Every November, roughly 46 million turkeys are killed in the United States for the sake of “American Tradition.” These are curious, socially intelligent birds capable of recognizing flock mates, forming hierarchies, and communicating with unique vocalizations, yet most are reduced to a dining table centerpiece, living just 14–20 weeks before slaughter despite a natural lifespan of 10–15 years. Their short lives, filled with fear and pain, expose the uncomfortable truth that gratitude and violence are braided together in the modern Thanksgiving ritual.
Talking about turkeys means confronting the systems—colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist—that shape their lives and deaths. Thanksgiving, too, cannot be separated from the mythologies that erase Indigenous histories, stewardship, and struggles for sovereignty. This holiday invites us to rethink what, and who, we actually celebrate, honor, and consume.
Most U.S. turkeys live in industrial sheds holding 6,000–20,000 birds and are genetically engineered to grow unnaturally heavy and fast. Their bodies become so large that many cannot stand without pain, often developing joint damage, leg deformities, and heart failure; because of these proportions, they are bred almost exclusively through forced artificial insemination, with their natural social and reproductive lives erased and relabeled as “efficiency.”
Packed tightly together, birds are subjected to “management” practices like beak trimming, desnooding, and detoeing, which remove sensitive body parts without anesthesia and can cause long-term pain, altered behavior, and difficulty eating or moving.
Most turkeys raised for Thanksgiving live on litter soaked with feces and urine under artificial lighting designed to maximize growth; their rapid weight gain often outpaces skeletal development, and many collapse from heart or lung problems. This is not tradition. It is industrial design masquerading as holiday ceremony, where bodies are treated as commodities and exploited to produce life that exists only to generate profit, encapsulating patriarchal capitalist values.
The harm of industrial turkey production does not exist in a vacuum; it is built on stolen land, exploited labor, and ecological harm —precisely the systems that ecofeminism, antispeciesism, and degrowth aim to dismantle. Barns, slaughterhouses, and feedlots sit on land taken from Indigenous peoples which are converted into monoculture grain fields, while underpaid and often migrant workers shoulder the physical risk and trauma required to keep cheap meat flowing.
Thanksgiving intensifies this logic of overproduction: ever-bigger birds, subsidized grain, and millions of pounds of turkey waste each year. In a staggering display of patriarchal capitalism’s disregard for life, it is estimated that 8 million turkeys will be thrown in the trash this Thanksgiving. In this context refusing turkey becomes more than a dietary preference; it is a small but powerful act of rejecting growth-obsessed holiday consumption in favor of justice and planetary boundaries.
And yet, as animal agriculture continues to threaten ecological stability, this year’s H5N1 bird flu outbreaks expose how fragile the turkey industry really is. Since late summer 2025, between 2 and 2.2 million turkeys have been infected or mass-killed, leaving the U.S. with its smallest turkey flock in ~40 years. Zoonotic outbreaks like H5N1 are not random accidents; they are features of a system that concentrates animals, waste, and workers in the same polluted spaces.
These mass culls—often carried out through ventilation shutdown—are presented as “biosecurity,” but they are predictable fallout of confinement, genetic uniformity, and high-density sheds, as discussed in my last post “What We Do to Nature Makes Us Sick – Literally.”
By hiding the ongoing theft and enclosure of Indigenous territories, the Thanksgiving story obscures how industrial animal agriculture depends on those same lands for feed crops, confinement facilities, and slaughter plants.
Additionally, Indigenous relationships with turkeys stretch back more than 2,000 years and offer a radically different perspective of these animals than what is normalized by Thanksgiving as its celebrated today. Historical records show that Indigenous societies in the Americas valued the birds so highly that they tamed them at least twice for companionship and participation in ceremonies.
This contrast makes clear that the way turkeys are treated today is not natural or inevitable—it is a political and economic choice.
This web of ecological and social harm reveals that struggles for land, animal liberation, and bodily autonomy are never separate. Colonial systems reshape landscapes and species to fit extractive needs, while the same logic reaches into gender and labor. What happens to the land, and what happens to the animals forced onto it, mirrors what happens to the people whose labor and autonomy are also controlled.
Ecofeminism names these shared roots and insists that none of these violences can be confronted in isolation. Instead of systems built on domination, extraction, and sacrifice zones, it asks us to move toward plant-based, low-impact, and degrowth-aligned ways of living that are grounded in care, interdependence, and respect for all beings.
Reimagining Thanksgiving through this lens means refusing to isolate animal suffering from land theft, climate chaos, and labor exploitation.
Supporting Indigenous land defenders, eating plant-based seasonal foods, and telling honest histories become interconnected acts of resistance to a system that treats life as expendable.
In place of a holiday that normalizes mistreatment, these choices move us toward traditions rooted in reciprocity, repair, and the shared right of all beings to live and thrive.
With COVID-19 cases rising again globally and health agencies monitoring potential threats from bird flu (H5N1, H9N2) and yellow fever, global organizations — including the World Health Organization (WHO) — have recognized the ongoing risk. They recently signed a new Pandemic Agreement to improve preparedness, as high-threat infectious hazards continue to increase due to animal agriculture, deforestation, urbanization, and global wildlife trade.
These risks compound: habitat destruction not only accelerates species extinctions but creates more pathways for dangerous viruses to emerge, multiply, and move into human populations.
Root Causes: How Human Activity Drives Spillover
Over 70% of new diseases in people—and nearly all pandemics, like COVID-19—originate from animal microbes also known as “zoonoses”. These spillovers occur when human activities disrupt natural barriers, usually through activities like:
Agricultural expansion. Converting natural habitats like forests and grasslands into farmland is responsible for over 30% of emerging disease events, making it one of the strongest predictors of spillover. Land use change like this causes increased contact between humans, livestock, and wildlife, which makes it easier for diseases to pass from wild animals to people (zoonotic spillover).
