“A tree’s wood is also its memoir.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it.”
― Hope Jahren
“A cactus doesn’t live in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn’t killed it yet.”
― Hope Jahren
“If every seed turned into a plant, we’d be living in a very different world.”
― Hope Jahren
“My laboratory is like a church because it is where I figure out what I believe.”
― Hope Jahren
“The world is a fickle place, and it’s not fair. But if you’re getting most of your rewards from you, then you can use that as a kind of compass, and you can be secure in the fact that you’re working for the right reason, and you’re going in the right direction.”
― Hope Jahren
“No matter how much funding I get, I’m always thinking, ‘This is temporary. This is fragile. It could all end tomorrow, and how am I going to make today worth it? If this is my last day in the lab, what can I do so that I can walk out of here saying, ‘That was a good day?””
― Hope Jahren
“I love rocks with the unconditional love that you lavish upon a newborn baby.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“I’m a scientist – a geobiologist who’s been studying trees, flowers, seeds, and soil for over twenty years. One day, I realized that I wanted, needed, to tell people – and not just other scientists – about my life in science.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“A seed knows how to wait… A seed is alive while it waits.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“I am a scientist. To be specific, I am a woman scientist. This, I have been told and have come to believe, is a good thing. In fact, it is such a good thing that America needs more of us. Everyone seems to be very sure of this. The thing that no one is sure about, however, is how to make it happen.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“I like weeds and hardy plants.”
― Hope Jahren
“The wood of any tree growing anywhere records fairly faithfully the oxygen and hydrogen chemistry of the water the plant has access to through precipitation.”
― Hope Jahren
“My lab is the place where I put my brain out on my fingers.”
― Hope Jahren
“In New England, the pin oak thrives, its leaves tipping to a thorny point in a good-natured impression of its evergreen neighbor, the holly bush.”
― Hope Jahren
“My father was a scientist, and I grew up in his laboratory. Maybe I am like him, but he is not like me.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“I love the quiet forest that stands between my lab and my home.”
― Hope Jahren
“All I have ever wanted is one more day in the lab with the people I care about. And every day that I get that, I am grateful.”
― Hope Jahren
“Science is so incremental and so full of setbacks and small steps forward. In order to really thrive in this business, you have to be able to glean as much joy from the failure days and from the small increments as you do from the breakthroughs.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“My father’s schooling during the 1930s was heavy with memorization; eight decades later, he is reaping the benefits.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“I am not the only scientist to be struck by the power and meaning of Lamium album in bloom.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“A true scientist doesn’t perform prescribed experiments; she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“Regardless of politics, our world will continue to change rapidly.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“Even a very little girl can wield a slide rule, the cursor serving as a haft.”
― Hope Jahren
“I grew up in my father’s laboratory and played beneath the chemical benches until I was tall enough to play on them.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“I have learned that nothing gets readers so fired up as saying something everyone knows is true.”
― Hope Jahren
“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!”
― 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.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“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.”
― Hope Jahren
“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
“Science is performed by people, and it’s subject to all the various foibles that plague the rest of our social dynamics.”
― Hope Jahren
“Women live in a world where we are forced to consider our safety at every turn. We minimize risk while we maximize activity. It’s this constant balancing act that we do.”
― Hope Jahren
“I think, as you move to the upper ranks of science – ranks being positions of influence and access – you see fewer female faces. And I think the basic reason is the same reason that you don’t see a lot of female faces in Congress or on the Supreme Court or on the directing board of Fortune 500 companies.”
― Hope Jahren
“I think it’s very common that scientists or technical people have an artistic side. Sometimes they are very accomplished musicians. Sometimes they have very fine tastes according to art or design. And often, they’ve spent a big chunk of their childhood or they’re growing-up years trying to get in very good at those activities.”
― Hope Jahren
“I love to read stories. And I don’t to get to talk about my favorite novels very often in my job.”
― Hope Jahren
“When I was five, I came to understand that I was not a boy.”
― Hope Jahren
“In our tiny town, my father wasn’t a scientist – he was the scientist, and being a scientist wasn’t his job: it was his identity.”
― Hope Jahren
“I spend a lot of time talking to other scientists and writing to other scientists.”
― Hope Jahren
“I grew up in a small town.”
