A Natural with Nature: Botanist Tobias Policha found his career path out of a lifelong love for plants
By Susan Palmer
The Register-Guard
Monday, May 25, 2009, page B1
Tobias Policha, a UO doctoral student, leads a tour of Hendricks Park and its wildflowers recently. Policha also leads nature walks on campus.
The Wednesday noon nature walk doesn’t get very far, barely once around the University of Oregon’s urban farm in a full hour.
But plant-wise the journey is far-ranging, what with stops for chatter about sweet rocket (Hesperis matronalis, you can eat the flowers), California poppies (Eschscholzia californica, and not really poppies at all), comfrey (Symphytum officinale, a bee magnet but it will take over your garden), blueberries (Vaccinium corymbosum, related to the huckleberries scattered through the Coast Range) and common mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris, the whole genus has medicinal uses).
Tobias Policha — the UO doctoral student leading the expedition — could go on like this all day.
An accomplished botanist, he also knows his herb lore and mixes in delightful bits — the common mugwort has been said to intensify the dreams of those who sleep near it, he tells the group of plant lovers who have braved a sunny but windy lunch hour for the stroll.
Policha, 30 and sun-burnished, wearing a perpetual smile and jeans scuffed with soil, has been talking about plants and gardens in Eugene for more than a decade.
In his early days, still a scruffy 19-year-old and armed with a little experience and a boatload of passion, he taught at the Free School in the Whiteaker neighborhood, a project of the local anarchist community.
But he’s emerged as an accomplished scientist, studying an obscure family of orchids in Ecuador under the guidance of his faculty advisor, Bitty Roy, a biology professor at the UO’s Center for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
Perhaps no one is more surprised by this turn of events than Policha, who graduated from high school with the conviction that he wouldn’t take the usual route through adulthood.
He was born and spent the first four years of his life in a rural setting on the edge of Edmonton, Alberta, a sprawling city on the Canadian plains. His mother moved the family to a farm in Pennsylvania when he was 13 after his father had died. But this was no ordinary farm. It was Camphill Village Kimberton Hills, a 425-acre farming community that includes adults with developmental disabilities.
“He was always outdoors,” said his mother, Debra Falkenberg. “And he always had this element of wonder.”
A toddler with a trowel in his hand, he morphed into a teenager working in the farm’s orchards, Falkenberg said.
It wasn’t all just bucolic outdoor living. Policha cut his political teeth in West Philly, where punk rock bands such as Citizen Fish, Clash and Bad Religion made him think.
He didn’t see it then, but he does now, the thread that connects the music with the science. “It’s the drive to question reality. It drives the music, and it’s what drives the science,” he says.
Policha took a detour post-high school. He wound up in Toronto, the eastern Canadian city that borders Lake Ontario. There he became an activist, focusing on anti-poverty, political prisoners and indigenous rights campaigns.
While the work was rewarding, “I was having a hard time rubbing nickels together, as my mother would say,” he said.
There followed an apprenticeship on a New York community-supported agriculture farm, a winter in Mexico, and a circuitous journey to Oregon, for the simple reason that a friend was headed this way.
Once here, he found himself among the anarchists preparing to demonstrate at the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle in 1999.
But Policha didn’t go. He stuck around Eugene and hooked up with Heather Flores. Their love of gardening coupled with their interest in living sustainably became a notion that Flores eventually turned into a book: “Food Not Lawns.”
Another apprenticeship at a farm, this one a seed collecting outfit in California, fired up a new kind of hunger in Policha.
For the first time, he was paying attention to the Latin names of plants.
He came back to Eugene burned out on Free School (“It’s not really free. You’re spending money making copies of handouts, posters.”) and discovered Pell grants, those government subsidies that allow adults to go back to school.
Policha enrolled in botany and Spanish classes at Lane Community College, and made a surprising discovery.
“It turned out I was really good at it,” he says.
He did more than take botany through LCC. He also went through the apprenticeship program at Eugene’s Columbine School of Botanical Studies, a two-year intensive classroom and field training in medicinal herbs.
He eventually moved on to the University of Oregon where he got a bachelor’s degree in biology with a minor in biochemistry in 2007.
But through all of the training, Policha continued teaching, setting up his own institute of ethnobotany, co-teaching workshops through local groups such as the Oregon Permaculture Guild, leading nature hikes in Hendricks Park and sharing what he learned. If there is a seed swap, a mushroom show, a native plant sale, Policha is there.
He’s part of a long tradition, said Roy, his UO advisor.
Before Policha offered the noon nature walks on campus, respected UO botanist David Wagner led them, Roy said. Bruce Newhouse, a private consultant and perhaps the best naturalist in the valley, is also out there doing garden tours and volunteering at events, she said.
“This is a wonderful community of people who model this behavior. It’s not at all surprising that someone as gifted in teaching as Tobias would follow,” she said.
What makes him special is the energy and passion he brings to the subject, she said.
“Whatever he learns, he almost feels compelled to share and he does it in a way that it kind of sneaks up on people. He tells stories. He makes it funny, but you can trust him to convey accurate information in a way that captures your interests,” she said.
Example: Policha sits at a wooden table, one of those big wooden spools that in a previous life had long stretches of cable wrapped around it. He smacks the wood with the flat of his hand.
“The physical matter of this spool used to be air,” he says. “That’s how plants make their living, transforming air into plant material. To me, it’s so remarkable.”
To watch Policha talk about plants is to get swept up in his joy in them. Part of his schtick he picked up from Howie Brounstein, Columbine school owner, and Steven Yeager, who teaches there.
“Imitation is a really nice form of flattery,” Brounstein said, but also quickly points out Policha came to the school with a lifelong interest and a hefty background. He was so hungry for knowledge he went through the program twice, Brounstein said.
Policha isn’t sure what his future holds. Perhaps the academic world has permanently enchanted him. As part of Roy’s research team, he is studying an intriguing family of orchids in Ecuador. The orchids look and smell like nearby mushrooms, a technique for attracting flies that will help pollinate them. Policha describes the intrigue in terms of sex and deceit.
Where will it all lead?
Policha smiles.
“It’s almost accidental, the nature of my academic career,” he says. “It’s very much in flow.”
