How can we make sure our big climate emotions are enlisted for justice, not harm? Why are stories of solutions so important for empowering us to keep going in the face of terrible news? How can “evidence-based hope” help us stay focused and grounded as we try to help the earth? How can digital storytelling buoy our climate literacy and resilience? What does it mean to “queer environmentalism,” and what do joy, fun, and celebration have to do with climate change?
Explore these questions and more in this week’s episode of Climate Magic, where I interview QueerBrownVegan and environmental scientist Isaias Hernandez.
Shownotes
- Queerbrownvegan’s website: https://queerbrownvegan.com/
- Dear Environmentalist newsletter
- Sustainable Jobs: https://queerbrownvegan.com/sustainable-jobs/
- Symbiocene events: https://queerbrownvegan.com/symbiocene/
- Teaching Climate Together web video series: https://queerbrownvegan.com/teaching-climate-together/
- Leah Thomas’s Intersectional Environmentalist website and book
- Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish
- What is Queer Ecology? Great keywords explanation here and a great updated explanation here
- “Why ICE Raids Are a Climate Issue”, substack essay by Hernandez
- El Paso shooter manifesto citing An Inconvenient Truth
- elin kelsey’s wonderful book Hope Matters
- Hernandez’s video with kelsey, “evidence-based hope and wellbeing in the community”
- Marisol Cortez’s theory of the “productivist imaginary” and the “praxis of deceleration”, article here
- Britt Wray’s work on eco-anxiety
- My book The Ecological Other, on the eugenicist roots of environmentalism, especially my chapter on violence against immigrants rooted in “green hate”
- “When Climate Anxiety Leans Right” panel convened after Buffalo shooting, with me, Jade Sasser, Blanche Verlie, Betsy Hartmann, and Rebecca Weston, recording available here
- Glenn Albrecht’s book, Earth Emotions: New Words for New Worlds
Transcription
HERNANDEZ: I used to think hope was so dumb and like, oh, it's just rooted in mental health talk. Now, I recognize that hope is rooted in actual science, actual evidence.
RAY: Welcome to Climate Magic, where we talk about the relationship between climate change and our hearts and minds. How do our brains, our nervous systems, and the culture we live in shape our ability to confront this challenge of climate change? I'm Sarah Ray, a professor at Cal Poly Humboldt.
HERNANDEZ: A lot of statistics show that people who are exposed to people doing good environmental behaviors or learning about environmental behaviors are more likely to adopt it versus tactics that use shame or guilt.
RAY: Today I speak with Isaias Hernandez. Isaias is an environmentalist, an educator, and a creative devoted to improving environmental literacy through content creation, storytelling, and public engagements. Isaias is more commonly known by his moniker QueerBrownVegan, which is an independent media platform that he started to raise awareness about the ways environmentalism intersects with a multitude of identities and to make environmentalism accessible to all.
He also collaborates with other leaders from the private and public sectors to uplift and produce stories of change and solutions for his independent web series, Sustainable Jobs and Teaching Climate Together. Isaias has been featured in The New York Times, Vogue, The Washington Post, The Guardian. His social media advocacy earned him recognition as a top climate creator by Harvard Sea Change.
He's presented for The New York Times, Nike, UC Berkeley, Billie Eilish's Overheated Summit, Harvard University, and more. He recently co-founded The Symbiocene Events company which operates worldwide, and we'll talk about that a little bit in the show.
We talked about how big feelings about climate change can lead to really harmful violence, like mass shootings of immigrants and the current militarization of ICE against immigrants. The fear of climate-driven immigration perpetuates so much violence. And we talk about how empowering and inspiring it is to look at stories of solutions and what someone he interviewed, named elin kelsey, calls “evidence-based hope.”
Are you ready to get inspired by the solution that is Isaias Hernandez? Let's dive in.
RAY: Thank you for meeting with me. Thank you for doing this with me. I feel like this is like I have an excuse to call up Isaias and talk to Isaias, you’re so sweet—
HERNANDEZ: Me. It's a reunion that was overdue.
RAY: I get to teach your work. I love what you're producing. How did you come to be what I might call an intersectional environmental education influencer expert?
HERNANDEZ: Yeah, I love all the adjectives behind it. I think, you know, my journey as an environmentalist started off in Los Angeles, where I grew up, and I think my experiences growing up in poverty really shaped my understanding of what is an environmentalist and what isn't.
Media had such a huge influence as a kid. I grew up watching Nat Geo, PBS, Discovery Channel, and I would see these really big environmental shows and conservation shows. Typically what the media represented were often very notable environmentalists like Jane Goodall, David Attenborough—the list goes on. But they were typically people who were college-educated, who were white, but also very talented in their field.
I would look up to them, but I would tell myself, there's no way that you could be there because you don't really have that life. At a very early age, I knew that education was always an interest of mine, and I'm very privileged that my parents shoved it down our throats that if we don't go to college, we're not going to make it in life.
When I decided I wanted to do environmental science in high school, it was because I saw it as a very holistic major where I was just like, oh, you get to be outdoors; oh, you get to learn about science and math and humanities. It's not just one thing. I would say that in college is where I got my journey started as an environmentalist.
RAY: Oh my gosh, I love that story too. You have a beautiful video in your Teaching Climate series online, where you interview somebody who's a scientist in Los Angeles. It was really touching because I was like, yeah, when I grew up in L.A., I was taught not to see nature. Because if you saw nature, you'd see the damage that this town had done to it.
