Black History Month · Ecolabs · February 2026
The History Books Left Them
Out.
But Nature Didn't.
The forgotten story of Black naturalists who transformed ecology, conservation, and our understanding of the living world — and what their legacy means for the young scientists watching nature today.
Black History Month · Ecolabs · February 2026
The History Books Left Them Out.
But Nature Didn't.
The forgotten story of Black naturalists who transformed ecology, conservation, and our understanding of the living world — and what their legacy means for the young scientists watching nature today.
🌿 Ecolabs · 12 min read · Family Activity Included
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Every scientist begins as a child staring at something alive. A caterpillar on a leaf. A bird landing on a wire. A flower opening in fast motion in the biology classroom. The history of natural science is, at its most human, a history of wonder — of people who looked at the living world and could not stop asking questions until the world answered back.
But for most of American and European history, the story of who got to be a scientist — who got their name on the specimen, their portrait in the textbook, their title on the college door — was written with invisible ink that only showed up in certain lights.
Across the last three centuries, Black naturalists, ecologists, botanists, and conservationists made discoveries that would shape modern biology, seed banks, and environmental justice. They classified species. They documented vanishing ecosystems. They created the frameworks that conservation movements would later stand on. And then, more often than not, history quietly closed the door behind them.
“The question is not whether Black naturalists contributed to science. The question is why we were never taught that they did.”
— A reflection in the tradition of environmental justice education
This Black History Month, Ecolabs is honoring four scientists whose lives and work belong in every ecology classroom, every nature journal, every conversation about who science is for. Their stories are not footnotes. They are the root system beneath everything we teach about the natural world.
The Scientists
Four Naturalists Who Changed the Way We See the Living World
These four figures — separated by centuries, united by curiosity — each made contributions that echo forward into the ecology, conservation, and environmental literacy work happening in schools and nature centers today.
01
Charles Henry Turner
1867 – 1923
Entomologist · Animal Behaviorist · Educator
Before anyone else had proven it systematically, Charles Henry Turner believed insects could think. Not in the way humans think — but in ways that were purposeful, adaptable, and shaped by experience. In an era when the scientific establishment barely acknowledged the interior lives of animals, Turner set out to prove them wrong, one bee at a time.
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1867, Turner earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Cincinnati and eventually a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1907 — one of the first Black Americans to earn a doctorate in zoology from that institution. Despite his extraordinary credentials, the racial barriers of the early twentieth century kept him from university research positions. He spent most of his career teaching at Sumner High School in St. Louis, Missouri — and continued producing groundbreaking research from there.
Turner’s scientific output was staggering for someone without a research institution behind him. He published over 70 papers in leading scientific journals. He discovered that honeybees can perceive color and patterns — findings that were later confirmed and built upon in ethology for decades. He showed that cockroaches learn through experience. He was the first to demonstrate that ants return to their nests through learned landmarks rather than smell alone — a behavioral insight so significant that the homing behavior of ants is still sometimes called Turner’s circling in his honor.
Why This Matters for Ecoliteracy
Turner’s work on insect cognition laid the groundwork for understanding pollinator behavior — why bees visit certain flowers, how they navigate, how their behavior shapes entire ecosystems. When children in Ecolabs programs learn that bees “choose” flowers based on color and memory, they are learning science that Turner proved. His legacy lives directly in Pollinator Patrol: How Kids Can Help Bees, Butterflies, Beetles & Birds — the understanding that pollinators are active, intelligent participants in ecosystems, not passive machines.
Turner also wrote extensively about environmental education and the rights of Black Americans — one of the earliest voices to connect ecological awareness with social justice. He understood, a century before the phrase existed, that environmental literacy was a form of liberation.
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02
Ernest Everett Just
1883 – 1941
Marine Biologist · Cell Scientist · Pioneer of Developmental Biology
Ernest Everett Just was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1883. By the time he died in 1941, he had transformed the scientific understanding of what cells are, how they work, and — most profoundly — how life begins. He was also, for much of his career, one of the most celebrated yet systematically sidelined scientists in America.
Just graduated magna cum laude from Dartmouth College in 1907 and went on to earn his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1916. His research base was the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he conducted meticulous studies of sea urchins, sand dollars, and marine worms — organisms that, because of the transparency of their eggs, allowed scientists to observe fertilization and cell division in real time.
What Just discovered there was revolutionary. He demonstrated that the outer surface of the cell — the ectoplasm — played a far more active role in fertilization and development than anyone had recognized. He challenged the prevailing view that the cell nucleus was the sole seat of heredity and life, arguing that life was a whole-cell phenomenon. His 1939 book The Biology of the Cell Surface is considered a classic in developmental biology.
