CIERP Alumni Perspectives: A Discussion with Dr. Nichola Minott

By Bethany Tietjen

This blog post is part of CIERP and CPL’s Black History Month Blog Series, where current Fletcher students interview Black alums about their successful careers in the environment sector.

When Dr. Nichola Minott started her MALD at Fletcher in 2002, she was not particularly interested in studying climate policy. She had previously served in the Peace Corps in Paraguay, and was interested in international development, security studies, and economics. It wasn’t until taking a class with Professor Bill Moomaw, CIERP founder and Professor Emeritus at Fletcher, that she developed a deeper understanding of the importance of environmental issues and saw how they intersected with so many of the issues she was passionate about. After that first class with Professor Moomaw, she decided to take another class in the IERP field, and then another, and from there her interest in the environment continued to grow. Combined with her interest in international security studies, Dr. Minott began to develop her expertise in environmental security issues. Fast forward to today, Dr. Minott now teaches classes on global climate policy and international environmental science at Boston College.

Dr. Minott’s time at Fletcher, both as a MALD and a PhD, helped shape her career trajectory in part by opening her eyes to the many opportunities present in the environmental field. She explained to me that when she started at Fletcher, her perception of climate action was very narrow – she saw it as recycling, joining the Sierra Club, and enjoying the outdoors, not as a field that would present a lot of job opportunities. Some of the advice that she offers to current students at Fletcher is to be aware of the multitude of job opportunities in the environment field, something that she hopes will help increase the diversity among students studying environmental policy at Fletcher and beyond. While at Fletcher, she was the only Black student studying environmental policy – something that she hopes will change in the future as more students recognize the job opportunities and significant impact to be had in this field.

While working on her doctoral dissertation, Dr. Minott had the opportunity to conduct fieldwork in Sri Lanka and Indonesia. When asked if she had any advice for Fletcher students hoping to conduct field research, she said that there were four important avenues that she thought about when planning for fieldwork. The first was financial, the second logistical, the third cultural, and the fourth, for her as a Black woman, was racial. The reality is that many PhD students have to fund their own field research, and as a result Dr. Minott had to take the initiative and apply for fellowships that funded research on her topic, which looked at the impact of environmental events on the dynamics of civil conflict. She was awarded both Boren and Fulbright fellowships to conduct her research in Sri Lanka and Indonesia and had vastly different experiences in both places. Logistically, she stresses the importance of adaptability when in the field. You can go in with expectations and plans, but you have to be ready to adapt to the surroundings you’re in and the circumstances in the field.

Culturally and racially, she says it’s important to think about your lens coming into the field. As an American coming into another culture, you are bringing in your own perspective and identity; some people will feel comfortable opening up to you and others will not. As a Black woman, she said that many people approached her with curiosity and perhaps a stronger sense of affinity in some of her interviews. That allowed her to have candid and open conversations with some of her interviewees who opened up to her more than they might have with white academics who seemed more foreign to them. Instead of putting on an academic armor when entering situations in the field, Dr. Minott approached fieldwork with a sense of openness and curiosity. “For me it’s about the capturing of stories and perspectives,” she explains. She wants to learn from the people she is speaking to, so the best way to do that is to approach them as herself. That opens the space for candid, natural conversations – something that can greatly enrich the quality of an interview.

The whiteness of the mainstream environmental movement is well documented and often critiqued. Racial minorities make up 12-16% of staff at environmental NGOs though they make up approximately 40% of the U.S. population. In academia, these numbers are even more abysmal, with people of color representing only 25% of full-time faculty in the U.S., and Black women only 3%. This underrepresentation has significant implications. Dr. Minott explains that “One of the key issues with climate and environmental approaches to policy is that they take on the fallacy that this is a colorblind endeavor and…the people who are most affected by the negative impacts of environmental policies are not colorblind, they're Black and brown people.” Initiating policies in “race neutral” ways leads to policies that don’t take into account the different experiences and vulnerabilities of communities of color.

One way to ensure that these perspectives are included in environmental decision-making is to make sure that people of color are involved in shaping policy and research on environmental issues. Just as Dr. Minott’s experiences as a Black woman conducting fieldwork allowed her to connect more deeply with her interviewees, other people of color can use their unique experiences and identities to shape climate policy and research in their own ways. To do this we need to support more people of color in finding their niche within the environmental field. Dr. Minott explains, “We need to have the voices of people of color coming from positions of strength. We have valid solutions and we have voices that can help us solve this problem; not only for the poor and the economically disadvantaged but for everybody.”

Bethany Tietjen is a junior fellow at Climate Policy Lab, The Fletcher School, Tufts University.

Stay tuned for more blog posts in this series.