― Hope Jahren
“I can explain to you in detail just how a tree can be made into paper. But I’ve always wondered – and hoped – that someday, someone would help me discover how paper can be made back into a tree.”
― Hope Jahren
“The type of science that I do is sometimes known as ‘curiosity-driven research.’ This means that my work will never result in a marketable product, a useful machine, a prescribable pill, a formidable weapon, or any direct gain.”
― Hope Jahren
“America may say that it values science, but it sure as hell doesn’t want to pay for it.”
― Hope Jahren
“Ask a science professor what she worries about. It won’t take long. She’ll look you in the eye and say one word: ‘Money.’”
― Hope Jahren
“People love the ocean. People are always asking me why I don’t study the ocean, because, after all, I live in Hawaii. I tell them that it’s because the ocean is a lonely, empty place.”
― Hope Jahren
“Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable.”
― Hope Jahren
“The turkey oak can grow practically submerged within the wetlands of Mississippi, its leaves soft as a newborn’s skin.”
― Hope Jahren
“The live oak can grow sturdily on the hottest hills of central California, contrasting dark green against the golden grass.”
― Hope Jahren
“Women scientists’ hands are like every other woman’s hands.”
― Hope Jahren
“We have to be very careful about acknowledging that the Internet is very good at combatting isolation, but it’s not very good at delivering justice.”
― Hope Jahren
“Your bones are not just made of the last meal you had, but the meals that you’ve had across many years. By looking at the composition of those teeth, researchers can say that something was a large component of the diet. This tells us a lot about how hominins lived and what they ate.”
― Hope Jahren
“Corn occupies a really special role in what I’ve been calling American agro-economics.”
― Hope Jahren
“My earliest memories are being in the lab, and the way the cement felt and the way it smelled, and the way the countertops looked and it just being this wonderful, warm, happy place where it was just full of toys.”
― Hope Jahren
“I’m interested in how the bare bones of the planet, things that aren’t alive, are transformed into things that are alive.”
― Hope Jahren
“For a tree, to endure four months of daylight is like you or I going without sleep for four months.”
― Hope Jahren
“Regardless of what humans do to the climate, there will still be a rock orbiting the sun.”
― Hope Jahren
“The world breaks a little bit every time we cut down a tree. It’s so much easier to cut one down than to grow one. And so it’s worth interrogating every time we do it.”
― Hope Jahren
“I think my job is to leave some evidence for future generations that there was somebody who cared while we were destroying everything.”
― Hope Jahren
“I think we get used to not seeing the green things around us. I think they become the backdrop of our lives. And I think you actively have to ask somebody to request that they put that in the foreground.”
― Hope Jahren
“I grew up in a time when there were very few women in the physical sciences. And people started to ask me, ‘How did you decide to become a scientist?’ And I couldn’t really answer. I always knew I’d grow up to have a lab because my dad had one.”
― Hope Jahren
“I think being a scientist is a position of respect and power and access, and it’s a privileged position in society. And I think there are fundamental mechanisms that keep men and women from achieving the same level of power and access and privilege in society.”
― Hope Jahren
“One thing that was very important to me was that I felt comfortable in the lab from being very, very small. I knew that that’s where I belonged, and I could fix things and move things. And no matter how many classrooms I went into where I was the only girl in the physics class or whatever, I never questioned the fact that I didn’t belong there.”
― Hope Jahren
“I grew up playing with kids who were the kids of people my parents grew up playing with, and they know me like nobody else. I thought everybody was that way when I was growing up, and then I left to go to college, and I realised that the world is full of strangers.”
― Hope Jahren
“I always knew how privileged I was to think for a living.”
― Hope Jahren
“Men and women study things differently, and it’s not because of our chromosomes. It’s a product of our cultural conditioning.”
― Hope Jahren
“Women study things in order to figure out how they’re connected to other things. I don’t know if it’s controversial to say that, but that’s what I’ve seen from doing science for a couple of decades.”
― Hope Jahren
“I feel like I’m the same scientist I was back when I couldn’t get a grant. Now I’m that same person thinking that same way getting grants. That system of external rewards in science has always mystified me. It’s fickle. And I also don’t think it was constructed with people like me in mind.”
― Hope Jahren
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