Why This Matters for Ecoliteracy
Just’s work on marine organisms was inseparable from his deep reverence for ocean ecosystems — he understood that you cannot study life without understanding the environment that shapes it. This philosophy sits at the heart of the Endangered Earth Series: that rivers, rain forests, and ocean systems are not backdrops to life, but the very medium through which life becomes possible. Just saw the cell and the sea as connected. So does conservation science.
Just’s life was shadowed by the racism of American academia. He spent years seeking proper funding and a proper research position in the United States and was repeatedly turned away. He eventually built much of his later career in Europe — in Germany, Italy, and France — where he found more respect, more resources, and more freedom to think. He returned to the United States in 1940 and died of cancer the following year, at 58.
📍
In 1996, the U.S. Postal Service honored Ernest Just with a commemorative stamp as part of its Black Heritage series — recognition, however delayed, that his science had changed the world.
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03
Ynés Mexía
1870 – 1938
Botanical Explorer · Plant Collector · Field Naturalist
Ynés Mexía began her scientific career at the age of 51. What she did in the thirteen years that followed is one of the most extraordinary stories in the history of plant science.
Born in Washington D.C. in 1870 to a Mexican diplomat father and an American mother, Mexía spent her early decades in Mexico managing her late husband’s hacienda after a difficult first marriage and a period of serious illness and depression. She moved to San Francisco in her forties, enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, and discovered botany — and herself. She took her first field expedition in 1925 at the age of 55, to western Mexico, and immediately demonstrated the extraordinary observational gifts and physical endurance that would define her career.
Over the next thirteen years, Mexía made seven major expeditions across North and South America — through Alaska, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Argentina, and Chile. She collected more than 145,000 plant specimens. She identified approximately 500 species new to science, with at least 50 named in her honor (Mexianthus mexicanus is just one example). She traveled often alone, by canoe, on horseback, and on foot through terrain that defeated professional male botanists half her age.
Why This Matters for Ecoliteracy
Mexía’s collections formed the backbone of numerous university herbaria and botanical gardens across the United States. Every seed bank, every field guide, every plant classification database carries the downstream influence of collectors like Mexía. Her work in the Amazon basin documented biodiversity that is now under existential threat — making her specimens among the most scientifically precious botanical records in the world. Her spirit is the spirit of the Planet Earth Series: that exploring the Earth carefully and with reverence is itself a form of protecting it.
Mexía identified as both Mexican and American. She is one of the most remarkable examples of a naturalist who worked outside every conventional box — outside the university system, outside the male-dominated field expeditions of her era, outside the boundaries of any single national identity. She died in 1938, just months after completing her final expedition to the Sierra Madre Occidental, of lung cancer. She was 68 years old and had already changed plant science forever.
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04
James Andrew Harris
1880 – 1956
Plant Physiologist · Biochemist · Soil Scientist
James Andrew Harris spent his career asking a question that most scientists weren’t thinking about yet: what is the chemistry of life in plants, and how does the living soil shape it? Working in the early twentieth century, Harris made foundational contributions to plant physiology and soil biochemistry that connected the chemistry of individual organisms to the health of entire ecosystems.
Harris was born in 1880 and pursued his scientific career with determination despite the limited opportunities afforded to Black scientists in that era. His research focused on the physical and chemical properties of plant cells — the osmotic relationships between cells and their environments, the biochemistry of soil-plant interactions, and the ways in which environmental conditions shaped plant growth at the cellular level. He published dozens of papers and authored significant scientific works that were recognized internationally.
His 1934 book The Physico-Chemical Properties of Plant Saps in Relation to Phytogeography was a landmark contribution — examining how the chemistry inside plant cells reflected and responded to the chemical environment of the soil and climate around them. It was an early ecological insight: that plants do not exist in isolation from their environment, but are in constant chemical conversation with it.
Why This Matters for Ecoliteracy
Harris’s work on soil-plant chemistry laid groundwork for understanding ecosystem health at its most fundamental level. Healthy soil is the foundation of every habitat — from rain forests to river banks. His insights connect directly to the conservation message of the Endangered Earth Series and the ecosystem focus of Who Lives Here: Discovering Ecosystems and the Life Within. When children learn that soil is alive — full of chemistry and biology and relationship — they are learning what Harris spent a lifetime proving.
The Living Legacy
Their Work, Our Ecoliteracy: Why These Stories Belong in the Classroom
When we talk about ecoliteracy — the capacity to understand how living systems work, how they’re connected, and how human activity affects them — we are drawing on a body of knowledge that was built by people from every background, every continent, and every century. The names that appear in textbooks are a thin slice of the people who actually did the science.