Yeah, and you would not feel good about it. It would create so much cognitive dissonance in you that you'd be like, this is too painful to look around. All these people are watering their lawns in this desert, you know; we're learning about the environmental justice history of it, or the Native history of it, or where we're getting our water from—all of it, you know.
HERNANDEZ: Yeah, exactly. I think the point of the Teaching Climate Together web series that I created—it's kind of built off from my platform, QueerBrownVegan, where I would discuss a lot of environmental terminologies on infographics that were cheaply made on Photoshop and Canva. This is the 2019 era, 2020, so the rise of the infographics era—now they've kind of died down.
RAY: Oh, you're so old.
HERNANDEZ: I'm like a past generation now. I have to always acknowledge it. There's a new generation with the viral videos, and I can't chase virality everywhere. But with Teaching Climate Together, the beauty of this web series is that it's based off my past, watching a lot of PBS shows.
One of the things that we wanted to do is actually show me what an urban ecologist does, and so I would interview different scientists and academics. I'm just like, show me the history, show me the science, show me these experiences. Doing this web series has been so healing for me, because I recognize, like, I'm sorry PBS, but PBS is not going to come up to the front of your door because there's not a lot of climate environmental media content anyway.
So I'm like, even if it's bootleg, even if my friends call it the YouTube version of environmental shows, it doesn't matter. At least I did it, and I'm proud I did it. I look back at the videos and I'm like, wow, I can't believe that was two years ago and I almost fainted on that shoot because there was a heat wave.
My team was like, we're really concerned about shooting, and your health is not well. I said, don't worry, we got this. Literally, at the end of the shoot, the sun was gleaming on our faces and it was like 115 degrees. After the episode, I told my assistant, I need water, I don't feel well. It was just insane to think that even how climate change affects the way that you shoot environmental content today.
RAY: Oh my gosh, that is a poignant view into what that was even like and how climate change was knocking on the door of your Teaching Climate series. I always sort of think you should have kept filming and said, we're having a heat wave; we’re talking about this and it's currently this hot right now.
HERNANDEZ: Literally.
RAY: Well, I'm glad you got some water after that. This makes me want to ask you about digital media as your medium. You described as a child how important that was for you to get you into it, and how you just bootlegged this stuff out there because you wanted to see someone from your perspective asking these questions, and you wanted to get that content out there.
But on your website, you say that something like 69% of people will tell you that they learned about climate change through digital media. I was wondering if you could give us some examples and talk a little bit about that relationship between the medium of digital media—or any medium that we would learn about climate change from—and whether it relates at all to our climate engagement.
So how we learn about it—does it affect what we end up doing?
HERNANDEZ: Yeah, absolutely. I think the statistics around climate media today—I remember I found it shocking when I saw that traditional media is the largest percentage where people are learning about environmental-related issues, like NBC, the press. Then you have digital media, which is 25%, and then you have TVs and commercials.
But we also know that that data in itself, when you're dissecting it, TVs don't really talk about climate change as its central theme. Maybe they mention it, or maybe the character is sustainable or they're vegan or taking a bike, or they're normalizing that culture, but it's not directly saying “climate change.”
Engagement with young people today—as we have entered such a rapid usage of digital media, different platforms have really offered different experiences. My experience of how I built my platform was through editorial content; it was through writing, actually. It wasn't video in the early days.
I had to expand to video during that time just to evolve. When I was taking environmental science courses, we would talk about environmental justice very quickly. I was just like, that's it? Then you move on and you don't really digest, you don't talk about it, you don't explain it.
There are a lot of statistics that are showing that people who are exposed to people doing good environmental behaviors, or learning about environmental behaviors, are more likely to adopt them versus tactics that are being used to shame or guilt. I use these parallels in the vegan animal rights spaces; often those tactics that are rooted in absolute values—you're either this or that—honestly don't really go long-term sustainable, and it's not really reflective of what younger generations want anymore, because they want nuance. They don't want “you're either this or that.”
For me, that's been something I've learned in digital media and teaching people: it's not about me saying this is the biological power of truth, but rather this is the dimension of a truth that I've been exploring and that there are different avenues to dissect this information.
I think this is reflective of our society with young people today. Some of the young people, with our democracy kind of eroding, find it really hard to have any sense of connection or safety net. Oftentimes they're really looking towards online communities to unpack these types of emotions and these experiences.
Not to say academia and education aren’t filling that, because I do believe they are, but I think that there's another supplementary part that social media plays in aiding this. At the same time, young people are so exposed to so much disinformation and misinformation that it's very easy to have them manipulated.
So I think the media landscape that we're in today is so much different than when I was growing up, because I think I was properly taught media literacy. I remember as a kid, as a teenager, looking up an article on Yahoo News about how we were due for a winter ice age. I remember telling my teacher and she was like, where are the sources coming from? Where did you learn that from?
When you're 12, you're like, I'm scared and you don't know what to do with this type of information. You’re like, well, I don't know, I'm not a scientist, I don't know anything. Now it's so easy for them to get abducted by these types of narratives that I think climate media, in my opinion, where I come from is: let's just bring it back to the 101 plus cultural analysis to understand that how I was taught media literacy is to critically analyze before you enter your thoughts on that.
RAY: Yeah, I love it, because when I see that data about how many young people get their climate information through social media, it freaks me out. I get a little bit like, my heart rate goes up, and I think, oh no, we’ve got to intervene, we have to have a bigger intervention, what are we going to do?
