Leah Thomas gets candid on the links between Black women and environmental justice. “Data doesn’t lie and my people deserve better.” From the Sustainability Issue.
Leah Thomas, known affectionately as Green Girl Leah, is a leading voice in the environmental justice movement. With over 230,000 followers on her personal account and more than 420,000 followers on @intersectionalenvironmentalist, her nonprofit’s account, it’s clear that people are listening to what she has to say. A quick scroll down her feed is full of colorful carousels that make for truly accessible content. But don’t let that perfect aesthetic fool you: Leah is all about data-driven and hard-hitting facts. Blame it on her degree in environmental science and policy. She’s not new to this, she’s true to this!
So what exactly does Leah share and why does it resonate so deeply? Leah is a self-proclaimed eco communicator who leverages digital tools toward expanding the climate movement. In many ways, the push to create virtual hubs for learning about the environmental justice movement began with identifying the gaps in her own journey. Leah was always passionate about the planet, but it wasn’t until the tail end of her bachelor’s degree program that she began digging into the way racism intersects with climate injustice. “We spoke about Superfund sites, which are places that have toxic waste or high levels of contamination throughout the U.S. and are dangerous to human health. We didn’t dive into the specifics about the environmental justice movement or the connection between race and environmental outcomes, but I later learned about this even more in a sociology class and also when I started to create maps that highlighted where pollution was with respect to race and income.”
These and other experiences fueled Leah to not only dig deeper but also to begin sharing what she was learning. “I was working as an assistant while founding an organization [Intersectional Environmentalist] when I started my first blog back in 2016 and it slowly grew from there,” Leah shares. Soon, the respective platforms took on lives of their own and Leah was working full time as a public educator. As a young woman, Leah is impressive, and it’s easy to believe that her work is novel, but Leah is clear that she’s building upon the legacy of her ancestors. “Our ancestors were inherently sustainable and did not create these unsustainable systems. I find optimism in thinking of all the ways my grandmother was sustainable and upcycled and recycled, and that reminds me that sustainability is so connected to my own cultural practices and isn’t just what the mainstream media has tried to make it.” It’s refreshing to hear such an intergenerational approach to how we can think of climate activism as more than a trend or social media fad.
The road to building such successful spaces has been rewarding but certainly not easy. There are many who feel that the only color in the climate movement is green and that race shouldn’t come up much, if at all. “When people ask me why I talk about race, I don’t even flinch and respond with “Why does talking about race make you uncomfortable?” It’s more of a personal problem [for them] because I’m showing up to talk about my area of expertise, which is backed by data and science and which clearly shows people
of color are the most impacted by climate injustice. The data is more important than their opinion or fragility. My people and their lives are more important, so I honestly don’t even really waste my time if someone wants to argue because there isn’t even anything to debate.”
Conversations with climate deniers around the science of climate change and the role of capitalism in driving ecological destruction tend to feel like talking to a brick wall. Unfortunately, the immense amount of misinformation and disinformation online has only made this more challenging. Leah doesn’t feed into the trolls though. She matter-of-factly states that “if you don’t think Black people should have clean water and air, you are a racist.” It’s that simple for her, and by arming followers with well-vetted information that affirms what we see every day in our communities, she supports others who are having these conversations on and offline. “I’m there to remind people of the facts.”
Now, Leah is consolidating many of these facts and supporting those looking to fight for the environment through her latest book, The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People and Planet. The Intersectional Environmentalist is a primer for those newer to the field and/or those who want to ensure race, gender, class, and other important identifiers aren’t being left out of the conversation. It doesn’t assume you know all of the jargon, but it also doesn’t coddle readers, which makes it the perfect space to go deeper than you may have ever gone before in rethinking your relationship to the world around you.
“I secretly wrote [this book] for my younger self as the book I wish I could have read as a Black climate student to sort of affirm everything I felt was missing from white-led climate and environmental books.” The intentionality jumps off the pages and one chapter in particular—which happens to be Leah’s favorite—stands out. It dives into Black feminism and eco-feminism. “I got to touch on things like misogynoir and how Black women were left out of both civil rights, women’s rights, and environmental movements, and I think this is really important for people to know.”
Many of us are pessimistic about the future available to us based on the rate at which our planet is deteriorating. It doesn’t help that the media and films we ingest seem to be pointing toward an apocalyptic ending to life as we know it. But Leah’s book will give you hope and calls to action on how to be the change you want to see. “You can’t be perfectly sustainable in an unsustainable system. We need systems to change, but until then we can do our best to build a world where everyone has access to basic environmental human rights like clean air, clean water, green spaces to recreate, and healthy, accessible food.” With people like Leah leading the charge, I know and trust that this world is within our reach.
Images by Cher Martinez and James Theodore.