Intensive livestock production. Factory farms crowd genetically similar animals together in unsanitary dwellings, creating ideal conditions for pathogens to spread and evolve. Animals in factory farms frequently suffer from a variety of illnesses, and many of these conditions often go unnoticed or untreated due to the sheer number of animals and unmanageable animal-to-worker ratios. These environments substantially increase the probability that a disease will jump from animals to humans.
Deforestation. Clearing forests for agriculture, logging, or settlement destroys wildlife habitats and forces animals into closer proximity with people and livestock. More than 70% of deforestation is driven by agricultural expansion, particularly for grazing and feed crops.
Urbanization. Rapid growth of cities creates densely populated areas where diseases can spread quickly and where expanding development pushes into formerly wild spaces, increasing human contact with wildlife.
Global wildlife trade. The legal and illegal trade of wild animals transports pathogens across borders and brings stressed, diverse species into close quarters with humans, creating ideal spillover conditions.
Together, these activities fragment habitats and expose people and livestock to roughly 1.7 million undiscovered viruses, an estimated 600,000 of which could infect humans.
A World Wildlife Fund (WWF) analysis adds that pandemic risk is best understood as feedback loops: agricultural expansion, luxury wildlife demand, industrialization, and global trade all reinforce each other, making spillover not just a single event but the product of complex, interconnected systems.
Increasingly, scientists and policy leaders advocate for the “One Health” approach—a recognition that human, animal, and ecosystem health are inseparably connected. One Health calls for collaborative action across medicine, veterinary science, agriculture, and environmental protection, aiming to address the root causes of disease outbreaks and ecosystem collapse at their source rather than simply reacting to emergencies.
These root causes mirror the forces behind climate change and global inequality: weak regulation, extractive industries, and profit-driven systems that degrade the very ecosystems acting as our first line of defense.
Animal Agriculture: A Major Driver of Climate Breakdown and Pandemic Risk
Animal agriculture sits at the center of both ecological disruption and disease emergence, making it one of the most significant contributors to pandemic risk.
Livestock farming is responsible for 12–20% of global greenhouse gas emissions, produces 37% of human-caused methane, and drives widespread deforestation, water contamination, and biodiversity loss. As global meat consumption rises, the demand for land and feed crops intensifies, pushing agricultural expansion deeper into natural habitats.
Industrial livestock operations also create ideal conditions for infectious disease evolution. Crowded, genetically similar animals enable viruses to spread rapidly and mutate. Many zoonotic pathogens — including avian and swine influenza and antibiotic-resistant bacteria — originated in high-density livestock systems. Live animal transport and global supply chains further amplify transmission risk, moving pathogens across borders at rapid speed.
The ongoing surge in bird flu outbreaks illustrates these risks: in 2025, millions of chickens and turkeys in North America have been killed to contain infection as H5N1 spreads rapidly in crowded factory farms, which serve as hotspots for viral mutation and transmission. When avian flu is detected in a flock, authorities typically employ mass culling methods—such as gassing or suffocation—which kills every bird in the shed to halt the disease’s spread. This process highlights the normalization of suffering and waste in our food systems.
Research consistently shows that transitioning toward plant-based food systems would reduce emissions, restore ecosystems, and significantly lower the risk of emerging pandemics.
Structural Causes: Capitalism, Inequality, and Rising Risk
Large-scale deforestation, industrial agriculture, and wildlife commodification are often financed and directed by high-consuming nations and powerful multinational corporations like JBS and Walmart. These actors profit from activities that degrade ecosystems, while the resulting disease and environmental risks are displaced onto communities.
In a growth-focused global economy, capital flows into industries such as factory farming, fossil fuel extraction, mining, and wildlife trade — sectors that depend on cheap land, weak environmental regulation, and low-cost labor. As these industries expand into biodiversity-rich regions, they fragment ecosystems, displace wildlife, and intensify opportunities for spillover. Global supply chains built for speed and efficiency further entrench this dynamic by externalizing environmental and health costs onto exploited nations and communities.
The very industries that degrade ecosystems and compromise community health channel their profits to corporations and wealthy nations, widening the gap between those who bear the consequences and those who reap the rewards.
Many of the world’s spillover “hotspots” lie in tropical regions managed or inhabited by Indigenous and rural communities who often lack the political power to resist industrial expansion by dominant nations. As a result, these communities face polluted waterways, degraded land, inadequate health infrastructure, and increased exposure to zoonotic disease. When outbreaks occur, indigenous and rural communities experience disproportionate illness, loss of income, and long-term social disruption. Meanwhile, high-consuming nations continue to benefit from exploitation and the availability of cheap commodities, while displacing the risks elsewhere.
The WWF highlights that protecting Indigenous land rights, supporting community-led resource management, and ensuring equitable participation in conservation are not simply justice issues—they are frontline strategies for pandemic prevention. Indigenous management consistently leads to better conservation outcomes, healthier forests, and—by extension—lower pandemic risk.
Calls for pandemic justice echo those of the climate justice movement: those who benefit most from ecological destruction must bear the greatest responsibility for prevention, restoration, and reparative action.
How U.S. Policy Has Increased Vulnerability
If we learned anything from COVID-19 its that reactionary approaches to pandemics are slow, expensive, and inadequate to the scale of the threat (WHO). Instead, prevention must start with transforming the policies that drive ecosystem disruption.
However, recent U.S. policy decisions under the Trump administration have amplified vulnerability to disease emergence and environmental harm simultaneously.
For example, despite warnings from experts about the risk of foot-and-mouth disease in Argentinian cattle, the Trump administration moved forward with policies to expand beef imports from Argentina, a decision that raises the risk of introducing animal diseases into U.S. herds and exemplifies the prioritization of economic and trade interests over ecological and public health safety.