But you're suggesting that there's some real possibility there. Yes, there's the negative side of being abducted by the hoax stuff, but there's also the potential for finding all this nuance, finding people who look like you and have experiences like you, who maybe aren't the David Attenboroughs of the world, who can offer some nuanced, interesting avenue that's backed by science to kind of counterbalance that democratic realm of ideas that are out there and available to consume.
So yeah, I like that you just gave it a little bit of possibility and hope for me. So thank you. There's some good to it.
One of the things you write a lot about and think a lot about, and you're really an expert voice on, in my opinion, is how people's identities shape their views about the environment. This is something that Leah Thomas writes about beautifully in The Intersectional Environmentalist, which is a classic teaching text, and I'll certainly put that in the show notes.
You have interviewed her and have a show with her too, on your website. The two of you are kind of intersectional environmentalist champions. Can you say a little bit about what identity might have to do with how we think of the environment, and what kinds of actions and feelings we might have about protecting it?
HERNANDEZ: Yeah, I think identity really relates back to your environmental work because it places you in an understanding of your cultural heritage and your environmental history—histories of your families. For me, one of the things that my parents reminded me, and I'm talking more about first-generation immigrant kids like myself, is that my parents always reminded me where I came from, and they reminded me, you are a visitor on this land because it's Indigenous land.
It's not your land. Yes, it's your home, but your home also has places of connection for other people. Growing up, my parents, growing up in Mexico, always told me stories about them being farmers, their parents being farmers, and even my grandparents having documented history of literally writing about the genocides that were happening to Indigenous people when Spaniards were coming.
It's so interesting to me to see narratives of like, wow, my grandparents were literally in America during the Bracero program, but they refused to become U.S. citizens or live in the U.S. because they thought—they were scared during the Vietnam War that they had their own kids. It's insane to me to think, wait, so you weren't the first one to America, your parents were. And they're like, yeah, our parents were, but they were just there temporarily working.
I come from a lineage of farm laborers, people who have worked tediously with the land, who were actually finding the ways to live the most sustainably, even if they were poor. My grandpa built his own house for his wife and his kid—built it out of scratch. It's still there in Mexico City. It’s insane when I visited that house, to be like, wow, he built this. I did not know that he could do that.
Growing up in the States, living in section 8 housing or in an apartment, my Latino identity was shaped richly to where in my community everyone was having health issues. That really led to my understanding of different environmentalists who come from different upbringings. I had friends in college who would go to private resorts or travel all around with their families, lived in big mansions, and complained that they didn't like their parents. I'm like, but you have really nice resources there.
You see a lot of marginalized students who come from poverty or low-income situations who are like, honestly, the reason why I'm interested in the environment is also from a health perspective. For me, it was really hard. I didn't see anyone in my major. There were less than five Latinos in my major. There were maybe less than four queer people in my cohort.
These identities helped inform me that yes, I have to work harder to understand this cultural system that I'm in, but also I'm someone who is passionate about justice. I'm mad about the environmental crisis; I'm also mad that my community has health issues. I have chronic health issues now, and I'm starting to link back in my book, talking about, oh my God, I was exposed to a lot of things as a kid. I was always in and out of the hospital, but they always told me that it's just growing pains, that it's just in my head.
Sixty percent is your environment, thirty percent is genetics, around that. To me, there's this environmental health component. I'm sorry if I didn't answer that question too eloquently.
RAY: No, you absolutely did. Beautiful.
HERNANDEZ: I think for me, my identity really informs me that I'm not just an environmentalist in this world, because the way that I'll always be defaulted is brown and queer. A lot of times it challenges the norms of when you think about environmentalists. Whenever you ask a group of students, “Who are five environmentalists you can name?” if the majority of them are white, I say, well, what about five Black environmentalists? Five Indigenous people? Maybe they know one or two.
That goes to show that we haven't really done an impressive job to not just highlight and amplify these stories, but we've romanticized these environmentalists who have existed decades before us—who were conservationist heroes for America—even though Indigenous people were here. We're not doing the job of telling those stories.
When we start to disrupt those narratives, we can actually start to make new spaces and new waves for these people, which is why I think I had a hard time in my classes with all the devil-advocate Chads that were like, well, racism isn't real, or the environment can't be racist. And I'm like, that’s true, Chad, nature itself isn't racist. But the people who implement these policies and practices were in fact racist, and were documented saying anti-Black language and being against diversity. So yes, it is actually based—
RAY: Many of them were eugenicists.
HERNANDEZ: And eugenicists too. Thank you so much for that. And that's the thing—we're not ready to have that conversation.
RAY: Yeah. Well, now that you've sort of gone that direction, I could imagine asking you fifteen different questions, because this is a real area of interest of mine: the ways that environmentalism puts a green package around really nefarious or xenophobic ideas so it's more palatable.
It's so easy to romanticize Greta Thunberg when she's talking about climate change, but the minute she talks about justice and changing the whole system, we don't hear about her anymore. The calls to justice, or calls to the house, or calls to recognizing structural racism as part of the environmental movement, are not as easy to integrate into the mainstream.
Greenwashing is fine: as long as white people are just saying, we love nature, go hug a tree, get outside, go to your national park, it's all very fine and well. But the minute there comes a more systems approach or a systems critique of something that might require people to think differently or change the way they behave, it's more of a threat. And those critiques are often coming from more marginalized identities too, not just coincidentally.
HERNANDEZ: Absolutely. I think that's where we have to talk about the dominant environmental movement being, in my opinion, an industry; it's not a movement. For me, in some ways—and this is from my experiences in these spaces now—you're in these higher-profile settings, you're at The New York Times events, you're at the Climate Reality events, you're at the TED Countdown events.
