A Journey of Written Discovery
I love books.
My mother often brought home boxes of books that she had purchased from thrift stores, rather than have us walk three miles to the public library.
By the time I was eleven years old, I had become an enthusiastic and avid reader—and writer—of science and historical fiction. In the summer of 1971, I wrote my first science fiction novella, about 150 pages.
The more I read, the more I began to anticipate the diverse worlds that unfolded before me by Maupassant, Asimov, Austen, Dickens, and Heinlein.
As I look back, my passion for this type of literature was a precursor to my becoming a scientist and a historian. This literature also gave me the notion that I could write environmental histories, material that describes how science and technology influence nature and its ecosystems, including humans who interact and coexist with these systems.
I had never dreamed of doing so, however, until I reembarked on my Ph.D. studies in the history of science, technology, and environment program in 1995 at Case Western Reserve University. My original intent was to augment my career as a journeyman environmental engineer (the highest level in the profession without becoming a manager), at what is now the NASA Glenn Research Center in 1992.
I came to NASA after completing my master’s degree in the Case School of Engineering’s systems and control engineering program in 1987. NASA engineers in the departments where I worked were expected to be visionary and creative. A critical task for us, especially after the Challenger space shuttle explosion in January 1986, was to “learn from the past” to avoid future catastrophes.
I took the cultural change within NASA as a call for engineers to understand the history of the engineering systems and design projects they were working on at the time, as a critical step for future policies and practices. With this resolution, I actively sought out, in 1991, a graduate program in engineering and environmental policy that focused on history. I chose this area after I had been assigned to a project that required me to examine the potential environmental impact of future Mars mission launches that contained nuclear material.
However, my first exposure to engineering and environmental policy occurred in 1985 in a course titled Legal, Economic, and Social Aspects of Water Resource Management, taught by Ben Hobbes in the systems and control engineering department. His course whet my appetite for more classes of this kind.
A history of technology course, taught by my history graduate advisor, Carroll Pursell, redirected me toward my love of reading science and history. For years, I had struggled to resolve how to incorporate my love of these two disciplines. Monographs such as Jeffrey Stine’s Mixing the Waters, Case history faculty member Ted Steinberg’s Nature Incorporated, and William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis showed me that you could read and write books that contained both elements.
As a result, I’ve decided to follow an intellectual path, which has guided me toward a very enjoyable venture: I’m writing three contracted environmental justice history monographs that use my knowledge and expertise of science, engineering, and African American history. 
SYLVIA HOOD WASHINGTON
Sylvia Hood Washington (GRS ’87, systems engineering, and ’00, history) is a visiting scholar in the history department at Northwestern University. This fall, she will teach African American history at Elmhurst College.
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