Additionally, there have been significant cuts and delays to federal research funding for emerging infectious diseases, undermining efforts at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other agencies to develop new diagnostics, vaccines, and treatments, and diminishing the nation’s ability to monitor and respond to public health threats.
Finally, the U.S. withdrawal from the (WHO) disrupted global data sharing and international public health collaboration, creating funding gaps in vital programs, limiting U.S. influence over international health policy, and reducing coordination on pandemic preparedness with global partners..
These decisions mirror broader climate deregulation: short-term economic gains for those in power, long-term social, health and environmental risks for everyone else.
Plant Based Diets as Resistance
When governments prioritize corporate interests over ecological and public health, it is easy to feel powerless. Yet individual choices — especially the ways we eat and where we put our dollars — offer a powerful form of resistance. A plant-based diet directly withdraws support from the industries most responsible for both climate instability and pandemic risk.
A plant-based diet reduces risk across multiple systems:
Lower pandemic risk: Reducing dependence on factory farming — one of the primary incubators of zoonotic disease — lowers the conditions that enable pathogens to spill over into human populations. Studies show that people eating primarily plant-based diets experience lower COVID-19 severity and improved immune outcomes.
Climate mitigation: Plant-based diets reduce greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 50%, while also decreasing water use, pollution, and resource depletion.
Biodiversity protection: Less demand for meat slows deforestation, protects wildlife habitats, and reduces landscape fragmentation — one of the strongest predictors of zoonotic spillover.
Individual dietary choices can activate our collective power. Even small shifts — like choosing plant-based meals a few times per week — reduce pressure on natural habitats and act as a form of climate care.
International health bodies like WHO, IPBES, and the One Health High-Level Expert Panel consistently affirm that addressing pandemic risk requires protecting ecosystems, reducing destructive land use, and prioritizing community well-being over extractive growth.
Conclusion
While plant-based diets strengthen pandemic and climate resilience at an individual level, systemic transformation is needed to address climate and pandemic risk on a global scale.
The most effective pandemic mitigation strategies cited from IPBES to WHO, BMJ, and global One Health networks include:
Nature-first prevention: Restoring forests, ending deforestation, and protecting biodiversity hotspots maintain the ecological stability that prevents spillover. Healthy ecosystems act as protective shields against emerging infectious diseases.
Integrated One Health policies: Aligning human, animal, and environmental health strengthens surveillance, early detection, and coordinated responses across sectors. The One Health model is now widely recognized as essential for global pandemic preparedness.
Community-led conservation: Indigenous and frontline communities consistently achieve stronger conservation outcomes through place-based knowledge, stewardship, and long-term relationships with land. Their leadership protects biodiversity while strengthening social resilience.
Redirecting funding toward prevention: Investing billions annually in early-warning systems, ecological restoration, and public health infrastructure breaks the costly cycle of reactive crisis management. Prevention is more effective, equitable, and sustainable than emergency response.
These solutions reflect the growing alignment between climate justice and pandemic prevention frameworks. Both demand a shift away from extractive, profit-driven models of growth and promote moving toward long-term ecological stability, community well-being, and global solidarity.
Climate care is pandemic prevention. Biodiversity is a protective shield that stabilizes the climate, regulates ecosystems, and buffers humanity from disease. When we dismantle that shield, the consequences cascade through every aspect of life.
The latest evidence, echoed by WWF, makes clear: The solutions that prevent pandemics are the same ones that restore justice and planetary health— restoring ecosystems, reducing reliance on animal agriculture, supporting Indigenous leadership, and enacting policies that prioritize people and the planet.
Wealth inequality and climate change are intertwined consequences of unchecked capitalist growth and the monopolization resources.
These two issues create a compounding effect: as the wealthy accumulate more wealth, their investments and purchases tend to generate more greenhouse gas emissions, which accelerates climate change and further exacerbates inequality.
Greenhouse gas emissions from both consumption and investments among the wealthiest groups have a vastly disproportionate impact on the climate crisis.
At the individual level, the ultra wealthy lead high emitting lifestyles through energy intensive consumption patterns that include things like travel, luxury goods, and ownership of large homes—often owning multiple properties which contributes to higher emissions.
For example, Jeff Bezos’ two private jets spent nearly 25 days in the air over a 12-month period and emitted as much carbon as the average US Amazon employee would in 207 years according to a 2024 OXFAM report.
Affluent groups not only consume more and purchase emissions intensive goods but their assets and investments are also funneled into emission-intensive sectors such as fossil fuels, mining, real estate and construction. Industries such as real estate and costruction are especially emissions-intensive because they rely on concrete and steel—materials with enormous quantities of embodied carbon. These investments generate considerable returns, widening the wealth gap, while also producing massive carbon footprints.
A 2025 study analyzing emissions inequality from1990-2020 found that two-thirds of warming can be attributed to the wealthiest 10%, with average emissions 6.5 times higher than the average per capita rate. To further put this disparity into perspective, a 2024 OXFAM report found that the world’s fifty richest billionaires produce more carbon through their investments, private jets, and yachts in just 90 minutes than the average person emits in an entire lifetime.
How Does Capitalism Influence Wealth Inequality?
A foundational critique of capitalism is its ability to concentrate economic gains among owners while workers receive only a fraction of the value they create. This surplus extraction has intensified with globalization and automation, leading to stagnant wages and declining worker power— trends widely documented by economists at the Economic Policy Institute and the OECD.
Under this model, wealth breeds more wealth: those with capital can invest and earn higher returns than those relying on wages, compounding inequality over time. This self-reinforcing dynamic is now supported by econometric evidence showing that every increase in wealth concentration significantly exacerbates carbon inequality—meaning the environmental footprint of the richest grows much faster than the average individual.
Research from the World Inequality Lab reveals that public policies often serve to perpetuate these divides, especially when they favor interest of wealth holders through tax breaks, deregulation, and subsidies that disproportionately benefit capital owners.
