This is a series of flash interviews with people I admire, people who are doing something—anything, a lot of things—for the Earth. These folks walk the walk, each of them in their own way, using their own unique skillset. They dedicate their energy, their time, and their hearts to a crucial cause: the preservation of this precious planet we call home.
When I worked as a journalist in Florida, the lyrical name of Susan Cerulean was held in high esteem among those of us interested in writing about and preserving wild habitats of the Sunshine State. Her name itself hints at Susan’s passions: She adopted the surname decades ago, to express her love of a tiny blue bird called the cerulean warbler.
A retired biologist and writer with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, she’s now a full-time nature writer—the unique combination of a scientist who writes knowledgeably but also ardently about anything from shorebirds to sea turtles. In other words, someone who can inspire us to care about the Earth with our minds and our hearts.
Susan lives in Tallahassee with her husband, who’s an oceanographer at Florida State University. They also spend a great deal of time at the St. Vincent National Wildlife Refuge, a pair of undeveloped barrier islands offshore from Apalachicola. There Susan and Jeff, along with other citizen scientists, roam the beach to locate and protect vulnerable ground nests of least terns, American oystercatchers, and sea turtles—both green and loggerheads.
“We keep watch over a most beloved place and a wild democracy of beings,” she says.
When not birding, kayaking, or monitoring nests, Susan is writing. She has published three award-winning works of nonfiction with the University Press of Georgia: I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird: A Daughter’s Memoir (2019); Coming to Pass: Florida’s Coastal Islands in a Gulf of Change (2015), and Tracking Desire: A Journey after Swallow-tailed Kites. You can tell by those titles that if it has to do with birds and with Florida, that lovely Cerulean name will be on the cover. She has also edited several anthologies of writing on Florida’s ecology. You can read more about her on her website.
Last fall Susan was honored, along with 19 other north Florida activists and artists, in an exhibit titled “Women Among Us: Portraits of Strength.”
Let me step aside now and allow Susan herself to speak. I think you’ll be inspired by her vibrant love for the Earth and how nature care is infused through everything she does. Enjoy!
Susan, please tell me about some of your early experiences in nature.
I was raised in the Watchung mountains of northern New Jersey. My mother made sure the four of us children were almost always outdoors. I loved the intimacy of the rocky hardwood forest around our home, and grew up embedded in the seasons of the Holocene: snowy winter, busting–out spring, sultry summer and gorgeous autumn. Those cycles hold me still (at least in my memory and imagination).
Our mother set our compass toward the seacoast as well. Every summer we camped or rented a small cottage on a barrier island of New Jersey (even then crowded with beach houses), and on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Our family journeys from foothills across the coastal plains to saltwater edge remain the rhythm of my life.
How did those early experiences shape your relationship with the natural world?
My childhood branded me with an ever-present longing to be at the edge of the natural world—if not in the heart of that wildness.
How do you connect with nature now … through your work or leisure or both?
Nature is who I am and what I do. Almost all of my travel, all of my work (as a biologist, activist and writer) has been in service to, on behalf of, the beings in the places of my adopted home state of Florida. I live close to the scarp (the dividing line) between the southeastern coastal plain and the red hills just to the north. At certain landings, trails, bridges and sinkholes, I enter into the ongoing lives of the Sopchoppy, Wacissa, Wakulla, and Saint Marks rivers, and the Apalachicola National Forest. But most of my time and loving attention is lavished on St. Vincent Island, a savagely wild refuge on the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico. I approach, explore and witness the island as my life’s privilege.
What are your biggest fears for the future of our planet?
I learned about climate change from a dream, years before I met my husband, Jeff (who studies the science of Earth’s atmosphere and oceans). I fear for the children of all species. I’ve had the privilege of a life during the still stand of the climate. They will not. “How can this be possible?” they will say, as my own son did. I will have to answer that question and that breaks my heart, because I consider it my job and my privilege to inoculate and immerse my grandboys in the beautiful things of the Earth.
What is your biggest hope for the future of our planet?
My hope? That we might, against all odds, transform the mind of western culture—greed, imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism—and that we might be aided in this way to a viable future, by listening to the intelligence and imagination of Earth herself, who is always speaking to us.
Thank you, Susan, for being a Champion of Nature!
Well done Jeanne. Thank you
The ongoing signs of climate change and the prevailing sense of inaction can be almost overwhelming. Jeanne's passion is to disseminate hope via the parade of wonderful people / role models who are doing all they can in the fight to save our collective home. And she's done it again.
Susan is a treasure, I met her twice in Florida. I respect the writers who are documenting change and loss in a way that can be read without turning away in despair. (As an analytical person interested in science and data, non-fiction is my go-to read.)