under as we expand renewable energy, and how much we’re willing to risk. I don’t know if, as a collective body of people, we are having the conversation. I know that no matter what, we will continue to find ways to protect wildlife and meet wind and solar energy goals that work.
JW: You have a background in outreach as well. Can you tell me about that, and how you see scientific research and outreach working in harmony to advance goals around renewable energy and wildlife conservation?
LP: While I was an undergrad at Clemson University, I worked for South Carolina Adopt-a-Stream. The organization used different water testing surveys for E. coli, and I built a protocol that allowed citizen scientists to identify frogs and salamanders using PVC tubes in the ground near wetland sites.
A third of the job was marketing, which entailed tabling at the zoo, sending emails to the university and other stakeholders, and attending meetings with the city about the Reedy River. I learned that science communication is key to protecting anything local. This was the first time I saw how change could be made to protect natural waterways. Now we have citizen scientists learning how to conduct scientific processes and identify E. coli, where to go to process the surveys, and how to test different chemicals. They’re also learning about their local waterways and where their water comes from. The job allowed me to not only talk about things I am passionate about but also to see a future where youth and all groups of people have real-time experiences with the natural world so they can build those connections with what is happening in environmental policymaking.
Outreach, in its diversity and complexity, allows us to connect with people when we talk about science. Especially for those of us with academic backgrounds, our work can be so separated from the local. It’s an exclusive class of people and language and terminology that removes you from what is going on because you’re knee-deep in 1970s literature about a specific study design that you want to replicate in a new way – whatever it may be. Outreach bridges that gap. It allows people like me who want to be creative in how they approach science, communication, and people who have various learning styles. It also includes factors we can’t account for when building highly technical quantitative studies. We get to create fun exercises that, for example, teach children about why there is sedimentation in the lake by their house. It’s about transparency and the ability to translate between two different mediums.
Science is inquiry-based learning. If we don’t have a next generation that wants to question the world, who will look at those different perspectives? We have to create intergenerational pathways of learning.
JW: I’d love to hear more about your thesis and your experience interviewing Black farmers and landowners in the Southeast about their relationships with prescribed fire in the long-leaf pine ecosystem.
LP: I went to graduate school at Virginia Tech and studied with my friend and advisor Dr. Adam Coates. We came upon an article that questioned whether ethnicity was playing a role in the use of prescribed fire in the Southeast. Many surveys about prescribed fire in that region broke down responses by ethnicity, among other factors. The number of people of color who had participated in the surveys was small compared to the number of white farmers or landowners who participated – and for good reason. Black farmers and landowners have a negative history with institutions of power that deal with loans and farmland – both in terms of USDA farm loans, as well as bank loans that provide credit.
I also have an ancestral history in Northwest Florida that was deeply tied to this history.
We realized there was a story there. I sound like a reporter, but we did find a story that we could tell, and that resonated with me as a creative person more so than only quantitative wildlife biology. In embracing social science, I was able to quantify data in a way that allowed me to express the reality of a lived experience instead of making it just about numbers shown in previous surveys. In other surveys, we can’t verify that the described obstacles and cultural dynamics affecting African American or Black farmers and landowners from actively conducting prescribed fire are the only ones at play. There’s history here to explore. I studied how the slave trade and the diaspora left descendants of different Western African countries with skills to produce fire for farming, forestry, and soil health.
Prescribed fire became a science that people study to understand how to maintain the longleaf pine ecosystem. We have to work with this cultural history to sustain this prominent, important wildlife ecosystem. The only way we will maintain the ecosystem is by encouraging the people who were here and who want the same things for that land to continue to use prescribed fire on their land. Policymakers need to understand that there is a collective and individual history that affects many land management practices.
I partnered with Tall Timbers Research Station and Land Conservancy, which worked at the heart of this dynamic story about prescribed fire history in the Southeast United States. One challenge I encountered was the small and close-knit nature of these communities. Most of the landowners I talked to were family or friends of friends. Many people I tried to contact who had been alive during Stoddard’s time – with discussions of longleaf pine and fire and Bobwhite quail for hunting – had passed away. I made many calls only to hear that the person I wanted to speak to had passed and couldn’t tell their stories.
I collected 21 personal and familial land histories. My questions included: Where were they getting information on prescribed fire, if they were getting any? What was inhibiting them from conducting prescribed fire? What were the frequencies and use of prescribed fire? Were they experiencing the underrepresentation of Black and Brown farmers while they served on Natural Resources Conservation Service committees or traveled to Longleaf Alliance meetings? Learning from answers to these questions, we were able to argue that the narrative that Black landowners aren’t participating in prescribed fire is false. They are participating, but at much lower rates than white farmers because of many factors, including property issues, access to education, under-representation, and financial and safety issues that continue to this day. The two most significant factors are debt and the lack of young people who see viability in these practices and ways of life because of negative interactions from the past.
I still have belief and faith that the outpouring of Black history and knowledge, scientific knowledge, eco-activism, and environmental justice will keep contributing to the practices Black farmers have given us since being enslaved. I really hold that dear.
My research helped me to explore some of my ancestral histories and invite discussions about not only our history and how we got to where we are, but also to push policymakers to see the different lived experiences across groups of people. Many people questioned why I only focused on Black landowners. This group faces a unique set of issues that are different, say, from those of migrant farmers who have been establishing their lives here in the past five to eight years. Policymakers need to be open to differentiating between challenges that various groups face, recognizing that we can use those differences to identify similarities between groups as well.
All that to say, I look forward to seeing what the 2023 Farm Bill contains. I look forward to seeing how Black farmer debt is dealt with in the future. And I hope to one day be a Black farmer.
JW: Thank you so much for sharing your rich experience with that work. Here’s my last question – what brings you joy and keeps you inspired outside work?
LP: I print pictures, I write people letters, I love cooking. What keeps me inspired? Art. I have found myself easily downtrodden by what science can reveal to us, both the good and the bad. Art allows me to keep an inspirational and vibrant future alive. Art allows you to challenge spaces that are sometimes negative, pressurized vacuums of voices and information. I’ve been writing since I was seven, so writing and drawing come easily to me. They are coping mechanisms and pathways of truth because there is beauty in all the bad. Even though we’re living through serious and worsening climate change, we still get to see spring come every year. We get to see the cherry blossoms, and we can hold onto those moments. Nature is the greatest version of that artwork.