At its foundation, capitalism prioritizes endless economic growth while disregarding planetary boundaries. Corporate interests drive extraction, pollution, and emissions as structural features of the system.
Why Capitalism and Climate Justice Can’t Coexist
Capitalism perpetuates climate change by embedding exploitation of people, land, and resources into its design. The wealth gaps created by this system ensure those least responsible for the climate crisis bear the greatest impacts, both nationally and globally.
Within the United States, capitalist production has created stark patterns of environmental injustice. Many of the most polluted areas are home to low-income communities who face the externalized costs of corporate profit. In Bakersfield, CA —one of three California metro areas with the largest increases in concentrated poverty from 2010-2018 —is surrounded by oil fields, intensive agriculture, and industrial zones. Weak enforcement of pollution controls enables business owners to cut costs and increase profits, while residents experience higher rates of asthma, contaminated water, and degraded air quality.
On a global scale, capitalism’s colonial and imperial roots continue to shape climate injustice. Wealthy nations such as the United States and members of the European Union account for the majority of historical greenhouse gas emissions, shaping climate impacts felt by countries who have significantly lower GHG footprints and GDP’s. The wealth that fueled industrialization in the Global North was extracted through centuries of resource theft, forced labor, and ecological destruction in colonized regions.
This legacy persists today through global trade structures, debt systems, and extractive industries that keep poorer nations dependent and vulnerable. Countries with the smallest carbon footprints now face the greatest exposure to extreme heat, sea-level rise, and food insecurity—while former colonial powers maintain economic dominance built on ecological harm and human exploitation.
Calls for climate reparations and responsibility recognize the disproportionate contribution of wealthy, historically colonial nations to the climate crisis. Addressing the climate crisis requires not only reducing emissions but confronting the capitalist structures that have normalized extraction, inequality, and ecological violence in pursuit of endless growth.
Solutions: Anti-Capitalist Degrowth Models
The interconnected crises of inequality and climate change cannot be solved within the same economic system that created them. Incremental reforms through green growth models or corporate sustainability pledges merely tinker at the margins of a structure built on exploitation. As thinkers like Kohei Saito and Jason Hickel argue, confronting climate breakdown requires a radical reorientation of our economies away from endless accumulation and toward collective well-being.
Degrowth provides a vision for reorganizing society around equity, and care. Under degrowth frameworks, economic success is measured not by GDP, but by metrics such as community health, ecological restoration, access to essential services, and time for leisure and creativity. The goal is to downscale unnecessary production—particularly luxury consumption and resource-intensive industries—while ensuring that everyone’s fundamental needs are met within planetary boundaries.
Ownership and control are central. If the wealthiest individuals and corporations dominate the financing of renewable energy and climate adaptation, their share of global wealth will continue to grow, deepening inequality even in a decarbonized world. Conversely, public, cooperative, and community-owned models demonstrate how climate action can redistribute both power and resources.
Degrowth also challenges the colonial logic of extraction that still shapes global trade. It calls for ecological reparations, debt cancellation, and the end of exploitative resource flows from the Global South to the Global North. In practice, this means investing in ecosystem restoration, housing cooperatives, and localized supply chains rather than fossil-fuel expansion and militarized borders.
The climate crisis is not an unintended consequence of capitalism—it is the inevitable outcome. Addressing it means redistributing wealth and transforming how we define prosperity, progress, and justice. Dismantling capitalist growth imperatives is not merely an economic task, but a moral and ecological one: a necessary step toward a livable planet for all.
Art has long served as a catalyst for change, connecting information to emotion and inspiring action. In the face of the climate crisis, human imagination may play a critical role in environmental activism by bridging creativity and science to drive transformation and innovation.
Several studies and projects support the idea that art can be a powerful driver for climate awareness.
For example, research published in ScienceDirect demonstrates that artistic activism fosters emotional engagement, behavioral change, and civic participation. Additionally, the US Global Change Research Program has found that climate art exhibitions and educational programs can encourage communities to see themselves as part of the solution, inspiring both dialogue and action.
Collaboration between arts and sciences transforms information into a sensory experience, which makes it more likely that the information will elicit emotion and remain in our memory.
Art’s power lies in its ability to make us feel before we act. By tapping into emotion, it connects intellectual awareness to moral responsibility. Art brings humanity to urgent political and environmental issues, allowing audiences to encounter them with new perspectives. This turns observation into involvement, inspiring people to envision how we might live differently in the future.
As one artist-scholar observed, “The universal language of art can encourage people from all different backgrounds to want to develop actions to help live more sustainably.”
Art, in this sense, becomes an act of resilience. It reminds us that that restoring our bond with the environment can be as creative as it is urgent.
Encountering Hundertwasser: A Philosophy of Color, Form, and Nature
My personal belief in the power of art as climate action was reinforced during a trip to Vienna several years ago. I had saved my pennies for several years and planned the trip around viewing works from my two of my favorite painters, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, leaders of the Viennese Secession Movement whose paintings shaped my understanding of creative freedom. But it was while I was in Vienna that I encountered a new figure who would expand my thinking even further: Friedensreich Hundertwasser.
My first encounter with his work was at the Kunst Haus Wien, where I was enthralled by the unusual curved lines and bright hues covering the face of the building. While visiting this magnificently strange structure and viewing the paintings inside, I learned that Hundertwasser was not only an artist and architect, but an ecological visionary and environmental activist as well.
His work merged creativity and activism into one beautifully radical philosophy. Deeply inspired by the Viennese Secession Movement, which sought to break away from artistic nationalism and the conservative art establishment of the Austrian Empire, Hundertwasser envisioned an art form that healed both people and the planet.
His work rejected modernist straight lines, which he referred to as “godless and immoral,” in favor of spirals, organic patterns, and radiant colors that celebrated life’s natural irregularity. He was a leader in the development of new techniques and the use of unconventional materials often using homemade paints made from organic materials while having mastered many graphic techniques including lithograph, silk screen, etching, woodcut and mixed media.
