Tracy Noel is a northern Illinois farmer, teacher and artist. She has worked across the country in the environment and agriculture fields for decades. WNIJ reporter Yvonne Boose featured her poetry in November. Now, environment reporter Jess Savage learns more about her journey:
Jess Savage: What drew you to the environment, and into farming in the first place?
Tracy Noel: I was always finding nature in the concrete. And I realized early on that I was different that way.
So, I was always, looking for what that meant for me and what where I would go with that.
And so, it was an obvious choice for me to go to an environmental school for college, which I did. And from there, lots of doors opened. And long story short, through a lot of experimenting and trialing and caring, it became obvious to me that farming somehow miraculously married so many of those interests and concerns of mine: caring for the earth and learning on a daily basis, working hard, doing tangible things with my hands. All of those things came together in farming.
JS: I’m wondering if there’s a job or project that you’ve done that, at first, seemed really separate from your work as a farmer, but actually had a surprising connection to it?
TN: At the Exxon Valdez oil spill cleanup in Alaska, the spill was at a monumental scale. It still is one of the top oil spills in history. And it took an industrial scale effort to address it. And that is not a scale that I've worked at in any other time of my life.
So that was, you know, very different for that reason alone. And the lessons that I learned then are very much the same lessons that I continually learned through life and and try to teach and practice. Every action that we take, every step that we take — literally with our feet — has an impact on something.
We were literally trying to clean massive amounts of oil off of rocky beaches in Alaska, with hand towels sometimes, and gigantic pieces of equipment. Both scales at present. The footprints that we made on those beaches with our human bodies was probably as detrimental of an impact as the oil itself.
And that was a big eye opener for me, and a lesson that I carry to this day that everything that we do has an impact, and we need to think about it.
JS: Finally, could you explain a little bit about how you view the relationship between art and the environment and nature?
TN: So, at the risk of sounding cliche, I need to say that it is all the same. It is. It is all one. When I look at a handful of mulch that I've pulled up from around my beetroots, and I see all those tiny little, geologic structures, and creatures crawling around, that is soil, right?
That is minerals and life. That is soil. To me, that is art. And there's no there's no greater art form than life that's around us. And, I mean, art historians will know that all art has been inspired by nature, at least at its core. So, it's all the same.
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