BY EMMA RUBIN ’20
Olivia Aguilar has always been passionate about the environment. In the Dallas suburb where she grew up, she rode the wave of early 1990s environmentalism, often clad in her favorite Earth Day t-shirt and picking up litter. Now, Aguilar is the latest addition to Mount Holyoke College faculty. In January, she will join the College as a tenure-track professor in Environmental Studies and director of the Miller Worley Center for the Environment.
Aguilar received a B.S. and M.S. in Horticulture Science from Texas A&M University and a Ph.D. in Natural Resources from Cornell University, but she wasn’t always fond of science.
Photo courtesy of WikiMedia Commons
Photo courtesy of Flickr
When she entered her undergraduate career as a first-generation college student, Aguilar was a political science major, but was unsure of what she wanted to do and certainly didn’t consider herself a “science person,” a term she now avoids using. Her interest in the outdoors and a summer gig at a flower nursery lured her to horticulture, a field she found engaging.
“It made me really question how science as a field is inclusive to different types of students and people,” Aguilar said.
Aguilar’s research focuses on the environment, community and inclusivity. Her Master’s research examined how children’s gardens impact youth environmental attitudes.
“I’m not sure enough people see the connections,” Aguilar said. “We’re not going to be able to tackle environmental issues if we don’t do it as a community, and I think it’s really hard to build community if it’s not inclusive.”
At Denison University, where Aguilar has worked since 2007, she has taught courses from “Environmental Education” to “Sustainability in the Apocalypse.” In her introductory environmental studies course, “People and the Environment,” she asks her students to participate in one week of what she calls “no impact,” slashing down their carbon footprints and the waste they leave behind. Students are often skeptical at first, but according to Aguilar, “they regularly note that it is eye-opening and come away from the project identifying small changes they can make to reduce their footprint without sacrificing much comfort.”
“Sometimes you need small changes before you can get to the big changes,” she added.
Aguilar is excited to join Mount Holyoke and see how her research extends to a college setting.
“I see the students are very passionate and that they care deeply about issues of justice,” Aguilar said. “For me, that’s huge.”