Hundertwasser believed that humanity had created a separation from nature that was detrimental to both people and the planet and that this “aberration” must be reversed. His artworks often depict structural, environmental, and human elements while advocating for harmony between them.
Hundertwasser summarized his idea of a life in harmony with the laws of nature in seven points which are outlined in his “Peace Treaty With Nature.”
Ecological Conservation Through Art
Hundertwasser created original posters in support of environmental protection efforts such as whale conservation and the promotion of public transport. He dedicated the revenue from these posters to various environmental organizations, which was a key component of his environmental protection strategy.
While visiting the Kunst Haus Wien, I was especially moved by Hundertwasser’s poster“Save the Rain – Each Raindrop is a Kiss From Heaven,” created for the Norwegian Nature Conservancy Association to raise awareness about acid rain and its impact on forests and fish. Seeing this work in person filled me with a deep, expansive gratitude for the miracles of the natural world.
The phrase “Each Raindrop is a Kiss from Heaven” overwhelmed me with how extraordinary our planet truly is—how every organism, from grasslands to glaciers, plays a critical role in maintaining the balance that allows us to have clean air, water, food, and medicine. These everyday miracles are sacred gifts. Protecting them is not just an act of care; it is a privilege and our responsibility as beings on this earth.
Manifestos for People and Planet
Hundertwasser spread his ecological positions in numerous manifestos, letters, and public demonstrations. His “Mouldiness Manifesto Against Rationalism in Architecture” from 1958 introduced ideas that remain profoundly relevant today, including the concept of “tree duty” which views integrating vegetation into architecture as a moral and ecological responsibility, promoting the idea that trees should grow on buildings as living architectural elements.
The 1958 manifesto generally called for humanity to restore its relationship with nature by returning to organic, evolving, and humanistic architecture. This vision foreshadowed current movements in sustainable design and biophilic architecture, which similarly emphasize harmony between humans, structures, and the environment.
Tangentially, Hundertwasser campaigned for forestation of the city through rooftop gardens and “tree tenants” that integrate greenery into urban architecture. He also developed and promoted eco-friendly waste management systems, including humus toilets and biological water purification that used aquatic plants to clean wastewater naturally.
His buildings, such as Vienna’s Hundertwasserhaus and Kunst Haus Wien, are living artworks characterized by vegetation and a jubilant embrace of imperfection.
In a world of homogenized cities and ecological neglect, his work proclaimed a rebellious return to nature.
Lessons from Hundertwasser: Honoring Non-Traditional Climate Action
Hundertwasser’s activism teaches several vital lessons. First, resistance to environmental degradation does not only require scientific credentials—it needs vision, creativity, and the courage to break away from conventional norms.
Hundertwasser’s “Everybody Must Be Creative” manifesto argues that creativity is a fundamental human right and necessity, not a privilege of artists. He condemned what he called “the new illiteracy”—the inability to create—claiming that modern civilization suppresses innate imagination through education and standardization.
Hundertwasser reminds us that solutions to complex problems such as the climate crisis demand imaginative engagement from all fields and backgrounds, making creativity an essential skill across disciplines.
His philosophy insists that ecological stewardship is a community responsibility, one that flourishes when everyone, from architects to artists and activists to ordinary citizens, claims a role in restoration and advocacy.
It is essential to recognize that climate action thrives through diversity of approach. Non-traditional methods like art, music, storytelling, and participatory design can catalyze real change, inspire empathy, and build movements.
By embracing creative resistance and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, we can expand our impact—making space for everyone to contribute, innovate, and inspire.
To honor Hundertwasser’s legacy means advocating for the importance of art alongside science and ensuring that sustainability remains a vibrant, imaginative movement.
Transition Towns are grassroots community projects that aim to increase self-sufficiency and build local resilience to global challenges such as climate change, peak oil, and socioeconomic instability.
The movement began at Kinsale Further Education College in Ireland, where permaculture teacher Rob Hopkins and his students developed an Energy Descent Action Plan to respond to peak oil. Hopkins later moved to Totnes, England, in 2006, where he helped found the first Transition Town– a community-led initiative to foster local resilience through projects focused on energy, food, and economy.
Since then, the Transition Network has expanded internationally to over 60 countries. Unique among environmental movements, Transition Towns emphasize not only practical solutions but also psychological and social change, nurturing skill development, connection, and collective action.
Skill Development and Behavioral Change: Building Lasting Climate Resilience
Central to the Transition movement is the facilitation of skill development as a key climate solution and resilience tool.
This process addresses the fact that many practical skills crucial for sustainability—such as food growing, clothing repair, and resource efficiency– have been lost over time as convenience culture has taken precedence over longevity.
Transition initiatives create hands-on workshops, courses, and community projects that revive these essential skills, enabling people not only to become more self-sufficient but also to share and pass these skills through families and neighbors.
For instance, in Totnes, the original Transition Town, a popular 10-week evening course called “Skilling Up for Powerdown” teaches participants about food, energy, water, and economics, all through the lens of enhancing local resilience.
An incredibly useful training for starting a Transition Initiative is Transition Launch, which teaches people how to set up and run a community-based change-making initiative right where they live.
Practical Workshops and Community Learning
There are also numerous smaller practical workshops, such as herbal walks, natural building, cooking, and cycle maintenance. These workshops are designed to be engaging and inclusive, drawing on the expertise of local elders, experts and practitioners to bridge knowledge gaps.
Through herbal walks, participants not only gain knowledge of local plants and wildlife but also strengthen their bonds with both their community and natural environment.
Natural building workshops teach participants how to construct buildings using sustainable, natural, and locally sourced materials like earth, straw, timber, and stone. These workshops emphasize eco-friendly techniques to build environmentally conscious structures that are energy-efficient, and healthy for people and the planet.
