Joe Blickfeldt: Fostering Resilience Through Plant Diversity

Joe Blickfeldt (ze/zim/zir) is a transfer student and senior from Idaho majoring in plant sciences at the University of Arizona. Through research and design of an interactive educational experience on campus, Joe strives to share an overlooked world of plants with zir community.

In this Q&A, Joe discusses how zir passion for plant diversity sprouted from roots in art and the garden. Ze emphasizes how deepening understanding of plant queerness can strengthen resilience in the natural world and beyond.

How have you been involved in environmental or other activities as a student at the University of Arizona?

I like to say that I come from a family of “green fairies,” by which I mean that my mom raised us with a deep love of plants and a sense of respect and stewardship toward nature. 

When I moved to Tucson, I was in love with how much of the culture of this area reflects those values as well as the opportunities to get involved in U of A’s plant and environment-centric communities. I relish the incredible diversity Tucson has to offer – in terms of both people and the environment!

I got involved with the Campus Arboretum and developed a new plant tour about the sexualities of plants as a part of a new series of tours Especially for Students. 

Currently, I am a research assistant in the Beilstein Lab, where we study comparative evolutionary biology of plants, roles and functions of reproductive or signaling genes, and ways in which we may someday improve agricultural yield and impact.

How do you hope to incorporate environmental or sustainability values into your future career goals (if at all)?

I’m not sure I’d be able to separate environment and sustainability from what I do regardless of my career choice! That being said, I love being able to work with plants and truly appreciate the incredible ways nature has evolved to solve problems and support the continuation of life on Earth. 

It’s amazing to think about how long plants have existed on the planet; they’ve been here about 60 times longer than humans have! In all of that time, they’ve developed innumerable ways to cope with nearly any problem, and all while being rooted to a single, stationary location!

Honestly, working with plants in any fashion is a dream come true, but my future career goals involve continued research, community outreach, and sharing what I know about the most important organisms on the planet.

Are there any specific aspects of sustainability, the environment, or resilience that you are particularly passionate about?

I mentioned my plant tour on plant sexuality. One of my biggest fields of interest is plant queerness! Queerness in plants, which I define as biological expressions that exist outside of sexual binaries, is an incredible and advantageous approach to dealing with problems. 

Humans have a tendency to project social gender binaries onto nature, and while that can sometimes help us interpret and understand concepts, it doesn’t always represent the larger picture. 

In my future research, I hope to explore this underrepresented field more, because there are so many ways in which plants’ queerness is actually a powerful adaptation to currently pressing issues like climate change, nutrient scarcity, and water shortage, and it can even be an important aspect of plant communities.

What draws you to plant science, and what kind of impact would you like to make through your research and beyond?

Plants have always been an inspiration to me. I appreciated the awe of nature on a large scale simply walking through the garden as a kid, and I loved the beauty of flowers and plants on a micro scale through photography and art as a teenager. 

Plants have been a companion as I’ve grown up, and they’re a fascinating source of knowledge that is now becoming my career.  My biggest hope is to share all of these important aspects of plants with people and foster a greater passion for them.  I hope to further the understanding of plant systems – like plant queerness – and their impact on the world through research. 

Connecting people to plants through expanding scientific lenses seems more important than ever (not to mention, a lot of fun)!

When you think about the intersections between resilience and plant evolution and genetics, what are some of the most significant connections to you, personally?

To be quite honest, I view plant evolution as a form of resilience. Evolution, in and of itself, is essentially the way an organism faces trials or adversity – and then moves forward. 

Every life form we see today comes from millions of years of resilience, and each gene is a marker of things that have been overcome or learned by the species as a whole. This is certainly true for plants, and it’s why adaptations like queerness are so fascinating to me.  It’s also true for all other organisms, including humans. 

Every trait that we may have as an individual persists for a reason, and it’s there as a way to strengthen our communities and our species as a whole. Without the diversity of individuals or the diversity of genes, the resilience of life would come to a halt. 

In this way, we can learn a lot from plants about resilience in a survival sense, but we can also learn about accepting others and ourselves for who we are and how important everyone is to our existence.

Why should students care about the environment, even if it isn't their major or area of study?

The obvious answer is that we would all be dead without it. No matter what a person’s field of study is, it becomes irrelevant if the environment is not put first. 

The fact is that the natural world is changing very quickly; at the rate it’s going, our environment will be so vastly different that not only could our cultures and our ability to thrive in life be threatened, but our very survival. 

Even more of a bummer is the fact that most of the practices that we all engage in, both at school and at home, are actively progressing this environmental decline. 

That said, as the next generation of students, we hold a lot of power to prioritize the world on which we rely and make adjustments to the detrimental practices we have a hand in. Whether or not a person’s major is environmental, if we want to have a world to live on, we all have to think environmentally.