9 Activists and Educators to Follow for a Revolutionary View of Climate Justice

To coincide with the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, them. is publishing a series of stories that explores how queer and trans folks are working to protect our planet through organizing, creative expression, and insurgent pedagogy. Read the rest of the pieces, and our ongoing climate coverage, here.

If you listen to some of the most prominent voices on climate change today, you might believe that the driving forces of the movement are straight, white, and cisgender. While there are certainly people who hold those identities doing invaluable work, this popular conceptualization erases the fact that Indigenous and QTPOC people, especially those who exist at the intersection of both, have been at the forefront of environmental justice organizing for centuries. In part because climate change is a phenomenon that exists because of capitalism and colonialism, the labor of activists and organizers who explicitly work to counter these forces is too often overlooked in favor of more palatable advocates. 

What’s more, QTBIPOC, especially those who live in the Global South, are among some of the most vulnerable to the effects of climate disaster. Marginalized people have experienced apocalyptic conditions—from the destruction of Indigenous communities and ways of life, to the poisoning of air and water in predominantly Black neighborhoods. But this is also what makes the world’s oppressed peoples the most equipped to fight for our future, and to strategize new ways of collective survival in the face of a steadily intensifying crisis. 

Climate activism is not and has never been straight and white. Below, them. spoke with nine activists, organizers and self-described “rabble-rousers” around the world — daring folks who work to protect both the land and their communities by sharing farming techniques, engaging in revolutionary writing, and protesting at the front lines.

Sha Merirei Ongelungel (she/her) is a Micronesian (Palauan) rabble-rouser who currently works as the Media Coordinator for the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN). She spent her childhood among activists, including her parents, who defended Indigenous lands against American imperialism and militarization. Best known for creating #BeingMicronesian, her decolonization-based webcomic, Colorful & Noisier, and her podcast, The Sha Nanigans Podcast, the activist has spent the past two decades raising awareness on issues affecting BIPOC communities throughout Pasifika and Turtle Island. 

“My dad taught me that decolonization work that only focuses on your own community isn't true decolonization work and my aunt taught me that solidarity that's built on transactional relationships isn't true or lasting solidarity,” Sha tells them. “When it comes to the climate crisis, which is deeply rooted in anti-Indigeneity, those are two of my major guiding principles.”

Precious Brady-Davis is a trans activist who works in communications at the grassroots environmental organization, the Sierra Club. She currently heads the Beyond Coal Campaign, which seeks to replace all coal plants with sources of clean energy. Prior to her role in environmental advocacy, Brady-Davis was a trans trailblazer who fought to change Illinois’ birth certificate process, so that she and her partner wouldn’t be misgendered. 

Brady-Davis’ focus on environmental justice, moreover, is inextricable from her trans advocacy.

“I see climate advocacy as social justice work and on the same continuum as LGBTQ+ equality and racial justice,” Brady-Davis tells them. “To not have an intersectional view on these matters is just perilous.” 

That’s why she’s running for a commissioner seat on the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District in Chicago, where her home on the South Side is “disproportionately impacted by flooding and access to clean drinking water,” as she told Politico. The seat was recently vacated by Debra Shore, who was recently appointed to a regional position with the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Shore was the first out lesbian nonjudicial candidate in Cook County, and Brady-Davis similarly hopes to make history as potentially the first trans woman of color in the position. 

“Corporate polluters are the biggest contributors to climate change and I believe in holding them to account for the harm they have caused that continues to poison drinking water, pollutes clean air, and endangers public health,” she says. “Far too long profits have been placed over the lives of people and that is simply unacceptable.”

Isaias Hernandez (he/they) is an environmental educator and the creator of @QueerBrownVegan, an Instagram handle through which he curates introductory environmentalism lessons via colorful graphics, illustrations, and videos. In his work, Hernandez seeks to create a safe space for like-minded environmentalists to advance the discourse around the climate crisis. For Hernandez, the climate crisis is also an educational crisis

“When we become fragmented in movements due to homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia, we are erasing that queer and trans communitis have always existed in environmental spaces,” they explain, noting that queerness itself “holds so much power to create a regenerative, just world.” 

Isaias continues, “When we think of environmental injustice, we must remember that queer / trans communities are a part of frontline communities that are the most affected by the ecological crisis.”

Christopher Griffin (he/she/they) was born and raised in West Philadelphia, and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York, where they work as the Assistant Director of the NYU LGBTQ+ Center and care for over “200 green gurls” in their “lil Brooklyn oasis of an apartment.”

An educator at heart, Christopher started the Instagram handle @plantkween in 2016 as a way to share the many lessons, lush adventures, and simple joys that comes with being a plant parent.

“Being a plant parent can mean many different thangs for many different people,” she tells them. “For this kween, being a plant parent means enjoying nature, gardening, green gurls, recognizing their complexities, their intricacies, their beauty, their connectedness, their essential need in our ecosystem, and celebrating, sharing and building community around the joy and happiness that this plant adventure has brought into my life.” 

As a Black queer nonbinary femme, Christopher strives to explore creative and accessible ways to use plants as a vehicle to incite further conversations centering Black joy and reslience, LGBTQ+ advocacy, and the need to increase the visibility, representation, and empowerment of QTPOC (Queer and Trans People of Color) in the lush world of horticulture.