Meanwhile, cycle maintenance courses not only provide instruction on how to perform essential bicycle repairs and upkeep, but also help cyclists gain confidence and practical skills to be a safe cyclist on the road.
Skill-sharing fosters behavioral change by transforming abstract concerns about climate and energy into practical, achievable actions. Learning by doing builds a fundamental sense of “can do” and empowerment, replacing feelings of helplessness with tangible capabilities. These shared learning experiences help build adaptable, supportive networks essential for collective problem-solving and long-term sustainability.
By nurturing both individual skills and community connections, Transition Towns not only reduce ecological footprints but also strengthen the social fabric necessary to sustain environmental efforts over time. Furthermore, as skills are passed on within communities, they create a multiplying effect—giving the Transition Town movement a legacy of resilience that extends beyond any one person, project or generation.
Expanding Skill-Sharing Across the Network
Transition hubs across the transition network have run repair cafés, gardening courses, energy-saving workshops, local currency initiatives, and numerous practical projects that bring learning and action together. These efforts contribute to a culture shift where sustainability becomes normalized, encouraging ongoing participation and deeper engagement.
Repair Cafés: Repair Cafés allow community members to bring broken household items (clothes, small appliances, bikes) for free repair by skilled volunteers. The goal is to reduce waste, save money, and share repair skills. This promotes a culture of fixing rather than discarding, reducing landfill waste and fostering community sharing. Combined with the transition network’s focus on skill sharing, the number of skilled volunteers grows over time so no community member is overly relied upon to perform repairs. Transition Pasadena has run Repair Cafés in California since 2013, involving city staff and volunteers, and offering extensive repair activities for electronics, clothing, and household items.
Gardening Courses: Community gardening and food-growing courses equip participants with skills in organic cultivation, composting, seed saving, and sustainable garden design. In Transition Town Lewes, regular gardening workshops and community orchards help restore local food sovereignty while strengthening neighborhood ties through shared green spaces.
Crystal Palace Transition Town’s Community Garden offers another inspiring example. What began as a small local food-growing project has evolved into a thriving hub for gardening and food-related initiatives. Today, it regularly hosts events and workshops on composting, foraging, and permaculture, providing a space where residents can both learn and connect.
Energy Savings Workshops: Transition groups across the network have implemented hands-on energy projects that reduce emissions while empowering households and communities to take action. For example, Totnes, UK facilitated a street-by-street program where neighbors met in small groups to learn about energy, water, food, and transport. In its first year, around 550 households cut an average of 1.3 tonnes of CO₂ per year each (saving ~£570 per household).
Community Energy Cooperatives: Transition members in Lewes, UK helped establish OVESCO, a community energy co-op. Together they’ve installed around 6 MW of local solar power, and offer free energy-advice workshops and drop-in sessions on bills, home efficiency, and renewables.
Global Diffusion and Local Adaptation
From its UK origins, the Transition Towns model has spread to over 60 countries worldwide, including diverse contexts in Europe, North America, Australia, Latin America, and Asia. Each community adapts the core principles to its unique social, cultural, and environmental setting.
For example, in the US Southwest, initiatives in places like Joshua Tree, California focus on desert-appropriate permaculture and water conservation, while community efforts in Toulouse, France established “micro-forests” through the Miyawaki method to rapidly create dense, biodiverse urban ecosystems. The creation of these micro-forests expands on the city’s already established connection to Japanese landscaping as Toulouse is home to the remarkable Jardin japaonais Pierre-Baudis.
This flexibility allows the movement to thrive globally, making sustainability locally relevant while demonstrating how local priorities, cultures, and resources shape diverse transition projects worldwide.
Inner Transition: Emotional Processing for Collective Resilience
Transition Towns highlight that sustainable change requires transforming not only infrastructure and behavior but also values, emotions, and relationships.
“Inner Transition” is a concept and movement, often associated with the global Transition Network, that focuses on the psychological, emotional, spiritual, and relational changes necessary for people and communities to shift from unsustainable ways of living to more resilient, connected, and meaningful ones.
It emphasizes personal and collective well-being and aims to integrate inner work with external practical projects, ensuring the “head, heart, and hands” are aligned to foster sustainable change.
By integrating practices from psychology and social change with community action, they offer a holistic model of resilience. This approach unleashes collective genius, turning fear and uncertainty into hope and empowerment—a powerful narrative as communities worldwide adapt to global environmental challenges.
Confronting emotions directly helps participants build personal resilience, preventing burnout and sustaining long-term engagement. In this way, hope and imagination are cultivated as practical tools, inspiring members to envision and work toward a positive, sustainable future.
This emotional work transforms despair into “applied optimism,” motivating collective action.
How Transition Towns Foster Hope and Agency
Transition Towns empower citizens by fostering a sense of ownership over their community’s future and encouraging proactive, pragmatic solutions.
Participants develop new skills, launch local enterprises, and collaborate with community members to integrate resilience into local planning.
The movement encourages “doing stuff” and learning by experimentation, making resilience a learned skill.
The transition network offers online courses and events which can be found here with 2 upcoming webinars in October 2025.
Additionally, you can view where there may be transition groups, trainers and hubs near you with this map on the transition network website.
Have you ever associated going vegan with the fear of missing out on vital nutrients? You’re not alone—this myth has been circulating for years. But science, insights into propaganda used by the meat industry, and my personal journey—tell a very different story.
Typical American diets are often heavy in processed meats and low in fiber. In contrast, vegans get significantly more micronutrients like fiber, vitamins C and E, and minerals such as magnesium. These nutrients are vital in supporting heart health, immune function, and overall wellness. Contrary to popular belief, plant-based eaters consistently meet or exceed recommended protein intakes through legumes, tofu, tempeh, nuts, seeds, and whole grains. With variety, all essential amino acids are covered.