In academia too, they have their own conferences, their own hierarchies. I see this and I'm like, what are we really doing here? How are we saying we're critiquing all of these systems, yet the person you hired to do your keynote charges $100,000 to speak at this large climate conference?
Why is it bad that I've worked with a brand that is not exploitative, where they paid me in order to support my career? There are all these contradictions in the space. Environmental justice spaces really brought me back to reality: these are working-class Americans, people trying to improve their economic and environmental conditions. These are mothers, laborers, people that look like me, that come from me.
I've always felt this sense of safety towards these communities because it's where I grew up from. I find it so hard that when you're in these “elite” spaces, you see a lot of power, wealth, status, accolades. It’s unfortunate that our economic system is set up this way to value that, but it's also dehumanizing, because what I'm fighting for isn't for this community here, it's for the community there.
So there's this really hard thing I've had to unpack: what does it really mean to be ethical in this space? I have seen a lot of exploitation, oppression, and power dynamics being used to exploit—
RAY: Performance.
HERNANDEZ: And performances. When I teach young people about justice-oriented spaces, I say, the people next to you are the ones who are truly going to watch your back, not these people that you're taking photos with, doing all these things with. At the end of the day, it's an illusion.
RAY: You're talking a lot about ethics and dehumanizing, and you've talked a lot about belonging. We're skirting around this question that's sort of the topic of the show, which is really about the emotional life of climate politics. You spend a lot of time in your videos and in all of your work really engaging the research on emotions and climate work, and climate justice work in particular.
I was wondering if you could explore a little bit the role of emotion and how it plays into your own climate politics and your own work.
HERNANDEZ: Yeah, I think emotions have been something very personal to me. As someone who struggled a lot with mental health growing up, socially, being queer, and understanding and navigating a family that was very much rooted in toxic religion, and having to challenge that and unlearn a lot of those things for myself.
Now I have a great relationship with my family; I love them to death now. I’ve healed over the parent trauma and also with my siblings—I love them to death. But for me, when it comes to emotions, I think it is a mental piece of our understanding for our liberation.
When people are able to tap into different energetic expressions of their emotions, they're able to activate certain stories and ecologies that have always been embedded in their ancestral history, but even within them. I often tell people that our emotions don't exist in a binary. You can be angry, and that fury is what gives you—not the power to oppress—but the power to create a foundation for others and for yourself, to ensure that you're fighting for the end goal of what you want to achieve.
In a world today where we have really devalued, unfortunately, literacy and academia, we have disconnected ourselves from people who may want to be able to validate themselves through a word that allows them to understand that this isn't something they're experiencing alone. They aren't the ones who—like Britt Wray has said too—eco-anxiety, for example, is not a mental disorder.
Even I had to challenge myself in college when I heard that term, because I was like, that's dumb. What do you mean you're afraid of the planet? I can't even pay my rent. Do you honestly think I'm stressed about climate change? I'm literally a doorstep away from getting kicked out of my housing, and I have no money, and I can't ask my parents for money.
So there's nuance there. But for me, emotions play such a role because they've helped me through so much. I think a lot—this is maybe more spiritual, but I think that we are in a spiritual crisis today, where many young people are looking not just for the science and the truth that we see, and the policies that need to happen to make this change, but they're also trying to find that spiritual connection to themselves.
I'm very privileged to have grown up knowing my family lineage, to know my family history. But for people who are born second generation, third generation, fourth generation, who may be disconnected from all of those traditions and raised in a way to value generational wealth, not ecological wealth, they have really strayed away from even valuing these types of emotions or these experiences for themselves.
We’ve lost practices. As kids, we probably touched dirt, we ate dirt, we talked to bugs. Now, if you see someone hugging a tree, we think they're crazy, or that they have a mental issue. We have really devalued all of this ecological wealth of relationships that we have.
My emotions have helped me understand that you're not just one person; you're a multifaceted individual, and you have all these different unique parts about you, and that's what makes you unique. I really wish I could have learned this when I was younger, because when I was younger I was always being forced: This is the way you have to act. If you want to be a scientist, you cannot even talk about spirituality. You need to do this or you need to be this.
I got so exhausted. I was like, I don't have that life. My life was never structured that way. I'm all of these parts, and it's fine if you don't like one of the parts of me, but this is who I am. I'm queer; literally I'm the rainbow of the screen. Being able to showcase that in my emotions, in my work, has helped resonate with young people, because I really wish I could have had older Isaias right now helping me when I was in college. That would have saved me from so many disasters.
But I think there's a reason why I went through that in order to help others situate themselves. So I think that's been one—
RAY: Everything is a learning experience, nothing a failure.
HERNANDEZ: Exactly. Right. Exactly.
RAY: I love what you're saying. You are touching on a lot of things. I want to pull apart a little bit: the emotion side is almost like the child side, and we're living in a culture where, if we want to think in binary dualistic thought—which of course we don't like, but in dualistic thought—we put emotion versus thought, child versus adult, immature versus mature, “backward” versus “civilized,” maybe minority or feminine versus male and masculine, “evolved,” and the humanities versus the sciences.
So the way you just described all of that, you helped me put together that little chart in my head about these binaries—and how violent that was for you growing up.
HERNANDEZ: Yeah. I think it took me a long time to understand what I was meant for in this world, and especially in my environmental work. To this day, I'm so thankful for people who support my work, but even then I've had moments of people telling me, your work is unique, but it fits different puzzle pieces and it's not one thing.
