Dedicated to a Future For Life on Earth

One scientist's path from the lab to the land

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When I was a child, I wanted to be an explorer; not the romantic, swashbuckling kind who hews swaths of forest away or uses a bullet to get up close to a rare bird, but the kind who spends years in the field watching, learning, and documenting. Jane Goodall in the forest, a woman seeking to truly know and understand a species other than our own, in defiance of the conventional thought and misogyny that dominated her field. David Attenborough, pausing, cherishing, and narrating the impossible complexity of a tide pool. Steve Irwin, his face lit up with pure joy, holding something most people would run from so that he could break down the barriers of fear that separated our species from the rest of the natural world. What those people shared was not just a love of nature but an almost spiritual reverence for it, an understanding that every creature, every relationship between organisms, every thread in the web of life, mattered deeply, and that type of understanding was what I wanted most to cultivate in my own life. I sought to be present in the living world and to understand my place in it.

I eventually concluded that "explorer" was not a realistic 21st century career path, at least not in the way I had imagined it. But what I wanted more than anything, to help ensure a future for life, on Earth remained constant. I decided that chemistry was the most powerful tool I had to pursue that goal, for if I could help to develop any technology that slowed or reversed climate change, I would have an impact across all species.

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I completed my PhD developing materials for transparent solar cells that could be applied directly to windows, and developing the next generation of OLED materials, the technology that now powers the display in almost every phone and television. During that work I came to understand something that would shape the next decade of my scientific career: that the greatest barrier to a clean energy future was not clean energy generation but sustainable energy storage. We already had myriad ways to generate clean energy cheaply and sustainably, but what we lacked was the bridging technology to couple generation to use — a reliable, scalable, sustainable battery. So I joined a Lawrence Berkeley National Lab spin-out organization working on a new polymer-based platform for energy storage, developing aqueous batteries for grid, extended-lifetime lithium ion, and enabling next-generation sustainable materials for anodes and cathodes, eventually leading technical development there and later at another LBNL startup focused on the same mission, developing solid-state batteries. It is work I believe in deeply, and I know that what happens in the lab every day matters for the long-term future of the planet.

But product development in deep tech takes years, sometimes a decade or more between a discovery and a deployed technology, and somewhere in the middle of that long horizon, I started to feel the distance between myself and the thing that had originally driven me to this work. I missed the outdoors and the feeling of being immersed in nature, the sense of interconnectedness I get when I am present and aware of my place in an ecosystem rather than thinking about it abstractly from a lab bench, an office, or a board room. I also had another hunger, increasingly urgent, which was to do something with an immediate and tangible positive impact in my community, not just in the world at large. I have always been service-oriented;  as a high schooler I organized beach cleanups and invasive species removals with EBRPD, and on any hike anywhere in the world I bring a sack and often a claw to pick up litter, because helping to keep our wild spaces wild and safe from human impact helps to inspire others to take on the same challenge. And as clean energy became increasingly politicized in the United States, I felt an urgency to engage locally, to do something concrete and real that did not depend on policy cycles or timelines I could not control.

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Gardening and landscaping run deep in my family. My uncle built a landscaping business over decades in the South Bay, and his passion for that work was something I grew up watching - the quiet satisfaction he took in it, the way it sustained him over a lifetime. My younger brother eventually left a career in car sales after years of success that had drained him emotionally, keeping him isolated from the kind of connection he needed, and moved to Hawaii to become a landscaper and property manager. It terrified me to watch him walk away from something so stable, and yet witnessing what happened next, how quickly the work gave him joy, how healthy and alive he became spending his days outdoors tending living things, only deepened my own sense that this kind of work carries something essential that a great deal of other work our society places a higher monetary value on does not.

My own gardening life began when I was somewhere between five and seven years old, helping my mother convert our backyard in Alameda into a food garden. She taught me how to remove turf, amend soil, and grow food from seed, and I was immediately transfixed by the diversity of life in that little patch of ground. I collected insects, snails, and slugs and observed them in my critter carrier, and I quickly noticed that the creatures I caught in isolation did not thrive. So I started trying to create tiny ecosystems for them, adding soil and plants and other small insects to model the living system I was observing outside. Eventually, I stopped collecting, because I realized I could not create anything remotely as complex and sustaining as what they already had if I simply left them alone. That was the lesson: life is deeply interconnected, and the best thing you can often do is stop interrupting it. I was about six years old then, but I have never forgotten it. The twentieth century American Dream sold us a particular vision of the good life: a house for every nuclear family, a car for every person, a wide lawn behind a white picket fence at the end of a long road that separated us from everything we relied upon outside of our own home. It was a vision of privacy and independence, and in many ways it delivered on its promises. But with privacy and independence has come isolation and loneliness, a flattening sameness that removes the richness and joy of complexity from our daily lives. As I began to cultivate my own native landscape many years ago, I watched as neighbors I had never spoken to started to stop and visit my garden. Children would peep their heads from around the corner, giggling to themselves and thinking themselves quite invisible until I invited them to see what was growing. I had designed a space for pollinators, but I had also created a space for community and connection, one which I did not realize I needed until I found it there for me.