Meanwhile, omnivorous diets can ironically lack many of these key micronutrients, despite providing ample protein and calories.
Since I began pursuing strength training and body composition goals on a vegan diet—alongside other active hobbies like dancing and hiking—I’ve experienced firsthand how plant-based nutrition fuels athletic performance and aesthetic goals.
My personal experience reflects what the science shows: a well-planned vegan diet provides all the essential nutrients needed for muscle growth, sustained energy, and recovery.
What’s the Difference Between Micronutrients and Macronutrients?
Understanding nutrition is like maintaining a car—you need both fuel and sparts to keep it running.
Macronutrients are your fuel: carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. Carbs provide quick energy, proteins build and repair tissue, and fats store energy and support vital functions.
Micronutrients—vitamins and minerals—are like the spark plugs and wiring. You need them in small amounts, but they’re essential for metabolism, immunity, brain function, and bone health. Without them, even the best “fuel” can’t keep the system running smoothly.
How Vegan Diets Boost Health
A vegan diet centered around whole foods like fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds is naturally packed with essential micronutrients. These include vitamins C and E, magnesium, potassium, zinc, copper, and antioxidants that help your body run clean and efficiently.
Collagen Production
Many of these nutrients support collagen production, which maintains healthy skin, joints, and connective tissue. Vitamin C stabilizes collagen fibers, zinc and copper support its synthesis, and vitamins A and E aid in cell renewal and protect skin structures. This profile not only bolsters heart health and digestion but also helps keep skin strong and youthful.
Muscle Growth and Function
Micronutrients play crucial roles in muscle function. Calcium triggers muscle contractions, potassium helps muscles relax and prevents cramps, and magnesium supports energy metabolism.
Great plant-based sources include:
Calcium: fortified plant milks, tofu, kale, bok choy
Iron and B vitamins (B1, B6, B12, folate) are essential for delivering oxygen and energy to muscles. Iron transports oxygen, while B vitamins convert food into energy. Find these in lentils, chickpeas, quinoa, spinach, pumpkin seeds, whole grains, legumes, nutritional yeast, and dark leafy greens.
Vitamins C and E and minerals like zinc aid post-exercise recovery and reduce oxidative stress. Sources include citrus fruits, strawberries, bell peppers, broccoli (for C), nuts, seeds, spinach (for E), and beans, lentils, and seeds (for zinc).
Vitamin D and zinc also support immune health and hormonal balance—key for consistent training and recovery. Vitamin D can be found in fortified plant milks, sun-exposed mushrooms, and supplements as needed.
In my experience, I’ve had more energy to pursue multiple sports—including weightlifting, dance, and hiking—on a plant-based diet than I did on an omnivorous one. Although I tracked my macronutrients more rigorously on an omnivorous diet, I’ve found it easier to reach my strength, stamina, and aesthetic goals by prioritizing nutrient-dense, plant-based foods. I attribute this to getting adequate macronutrients alongside a significantly higher intake of micronutrients. The boost in vitamins and minerals has also enhanced my focus throughout the day.
What About B12?
Contrary to popular belief, meat itself does not naturally contain high levels of B vitamins; rather, it’s produced by microbes and added to animal feed in industrial farming. This means most people consuming meat get B12 that was supplemented earlier in the food chain.
Fortified foods such as nutritional yeast provide a direct, reliable source for vegans.
Increased Immunity
Since going vegan, I rarely get sick and recover quickly when I do. I feel more energized and no longer experience the frequent colds I used to. Whether it’s due to increased vitamin C, zinc, antioxidants, or overall nutrient density, the shift has been profound.
And the data backs it up: A 2021 study in BMJ Nutrition, Prevention & Health found that people on plant-based diets had a 73% lower risk of moderate-to-severe COVID-19. Researchers attributed this to higher intakes of vitamins, antioxidants, and fiber, which reduce inflammation and boost immune defenses.
How Meat Industry Propaganda Fuels Nutrient Myths and Greenwashing
The enduring myth that vegan diets are nutritionally insufficient is not merely a misunderstanding—it is actively propagated and reinforced by coordinated marketing and lobbying campaigns funded by the meat industry.
This industry exploits a fundamental human instinct: the desire to protect our health and well-being.
By weaponizing legitimate health concerns, the meat sector promotes the narrative that meat is essential for strength, vitality, and overall wellness.
Each year, the meat industry deploys powerful advertisements that positions meat as the primary or exclusive source of vital nutrients such as protein and B vitamins. These campaigns use cultural symbols, linking meat consumption with masculinity, patriotism, tradition, and cultural identity.
Ironically, many nutrients long attributed to meat actually come from supplements administered to animals before slaughter, rather than naturally occurring in the meat itself—as noted above regarding vitamin B12.
Marketing tactics target young demographics and schools by funding educational materials that vilify plant-based alternatives as unnatural or overly processed.
Simultaneously, the industry promotes “net zero” sustainability pledges that omit critical emissions sources like deforestation linked to feed crop production, misleading the public regarding meat’s true environmental costs.
Beyond traditional advertisements, the meat industry has invested tens of millions of dollars into orchestrated misinformation and disinformation campaigns designed to obstruct transitions toward plant-based diets and challenge studies advocating for reduced meat consumption for human and planetary health. This includes providing funding to scholars, research centers, and public relations firms that produce and disseminate messaging aimed at undermining scientific consensus on the environmental and health impacts of meat consumption. For instance, the University of California Davis’s CLEAR Center has received nearly $12.5 million in meat industry funding to challenge studies advocating for reduced meat consumption and to lead campaigns such as #yes2meat.
In 2023 alone, the U.S. meat industry spent over $10 million on political contributions and lobbying. For example, Tyson Foods spent about $1.67 million on federal lobbying in the 2023-2024 cycle; WH Group spent $1.04 million; JBS, $440,000; and the North American Meat Institute, $186,767.