Sometimes it's hard to describe that work of yourself. I said, I think that's just how my life has always been, where my parents knew that I was always failing to fit their molds. Even though they forced me to fit the mold, I would be like, well, I'm going to be here, but I'm also going to disrupt the rules here.
As an environmental scientist, a lot of my professors were just like, you need to stop challenging things. And I'm like, no, I'm going to challenge it. Did I get reprimanded for it? Yes. Did I go through a lot of trauma through that? Yes. But I think that's the beauty of our culture today, that we embrace all of these unique sides of ourselves.
RAY: Yeah. I think there's something about interdisciplinarity there that's beautiful. Michel Foucault, the famous French theorist, talked about docile bodies and disciplined bodies. I love the word “discipline”—it's punishing and disciplining, and it's also the word we use to talk about fields of study. You're disciplined in your discipline. You have to fit in your box.
But there's also a queerness to it. One of the things that I think queer ecologies bring to this conversation, and that you're speaking of in an oblique way, is a theory underlying it—queer ecology. It's not just a metaphor. The ways that we think about gender binaries and sexuality binaries has been so harmful for people.
Similarly, we shouldn't be doing that with environmental identities and how holistic and complex and slippery and boundary-transgressing our knowledges around what it takes to achieve justice, climate justice, environmental justice. There’s not just one way to do it. There's a critique of purity or a critique of the box that really comes from queer ecology, and lots of other fields have picked that up.
I don't know if you want to speak to that, but I just want to highlight this beautiful critique of the box that you're giving us.
HERNANDEZ: Yeah, because I think with a lot of queer scientists, academics, even queer youth, they go through this thing of how you've had to see the world. Being a brown queer person—because I love my white queer friends, but we've had such different experiences—where it's like, you can enter the room, you'll be seen as white; I'll enter the room and they'll be like, a brown person, and he's queer.
I'm disregarding that hierarchy question there, but with a queer ecology lens, I've always seen it as an expansionary set of values that allows you to continue to expand yourself. There's no such thing as limitation in a world that strikes me as unnatural.
For me, I've often felt, what does it mean to queer these spaces? It doesn't just mean, we have gay penguins and the whole history of academic research on same-sex behavior in animals. There's a lot of research about that. But I do think that, on my own, when it has come to dissecting and understanding the experiences of queerness in academics and myself, theories of liberation—you're constantly unraveling this term around “natural” and “unnatural.” As you peel those layers, you're also discovering different subsets of values of who you are.
That's the beauty of queerness: it's an ever-expanding journey of yourself. Oftentimes, because we grew up in a heteronormative world, those journeys for queer people are not going to be the same. Heteronormative communities—their health, their status, their symbols, their expressions of love—are not always going to be there, and even their environmental work.
RAY: And even their environmental work.
HERNANDEZ: Their environmental work is not going to be the same for queer people. I try to remind queer and trans environmentalists: your journey is going to be unique. Is it going to be isolating at times? Yes, it is, because even I go through it. But that doesn't mean that you are meant to do this alone forever, or that those who have come before us didn't also figure out ways to do it.
My legacy with queerness is that we continue to see it as this extensive brand that continues to grow, that is not going to maybe be seen in our lifetime, but it's going to continue to be used as a mantlepiece for people's understandings of their journeys and other people's journeys. I draw my experiences from the LGBTQ rights movements, all of the people who have fought for rights decades before me.
We're in a time where we're going back. I keep thinking that in queerness things will never be linear; things are always going to be up and down, and there's going to be losses—in terms of, not necessarily lives, but losses of our rights, losses of wins that we thought we could have had—but that doesn't mean that's the final outcome. Queerness is telling you that no matter how much you try to be structured and confined into systems, queerness can always find a way out.
RAY: And what a lesson for environmental work, you know. Beautiful. Thank you for that.
You’ve talked about expansion of yourself and this kind of sense of liberation, that this is a kind of permission or a mantlepiece for liberation. You've talked a little bit in different settings, both in terms of your Latino identity and your queer identity, in this sort of multi-generational way. You hinted that you might be worried about later generations not having it, but there’s this sense of belonging to a lineage and carrying on ancestors’ projects, and being a good ancestor to future descendants—biological or otherwise—and this longer temporality of seeing yourself in an arc of maybe a hundred-year history, rather than just your own lifetime.
Do you think that that kind of view of time, or that feeling of belonging in a long temporal arc, is really an important aspect of feeling hopeful about and engaged in climate work?
HERNANDEZ: Yeah. I mean, to me, going back to what you were saying about the human dimensions of emotions, I think all of us desire to be chosen. All of us desire to have connection, and we desire a bid for connection.
Within that lens, even myself—I talk openly—yes, we can have our family, yes, we can have our best friends, and yes, we can have friends, but there's nothing shameful in saying, oh, I want a romantic partner. People say, “Oh, you need to love yourself first.” Yes, that exists, there is that nuance, but there's also this thing of: I desire to be chosen. I desire to be held. You desire to be held, to be cared for, to be tended to, to be tender with someone else, in a non-platonic setting or a platonic setting.
I think that in that arc, a lot of us have often felt like we're very good at saying, yes, systems are collapsing, justice systems are collapsing, yes, we need to shut it down. But how many of us are showing up for people around us? I had to recognize and evaluate myself as I've gotten older: I need to show up for the people who held me in my lowest points of my life and never forget that, because they're the ones who are going to get me through every crisis. We're going to sit through this together.