The contributions of Turner, Just, Mexía, Harris, and hundreds of other scientists of color are not simply stories of diversity and inclusion (though they are that too). They are stories about the actual science of living systems — about insect cognition and pollinator behavior, about cell biology and ocean ecology, about plant biodiversity and soil chemistry. These are the foundational pillars of modern ecology.
For children growing up today, in an era of climate change, biodiversity loss, and urgent calls for environmental action, this matters for a very specific reason: they need to see themselves in the story of science. When a Black child, or a child of any background who has been told — implicitly or explicitly — that science isn’t for people like them, encounters the story of Charles Henry Turner teaching revolutionary entomology from a high school in St. Louis, or Ynés Mexía blazing through the Amazon in her sixties — something shifts. The story of science expands. And so does the sense of what’s possible.
“Conservation is not a story that belongs to any one race, culture, or country. It belongs to everyone who loves the world enough to pay attention.”
— The spirit of the Endangered Earth Series
At Ecolabs, we believe that ecological literacy and cultural literacy are inseparable. The stories in books like When the People Asked for Day — which carries the environmental wisdom of the Cherokee people — and the scientific rigor of the Endangered Earth Series are not in competition. They are in conversation. Science has always been a human endeavor, and human endeavor has always been shaped by culture, history, and the question of who gets to belong.
Teaching children about Black naturalists isn’t a February activity. It’s a year-round curriculum choice that changes what children believe is possible — for science, for conservation, and for themselves.
The Naturalist Portrait Project
Ages 5–14 · 45–60 Minutes · Individual or Classroom
This month, invite your child or students to become Naturalist Biographers — scientists who document the lives of other scientists. The goal: research one of the naturalists above (or another Black scientist of their choosing), then create a portrait that combines their image, their most important discovery, and a drawing of the organism or ecosystem they studied.
1
Choose your naturalist. Use the profiles in this post, your local library, or trusted sites like the Smithsonian’s Natural History website. For younger children, a parent or teacher can read the profile aloud together.
2
Fill out the “Naturalist Field Notes” card. Download our free printable below (or use a notebook). Record: Name, Dates, What They Studied, and Their Most Important Discovery in their own words.
3
Draw the scientist and their subject. On one half of a large sheet of paper, draw or paint a portrait of the naturalist. On the other half, draw the organism, ecosystem, or discovery they’re most known for. Label everything like a real field journal entry.
4
Write one sentence that begins: “Because of [scientist’s name], we know that…” This sentence ties their work to something in the natural world today — a pollinator, a plant, an ocean, a soil.
5
Share your portrait with your class, your family, or on social media. Tag us at @EcolabsNature and #NaturalistPortrait — we’ll feature the best portraits on our website and in our monthly newsletter.
Educator Note: This activity directly supports NGSS practices of “obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information” and cross-cutting concepts of patterns and cause and effect. It also integrates ELA standards for research-based writing and expository text. A full classroom guide is available at raniyer.com.
Extend the Learning
Books That Bring These Stories to Life
Every Ecolabs post connects to books that can deepen and extend what your child discovers. This month, these titles carry the spirit of the naturalists we’ve honored — all available at raniyer.com/shop and on Amazon.
🌎
Endangered Earth Series
Rain Forests, Rivers & Fossil Fuels — conservation as a shared global mission, exactly the work these naturalists dedicated their lives to.
Available via Amazon · Author: Rani Iyer
🌎
Endangered Earth Series
Rain Forests, Rivers & Fossil Fuels — conservation as a shared global mission, exactly the work these naturalists dedicated their lives to.
Available via Amazon · Author: Rani Iyer
🐝
Pollinator Patrol
How Kids Can Help Bees, Butterflies, Beetles & Birds — built on the very science Charles Henry Turner pioneered.
$11.97 · raniyer.com/shop
🌍
Planet Earth Series
Exploring our incredible world — in the spirit of Ynés Mexía, who never stopped exploring.
Via Amazon · Author: Rani Iyer
🌙
When the People Asked for Day
A Cherokee story about indigenous wisdom — a reminder that ecological knowledge belongs to all cultures.
$11.95 · raniyer.com/shop
🏡
Who Lives Here
Discovering ecosystems and the life within — carrying James Harris’s insight that soil, chemistry, and life are one system.
Via Amazon · Author: Rani Iyer
🌳
The Gift That Became a Tree
A heartwarming story about gifts that grow — because the greatest gift these scientists left us is still growing.
$9.97 · raniyer.com/shop
The Story Isn't Over. Your Child Is Part of It.
Every week, Ecolabs delivers nature science, family activities, and stories from the full history of the living world — straight to your inbox. Join thousands of families learning that science belongs to everyone.
🌿 Ecolabs · raniyer.com · Where science, nature & culture meet
Books by Rani Iyer available at raniyer.com/shop and Amazon. All rights reserved.
