Isabelle is a recent addition to the Agritecture family, joining the marketing department in May 2022. While she is a newcommer to the industry, her interest in sustainability, particularly in the urban context, has been constant throughout her life.
Isabelle currently resides in her hometown of Houston, Texas. Her experience growing up in the fourth-largest city in the U.S. (ranked amongst the worst in terms of sprawl) coupled with her routine visits to her grandparents’ remote, hill country home helped drive this passion.
“Growing up, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents who live on 38 acres northwest of San Antonio. My grandmother worked professionally as a site surveyor and would survey potential building sites for rare and/or endangered plant species. Through this interest of hers, she developed in me a sense of wonderment and appreciation for the natural world,” shares Isabelle.
As she continued to visit her grandparents year after year, Isabelle witnessed firsthand “the loss of natural landscapes as the city of San Antonio sprawled and some of the rolling hills became subject to quarries.” To better contextualize this issue, according to Texas A&M, “between 1982 and 2010, Texas lost 4.1 million acres of working lands to urban uses.”
While a glum reality of the industrializing world, this transformation cemented Isabelle’s curiosity into the environmental impacts of human behavior.
Isabelle narrowed in on the effects of urban planning, particularly as it relates to food security, during her undergraduate studies at Randolph College.
As part of her Global Studies degree, Isabelle explored the intersection of economics and sustainability, and her thesis “discussed how urban planning can exacerbate social inequities.”
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