A lot of us have been shamed, shunned, pushed away in an attempt to create connection. I think the long arc of queerness to me, and identity and environmentalism, is that there's always going to be that desire for connection that exists. But we can really start rewriting a lot of those narratives now, before we become too mechanistic as a society, where we start to devalue that.
To me, that's the strongest asset of ourselves—for people. The desire to live, the desire to care, the desire to love in a world that's both living and dying is, to me, the most powerful thing that you can do. I understand that the realities of this world are: yes, our system is not working; yes, people are being imprisoned by ICE; and yet we're trying to still to take care of ourselves.
I often feel like younger people—and I understand where they're coming from. I was a young person too—how angry they are about the systems they have. At the same time, I want to remind them of the power that they have. Like, hey, the fact that you're traveling for Climate Week NYC and you're only 19—I didn't have that money. I was struggling in my classes trying to work three part-time jobs.
I remind youth: you are also a kid. You also deserve to experience. You don't need to force yourself to be an adult. You lose your magic, you lose your essence. I'm so proud that my friends have told me I never lost my smile, I never lost my humor, because that's what got me through everything—to be playful.
It’s so sad when I see people who are so angry and sad. I know I used to be like that in certain ways, but I don't want myself to dwindle away either. That's what makes you who you are. I think we've shamed people for wanting connection, and we've also shamed people for trying to be child-like, playful acts of their selves, in expressing themselves beyond the “work” they're trying to do.
RAY: So if you're expressing joy or experiencing joy, or if you're having pleasure, that is somehow childish and immature, and you're not awake to the realities of the world. If you’re showing anger and frustration and nihilism all the time, it's a sign you're awake to the realities of the world. You're pushing back on that binary again. You need them both, right? You need them both. That kind of desire for joy and connection and pleasure has to be part of the work that we're doing, or else we can't sustain ourselves, as you've described in your own personal experiences. Beautiful.
This is going to take another turn. We've been talking a little bit about the really critical role of these pleasant feelings in keeping us sustained, and belonging, and healing from trauma—how important that is so we can stay sustained, the burnout and the cynicism of youth, and why that's not helpful. But there's also this uglier side of “eco-emotions,” if you will.
Can we talk a little bit about when big climate emotions really go wrong? You've talked about compassionate climate action or being curious in your work that you do, rather than being interrogative. You wrote this incredible piece on why the climate movement should care more about the ICE raids happening, especially in our mutual hometown of Los Angeles.
How do big climate emotions often end up motivating violence instead of justice?
HERNANDEZ: Yeah, I think with climate emotion words that exist, we have to remember the nuance behind them. These were primarily made by academic scholars who are inspired by, let's be honest, Indigenous science. These words are not new-new. They’re maybe new to the academic sphere in the Western world, but we have to remind—
RAY: And also new to the environmental movement. Like, hello environmental movement.
HERNANDEZ: When I was in college in 2016, I knew “eco-anxiety,” we were like “eco-grief,” and I was like, what, this exists? I just thought “eco-anxiety,”—honestly, I was like, okay, y'all are taking it too far. Obviously I see the value for these terms, especially with climate disasters destroying people's lives, families.
But I think where some of these climate emotions don't really do justice is they don't illustrate some of the realities of marginalized communities. A lot of the time we often think that these terms dilute the realities of, oh, I'm grieving because—like if you use the word “solastalgia,” which is the deep sorrow when you see an environmental landscape change—for some Western people, they'll be like, yeah, I remember a tree was down on my block and it got destroyed. I'm sad, there's this sorrow. Yes, that's a true feeling or emotion.
But for other people, it's like, no, I literally saw my neighbor get wiped out by a climate disaster, and they had a beautiful garden and were always greeting us, and now they were killed during the climate disaster. What's the word for that? I don't just have grief; I don't just have solastalgia. I'm literally traumatized.
Trauma is the thing at the end of the day. As much as we think about the mental health climate emotions around people like first responders rescuing people from climate disasters, my first priority is: don't tell me that I have land-based trauma. Tell me, I need food. Where's my family? Am I going to be okay?
RAY: So addressing material needs before you address the mental health implications.
HERNANDEZ: Yes. I think there's a time and place for everything, and of course I know psychologists and therapists work through that. But I also do think that one of the responses to climate emotion words comes from the lack of connections from—how do I say it—but Western settlers, their lack of connection to nature.
In my community in Mexico, we knew when there was a drought. We knew how to talk about it. We knew how to respect and make sure, like, okay, if you're going to take timber from the forest, you only take the trees that have been lightning-struck; you don't chop down the healthy trees. I'm not saying, I don't want people to quote me as if that was every community, but I think what scares me is that typically people who are eco-fascists, or people who adopt anti-immigrant views, what they’ll see is a lack of response to climate disasters, the failure of our government in addressing those resources.
They'll see right-wing media say, yeah, immigrants are taking the jobs. That's going to increase the hatred and violence towards our bodies, us being hunted down—not just by ICE, but insane kinds of people. With the lack of access to care, to medical systems, to physical resources like food, it becomes easy to redirect that anger and use it against us.
I'm really scared that they would adopt these types of terminologies to justify why they're going to do a mass shooting or murder or unalive these communities. It's already happened. With the El Paso shooter, for example, with Latinos—it's just insane.
RAY: I just want to pause on that one for a minute. That's the 2019 El Paso shooting in a Walmart parking lot, where the shooter himself left a note that was titled “The Inconvenient Truth,” which is, of course, a riff on Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth film.