“Being a plant person can be more than just building that fabulous plant fam,” they explain. “It can extend into a whole lifestyle — from environmental politics, to the food you eat, to the clothes you wear, to the products you use;  it’s a whole world of planty-ness dahling, and this kween is learning more and more each day.”

Willow Defebaugh (they/them) is the editor-in-chief of Atmos, a nonprofit biannual magazine and digital platform curated by a global ecosystem of artists, activists, and writers devoted to ecological and social justice, creative storytelling, and re-enchantment with the natural world. They write a weekly newsletter called The Overview which offers a holistic look at life on Earth through the lens of deep ecology.

“My climate advocacy is rooted in deep ecology and re-enchantment with the Earth,” Willow tells them. “When we are able to see something with a sense of wonder, we are naturally moved to protect it — a way of breaking the spell of complacency and apathy that many have fallen under.”

Part of that re-enchantment, Willow suggests, includes understanding how we experience ourselves and our identities influences our relationship to nature. “Being trans has informed so much of my environmentalism,” Willow explains. “Healing our relationship with the Earth will require us to transcend the binary of human vs. nature that was imposed on the world by colonialism, much like the gender binary. Being nonbinary has taught me that this is possible, to see the world not through a lens of us and nature, but us as nature—one and the same."

Gabriel Klaasen (he/they) is a 23-year-old intersectional justice activist from Cape Town, South Africa. He is the youth coordinator for African Climate Alliance, and communications officer for Project 90 by 2030, both of which are social and environmental justice organizations. Their environmental advocacy has been recognized by national organizations, including the South African newspaper, Mail & Guardian. 

“I believe that because nothing in life is isolated we cannot view the solutions to our injustices as isolated issues either,” Gabriel tells them. of their approach to organizing. “As a coloured, queer, non-binary person, I approach my activism through an intersectional lens, with the hope that through intersectional action we can achieve deep systemic change and a just future for all.”

Pınar Sinopoulos-Lloyd (they/them) is an award-winning Indigenous multi-species futurist, wildlife tracker, trans eco-philosopher and transdisciplinary artist. They along with their spouse are the co-founders of Queer Nature, a transdisciplinary educational program that stewards earth-based queer community through the teaching of ancestral skills, interspecies kinship, and rites of passage. They are also a founding Council Member of Intersectional Environmentalist; trans ambassador of Native Women's Wilderness; and a founding member of the Diversify Outdoors coalition. 

“Gender liminality is an Indigenous technology that has supported navigating apocalypse,” Pınar tells them. “As a trans Native and Qariwarmi, the Andean Two-Spirit role, it's in my gender-prismatic lineage to apprentice to death and rebirth, to tend to the liminal — the in-between of what is Known and Unknown. This devotion to liminality is pivotal to climate advocacy.”

Of their approach to climate justice work, Pınar shares they strive to “listen to our more-than-human relatives in co-dreaming multi-species futures.” 

They continue, “It is through apprenticeship to liminality to dream Indigenous futures; to tend to my more-than-human accountability partners who are my elders and mentors; to amplify the inherent innovative world-making that gender liminality is.”

Loba (they/Loba) is a queer gender-nonconforming Peruvian farmer, herbalist seed-saver, full spectrum doula, and fungiphilic educator and consultant. Through their project Flora Pacha, previously known as La Loba Loca, they facilitate workshops and create content via social media. Offline, Loba cares for a chajra, or mini-farm, in so-called New Mexico. 

“How do we find our place in the ecosystem in the midst of climate collapse, a plague, and late capitalism?” Loba asks in a comment shared with them. “Whenever I start feeling hopeless I plant a tree, process some plants, stare at my corn, wait for the new sprouts to come out or gift some farm grown produce to the neighbors.”

Loba shares that because they come from a lineage of chacarerxs and farmers, growing crops constitutes a key method through which they cope with the ecological and psychic consequences of climate change. “I keep planting corn, quinoa, kiwicha. I keep saving seed and sharing and trading them,” they say. “That’s where I’ve found my place in this ecosystem and even if total climate collapse happens tomorrow, I’ll still be eagerly planning which type of corn I’ll grow next season.”

Regan de Loggans (they/themme) (Mississippi Choctaw/ K’iche Maya descendant) is a two-spirit agitator, art historian, curator and educator based in so-called Brooklyn, NY, on Canarsee land. Their work relates to decolonizing, Indigenizing, and queering institutions and curatorial practices. They are a member of the Indigenous Kinship Collective: NYC, a Indingeous women, femme, two-spirit, Indigiqueer collective based in Lenapehoking. They have led a number of teach-ins throughout the city, and staged actions at the Whitney Biennial, American Museum of Natural History, The Met, and on the MTA Subway in response to continued settler colonialism and institutionalized racism and violence. 

Recently, Regan spent time on the frontlines defending lands and waters from the construction of the Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota and the north Brooklyn pipeline in New York. On social media, where they can be found at either @phaggot.planet or @indigenouskinshipcollective, Regan posts uncompromising and revolutionary poetry and educational materials. 

“Resource extraction is ongoing colonialism,” they tell them. of their vision of climate justice. “Land and water protectors are criminalized; as long as settlers continue to occupy Indigenous lands, colonialism continues.”

Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for them.'s weekly newsletter here.