When I close my eyes I see seeds. I reach for them, feeling out the iterative estimation outlined in the Seeds of Success protocol: I am training my eyes and hands to confirm that I am collecting 25% of a population of at least 50 individuals. I find seeds in my socks, stuck inside my pockets, even one currently embedded beneath the skin of my pinky (thank you needle and thread grass, Hesperostipa comata). Although the few that follow me home and creep into my dreams do not reach their ultimate destination designated by Seeds of Success, the remaining 10,000 plus seeds make their way to a processing facility before reaching their final home outside again, put to work to restore ecosystems.

Sometimes I feel like I am just taking, destroying, smashing tiny plants under my big-foot sized feet. I spend all day grabbing seeds, at a buffet where I can take 25% of whatever is there that day. While collecting seeds requires a second by second mentality, my attention span focusing on one handful at a time, this frame of reference is limited. I frequently remind myself that my taking will turn into giving. Idioms about stealing run through my head daily: Am I “robbing Peter to pay Paul” (except in this instance Peter is a sagebrush ecosystem and Paul is a future ecosystem in need of genetically appropriate, native seed).

While bats, ants, butterflies, and birds are traditional pollinators; in the Seeds of Success system, people are pollinators with a purpose, taking native seeds and spreading them to landscapes in need of restoration. At the end of long days, when I arrive home encrusted in dirt and salt from my sweat, I bend over to unlace my shoes and find dozens of seeds stuck to my socks. Through this daily ritual, I have realized that I have always been a pollinator, collecting seeds unwittingly wherever I go. The seeds I carry with me are not necessarily the ones I have been assigned to collect. They are often seeds of weeds, clinging to my feet in the hopes of spreading their range. These persistent seeds are like a comet’s tail, debris latching on to whatever comet happens to pass by.

It is through these incidental, unofficial Seeds of Success collections that I become aware of how connected my movement and actions are to the landscapes I move through. Every step I take contributes to the accumulation of both intentional and unintentional seeds. Each week when I mail our Taos seed collections to the cleaning and storage facility I can grasp the tangible magnitude of our daily actions. Assembling 100,000 seeds on one table prior to packing reminds me what humans have the power to do when we put our minds to it. In addition to assessing the intentional fruits of our labor, I wish there was a way I could regularly assemble and assess all of the unintentional impacts, both positive and negative, that I have on plants, places, and people. How many seeds have I transported through my shoes and introduced to new places? What didn’t I see at a collection site that I should have?

In light of recent events that have studded my time with the Chicago Botanic Garden (Orlando shootings the week of my Chicago training; Baton Rouge, Minnesota, and Dallas the week of my blog post), I must also ask how my actions as a scientist, intentional and unintentional, contribute to or dismantle systems of oppression. While I collect seeds I have time to listen to the news and podcasts. While collecting Hesperostipa neomexicana, a fuzzy grass, I listened to first-hand accounts of civil rights activists through the BBC Witness Series. As much as Charles Darwin, Alexander von Humboldt, and Asa Grey inform my work as botanist, listening to Franklin McCain of the Greensboro Four and Gwendolyn Webb, a child hero of the Children’s Crusade, influences my work as a scientist.

At a time when the dissonance between my daily routine of collecting seeds in scenic places as a white scientist and the routine violence experienced by people of color in America could not be more extreme, I must seek connections between the voices I hear through my headphones and the work I do while listening. The 100,000 seeds I have collected so far remind me that I have power to tangibly alter and influence the plants, places, and people around me and prompt me to ask myself and whomever reads this: what does this power look like when devoted to cultivating a community of actively anti-racist and anti-oppression scientists in addition to cultivating a community of native and genetically appropriate seeds?

Sophie Duncan–Taos Field Office, Bureau of Land Management