The fact that the shooter himself cited climate anxiety and climate change and the rise of refugees and immigrants that will be caused by increased climate problems like rising sea levels, displaced people, and more conflict is going to drive more immigrants into the U.S.—he used climate change as a reason for all this violence and anti-immigrant xenophobia, shaping the violence against brown bodies that is happening right now.
That's exactly right. I just want to make sure listeners knew what you were talking about—the El Paso shooting.
HERNANDEZ: Yeah, absolutely.
Ray: That happened in 2019. And even the Buffalo shooting too. I mean, some mass shootings are those spectacular ones that get the news, but you're talking about the fact that we just gave ICE more money than almost any military on the planet has. I think I heard some data point like that yesterday.
Hernandez: It's easy to manipulate the herds of people to be more mad at certain people of color that don't look like them, versus the system and our government. That's the thing that honestly scares me. Our next environmental crisis is the border and surveillance industry. Yes, I know fossil fuels and industrial agriculture, but I'm scared for surveillance and tech, which I'm writing in my book as the next environmental injustice.
I mean, it's already been one for decades, but for me, I want people to shift to the social justice side and be like, fossil fuels, definitely, they all work together; we're going to have to figure out which one of the three we're going to tackle. For me, I'm focusing on border and surveillance because to me, those are my people that they're targeting.
Not to say fossil fuels don't, they target Global South communities too, but for me, I want to focus on that because that's my next concern.
RAY: Yeah, that description you just said about there being so many things to tackle, so many monsters in the room—which one do we choose?—and should shame people who choose one versus the other. That’s one of the things that has been really undermining the climate movement and the climate justice movement in recent years, this purity politics around that.
That's one of the reasons why I call this show Climate Magic, because I want to give audiences permission to pick the thing like you just described. I'm going to pick the thing where my passion lies, where it feels really good to do that work, and it feels like it calls to me, it brings me alive. That sense of being of service to your people, as you say—that's you finding your climate magic, to put it in the terms of the show.
You can't do it all Isaias.
HERNANDEZ: Exactly. You’ve got to choose what you can do.
RAY: You can’t do all those things. You can't say, I'm going to pull all the carbon out of the atmosphere and get rid of ICE. Thank you for that. I really wanted to talk about the dark side of climate emotions and how they drive really awful things, and have historically, for a long time in the U.S. especially.
Turning to a different set of emotions and kind of coming to the end here, you have a great series on your show—I just mentioned it—with your L.A. person. You interview elin kelsey, the environmental writer and activist, and in that show she talks a lot about how important it is for us to hear stories of solutions, not just problems.
What did you learn from her about why we need to hear more solutions and not just problems? Emotionally, what does it do to us emotionally to learn about solutions?
HERNANDEZ: I love elin kelsey. To kind of bring it back with the Teaching Climate Together web series, she was the first academic scholar who said, I love what you're doing with media, do you want to collaborate and do a video together? I said, but do you have funding? Because we can't just shoot. I don't have funding for anything, obviously.
She was like, yes, let's do it. We shot in Monterey Bay, and she was honestly—that was the demo episode. It was shot really horribly. I had a friend that was like, I think I'm a videographer. We were like, you know what, who cares? Let's just do it. Let's just see what's going to happen here.
Everyone’s like, we're working on season two, and this time I was like, this is so much better than season one. But also, can we just take a clap because we've done such good work from season one to now? Yes, we improved.
We talked a lot about this concept around “evidence-based hope,” which is a word she coined. I was very interested in our episode. We talked about how, in climate issues, we're very good at problem identification. I agree; I'm really good at saying, this is the problem, you're the problem, you're the problem. But it's like, okay, what is the solution?
She offered this different perspective where she even challenged me: why do you think of the worst already, entering an environment that you don't know? I was like, well, because I feel like my brain is so used to finding the problem or thinking, oh yeah, this environment's dying. She said, what if I told you that there are ongoing people, organizations, nonprofits, scientists that are working to restore this ecosystem?
What if I told you that the humpback whales in Monterey Bay are coming back, their population has started to increase? I was like, are you serious? She said yes. That helped me alleviate a lot of stress I think, from a media perspective. I communicate all these big issues that are happening, but we forget about all of the hidden heroes, unsung heroes, who are literally on the frontlines doing this work, who don't have social media platforms and are not talking about this.
It makes you recognize that it's not just a small fraction of us doing this work. There are a lot of people in the environmental industry and movement doing such great solutions work; it's just not being amplified. When we focus on telling stories around solutions, it doesn't just make us hopeful in a wishful-thinking way; it allows us to validate the possibilities of the worlds that we can create.
For me, that opened up a portal of a world. I used to think hope was so dumb and like, oh, it's just routine mental health talk or like all these things. Now, I recognize that hope is rooted in actual science, actual evidence, and that to me is much more powerful to ground myself in.
I think the Western world’s way of how hope is taught is a bit misconfigured, and I had to reconfigure that in that episode. Solutions do exist and there needs to be an increase of media focusing on solutions, which is why I think there's this explosion of “good news” in the media—Good News Friday, Good News This, Good News That—because it is needed, and I think there is a role for that.
My point in my web series is not just to find the solution, but also to talk about the realities of the world: what are we going to do next? What's next for this world, for this portal, that environment? With season two, we're really focusing on a lot of episodes like that, reimagining landscapes in the future after we're done living in these spaces ourselves, when we get older, for the next generation.