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Those early years in my mother's garden shaped the way I moved through the world, and when it came time to choose where to continue my education, I chose UC Santa Cruz for its immersion in nature and its commitment to sustainability, including its partnership with the Monterey Bay Aquarium in the study and preservation of ocean biodiversity. It was there that I also came to understand something that has stayed with me ever since: that a vast proportion of the medicines and therapies we rely on for human health are derived from natural products we are still in the process of identifying in plant life, and that every species lost before we have had the chance to study it is a door closed forever. I fell fully in love with the Northern California coast, where I would later marry my husband under the same towering redwoods that shaded my school, completed my BS in chemistry, and carried that additional connection to California's wild spaces with me when I left for graduate school.

I should say something about my relationship with California, because it is foundational to everything else. I am obsessed with this state in a way that I have never been able to fully explain to people who did not grow up here, and not for lack of trying. California produces more food than any other state in the nation, feeding a significant share of the entire country from its valleys and its coast, and that agricultural identity runs deep in me. I think often about the Founding Gardeners — Hamilton, Madison, Franklin, Washington — who envisioned the United States as an agrarian nation, who cultivated seeds collected from wild spaces, planting them in their own gardens, carrying them across hundreds of miles to share with one another or sending them by ship to friends in the Old World, and who wrote letters to one another waxing poetic about the astonishing diversity of life they found in North America. I have read those letters and been inspired by them. The sense that caring for the living landscape was once understood as both a civic and a personal responsibility is documented with wonderful depth in Andrea Wulf's The Founding Gardeners, and that instinct feels true to me. In graduate school I would corner every transplant I could find and make the case for California with an evangelical fervor that probably exhausted people: its deserts, its coastlines, its mountain ranges, its valleys, its wetlands, its foothills, and the staggering diversity of wildlife each of those habitats supports. I would tell them that you could drive an hour outside of Los Angeles in almost any direction and find yourself in a completely distinct and wholly unique ecosystem.

And yet, as a graduate student in Los Angeles's concrete jungle, surrounded by the non-native palms that line its boulevards and drink deeply from a water supply the city can ill afford to share with them, I missed my connection with nature with a kind of physical ache, and I compensated by gardening on my own concrete patio using anything free and container-shaped I could find: suitcases, old pots, salvaged vessels of any description resembling a plant pot. I grew food from seeds I collected from grocery store produce, and became so successful propagating tomatoes and peppers that I had to bring them to the department in hundreds of little paper cups to give away. I started planting for pollinators, became driven to create habitat in urban spaces by the newly endangered monarch butterfly, and began learning everything I could about supporting the monarch's remarkable multi-generational migration. That is where I first truly understood why native plants matter. The non-native milkweeds I had planted with good intentions were inviting monarchs to lay eggs out of season, disrupting rather than supporting the migration cycle these butterflies had evolved over millennia. Good intentions are not enough; you have to understand the system, a lesson I should have recalled better from childhood. So I started to study native gardening in earnest, and my little concrete patio, which had been completely barren, gradually filled with life: hummingbirds, butterflies, bees, spiders, ladybugs, complexity and beauty where before there had been nothing. When I moved back to Berkeley, I gave that container garden, about a hundred plants by then, to my neighbor at his request, so he could raise his daughter among the same lessons I had been fortunate enough to learn.

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Since then I have repeated the experiment in creating habitat many times over and in many places, helping people as far away as Costa Mesa, Los Angeles, and Sacramento build landscapes that are genuinely full of life. I have learned through volunteering with EBRPD which invasives need the strictest controls and which natives need the most support, and through my engagement with the California Native Plant Society and the volunteer-led Native Here Nursery about the irreplaceable value of planting with native ecotype, plants propagated from local wild populations, plants which thrive with little support because they evolved precisely in this place.

Climate change is upon us, and has accelerated extinction to levels not seen since the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction 66 million years ago. Continued development and encroachment into wildlands threatens to eliminate even more of the diversity that remains, and the urgency for habitat creation in urban spaces has never been greater. Many people, like myself, want to make a positive impact and simply do not quite know where to start. Golden Aura Gardens grew as a response to this, primarily as a resource and support for community members, friends, and anyone else driven by the same passions that have guided me: to preserve a future for life on Earth, all life, not in spite of us, but because of the choices we make every day.

Jessica is a materials chemist, native Californian, and the founder of Golden Aura Gardens, a habitat-focused California native landscape design project based in Berkeley. She has spent fifteen years developing clean energy technologies, and the past decade creating native habitat landscapes across the Bay Area and beyond. She lives in the Berkeley Hills with her husband Jordan and their two dogs, a short walk from Tilden Regional Park where she visits most afternoons.