It's so cool to see different people I’ve never met, and that's why I love this web series. I get to go outside and shoot things versus trying to write an email.
RAY: Same with talking to you right now, Isaias. That's how I feel about it. Thank you so much for that description of what solutions do to us—this kind of portal, this empowerment you described, and also this feeling of not being alone.
To me, when I think about the reason why people give up their power—you talked about youth giving up their power, like, you have so much more power than you think; why are you so downtrodden? Embrace and harness your power and use it to make the changes you want to see. Don't give up so prematurely.
Solution stories, for me, feel like an antidote for that as well, not just because of hope. Hope, like you said, has weird associations with it, but because it has this feeling of saying, oh, if I get up and contribute, I'm part of this mass movement. I'm amplifying their work, they're amplifying my work. Also, when I need to take a break and not burn out, I know that the work is continuing. I can take a break and rest and make sure I'm refueled.
That permission to keep yourself sustained is part of another reason that solution stories are so important—and we can celebrate the successes. I think the problem with solution stories is that people think if you tell them the humpback whales are back, they're going to stop working, they're going to think the task is done, we don't have to keep doing it.
So to your point about your next series really focusing on “the task is not done”—
HERNANDEZ: It's like there's a lot of issues—
RAY: We still need to keep going, but just know you're not alone, and know that there's ways to do it, and you can jump into an existing thing. I think people get really disempowered when they think they have to invent the whole solution to the whole problem all by themselves.
HERNANDEZ: Exactly. I think with young people, I always tell them: your health is your wealth. As someone who has a chronic illness, no amount of people that tell you you're not doing enough for this movement– is irrelevant, because if they are not showing up when you're sick—
I have a lot of people who always mask themselves as, “I'm just checking in, I'm a community member, and I'm trying to hold you accountable.” Actually, choose the right relationships in this space. We don't need to be friends with everyone. You can acknowledge that you have differences—politically, economically, whatever you want—but to youth, I always say, stick with your crowd. Build with the people who want to build your dreams with you, and that's what's going to make you happy.
I think as I abandoned that after my college activist years, I was like, those same people who criticized me now work at fossil fuel companies and are no longer practicing activism. So I'm like, who was the one that wasted their time?
RAY: They were bringing to the movement what the fossil fuel industry really likes—that kind of productivist imaginary that disables us, that burns us out, that drains us until we're gone.
HERNANDEZ: Exactly.
RAY: Thank you for that. To come to a close—I could talk to you forever, I feel like there are about fifteen threads I want to pick up on. You have a lot of analyses going on, and I think we've cracked open a little bit of it here.
You talked about your next series, you're writing a book. Can you tell us a little bit about what's coming next for you? What are your current projects and how people can learn more about your work and follow or support you?
HERNANDEZ: Yeah. Some of the next projects that we're doing: we're planning for Teaching Climate Together season three, which we've been working with funders to hopefully fund. We are releasing some episodes later this year on YouTube. We have one on mycology, which is super cool—
RAY: People are going to love that.
HERNANDEZ: We interview a very cool queer mycologist too, and a woman in the field, because mycology is not represented a lot—it's very male-dominated—and we have very unique talent for this year.
My book won't launch until April 2027, so I tell everyone to please support Dear Environmentalist by just sharing the word. It's free; it doesn't cost a dollar to talk about it.
Other projects: I'm working hopefully on a summit next year called the Symbiocene Summit, based off Glenn Albrecht and others, hopefully to have different conversations about portals of worlds that we mentioned in this podcast and what a world can look like through an eco-feminist world, an eco-womanist world, an urban ecology world. We really are going to explore those types of themes hopefully next year in the summit. That's if our funding finalizes in time.
RAY: Yeah. Just real quick, what is the Symbiocene? And for listeners who are familiar with Glenn Albrecht's amazing book Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World.
HERNANDEZ: Yes, I love it. Symbiocene is basically defined by Glenn Albrecht as a period of reintegration of humans with nature. Typically, the Anthropocene is defined as an era of human-induced actions, increasing industrialization and exploitation of the planet. That doesn't really illustrate the real systems at play; it just blames everyone in this table.
Symbiocene Summit Series is a spin-off from his word, to create summits and microsatellite events that explore culture, art, and sustainability, and we unpack different conversations of world-building that focus on different themes and theories of change.
We bring people together that may not be just that politically aligned, but have different ways of seeing the world, which has been very cool because we've been using Glenn Albrecht's word—and of course I have permission from him. We actually talked about it. We met, we met. I love him.
We explored different themes. We did bio-anarchy in London a year ago when we did our summit, using biological systems as anarchy. This year's theme that we're doing is “Cyborg Futures Through the Symbiotic Lens of Energy, AI, and Climate.” What’s going to happen? We're exploring different worlds.
What makes it unique is that we hire local talent. We work with speakers in those areas. We don't just work with environmentalists; we get with animators, we work with different people in the arts industry, and bring people together to have these discussions.
RAY: Yeah, thank you for that. That just inspired me so much. Thank you so much for all that you do—for your model for young people, for exploding the boxes of what an environmentalist does, for queering environmentalism, for bringing your multi-generational ethics and sense of belonging to your work. All of what you're doing is just so uplifting and beautiful and important.
HERNANDEZ: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.
RAY: You've just been listening to my conversation with Isaias Hernandez, aka Queer Brown Vegan. Show notes for this episode can be found at khsu.org. You can follow Climate Magic wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Sarah Jaquette Ray, and thanks for listening to Climate Magic.