This intensified financial clout coincides with rising scrutiny of meat’s environmental and health impacts, as well as a cultural surge in traditional norms linking meat and dairy consumption to masculinity.
These campaigns create confusion. Many people wrongly believe beef is sustainable through inaccurate sustainability pledges and that plant-based diets are nutritionally lacking. Such misinformation is used to protect industry profits and delay the urgently needed policy reforms to reduce emissions and safeguard public health.
Recognizing this complex propaganda ecosystem is essential to understanding why nutrient deficiency myths persist and empowers people to make informed, health-conscious, and sustainable choices.
Vegan Diets Are Better for the Planet—And That Supports Our Health
Eating plant-based doesn’t just benefit your body—it helps regenerate the systems that sustain all life on Earth. Compared to animal-heavy diets, plant-based eating uses far less land, water, and energy while slashing greenhouse gas emissions.
Studies from Oxford and Harvard show that shifting to plant-based diets can reduce environmental impact by up to 75%, while also lowering risks for heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and some cancers.
This shift reduces environmental pressures and restores ecosystems, which in turn provide cleaner air, purer water, and greater climate stability—directly benefiting human health.
It’s a powerful feedback loop: eating plants helps protect ecosystems, and thriving ecosystems support human health in return.
How Plant-Based Diets Restore Natural Systems
Water Cycle Support: Switching to plant-based diets could significantly decrease water use on a global scale. When less water is needed for crops, and less pollution enters rivers, this allows aquifers to recharge, rivers to flow, and ecosystems to recover.
Carbon Cycle and Climate Regulation: Vegan diets could reduce food-related emissions by up to 86% by retiring grazing land and monoculture feed crops to make space for forests and grasslands to regrow. This helps to improve air quality and restore carbon sinks.
Healthy Ecosystems = Healthy Humans: Intact ecosystems filter air and water, regulate temperature, prevent erosion, pollinate crops, and buffer natural disasters. These services reduce disease, support food security, and strengthen community resilience.
Fuel Your Body and the Planet with Plants
Vegan diets deliver both the robust fuel (macronutrients) and essential parts (micronutrients) your body needs—while caring for the Earth. They bust the nutrient deficiency myth by offering a rich spectrum of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants to support muscle performance, collagen production, immunity, and vitality.
By choosing plants, you’re efficiently fueling your body, fine-tuning your health, and creating a better world for everyone. I’ve felt this transformation in my own energy, immunity, and strength—and science backs it up.
As we reflect on Juneteenth and its legacy of freedom, we must also reckon with the ways systemic racism still permeates our society—especially in how we prepare for and respond to climate disasters. Today, one of the most egregious examples of this injustice is playing out in real time: while the federal government dismantles environmental protections and disaster infrastructure, it increasingly relies on the underpaid, or often unpaid, labor of incarcerated people—disproportionately Black and brown—to fight wildfires. This is not just a policy failure; it is a modern form of environmental slavery.
Climate change has intensified the severity and frequency of wildfires across the United States. Over the past 40 years, the average number of acres of forested land consumed by wildfires each year in the United States has increased by 1,000%.
Rather than addressing this crisis with the urgency it deserves, the Trump administration has actively undermined the nation’s ability to prevent and respond to climate disasters by:
Defunding Disaster Infrastructure: Trump has pushed to phase out FEMA, shifting responsibility to under-resourced state governments.
Withdrawal from Climate Agreements: Exiting the Paris Agreement and cutting $3.7 billion in clean energy and carbon capture funding—including California decarbonization projects—further isolates the U.S. from global climate efforts and abandons marginalized communities to worsening environmental risks.
Unequal Disaster Aid: FEMA’s funding formulas often require local cost-sharing, leaving low-income communities behind. Studies show that as the proportion of people of color increases in a region, the amount of federal disaster aid tends to decrease.
The Rise of Exploitative Prison Labor
As federal climate infrastructure erodes, the state turns to prisons—not prevention. In California and beyond, incarcerated people are increasingly relied upon to fill the labor gap in wildfire response. These individuals—often Black or brown—are paid as little as $1 a day, if anything, to perform life-threatening work without proper training, gear, or protections.
This isn’t rehabilitation or opportunity. It’s exploitation. Incarcerated firefighters are frequently barred from post-release employment in the very field they risked their lives to serve. They are often denied parole, early release, or livable wages. Meanwhile, the state profits from their labor during climate disasters caused in part by the very same policies that left their communities unprotected.
This system is not new. It is a direct continuation of America’s long history of racialized labor exploitation. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime—and this loophole has been systemically weaponized to maintain racial hierarchies through incarceration. For example, Black Americans—just 13% of the U.S. population—make up 37% of the prison population. Over 80% of arrests are for low-level, nonviolent offenses, and Black youth are disproportionately targeted for surveillance and criminalization.
The more fires we face, the more bodies are needed. And because of systemic racism in policing and sentencing, those bodies are overwhelmingly Black and brown. This creates a feedback loop: environmental neglect feeds incarceration, and incarceration becomes a substitute for climate policy.
The same communities that are over-policed, under resourced, and left behind in public health planning are then called upon to clean up the very disasters they were never protected from in the first place.
This is not just an environmental issue—it is a racial and human rights crisis.
Why This Matters for Juneteenth
Juneteenth commemorates the day when enslaved people in Texas finally learned of their freedom—two and a half years after emancipation was declared. It is a day of resistance, celebration, and reckoning. But it is also a reminder: freedom was delayed, and it remains incomplete.
In 2025, Black Americans are still being forced into unpaid labor under deadly conditions. Still disproportionately policed and imprisoned. Still left out of disaster response while being asked to carry it on their backs.
To honor Juneteenth is to demand more than symbolic freedom. It is to fight for a future where Black communities are not over-policed, over-incarcerated, or overexploited—but are protected, resourced, and central to our vision of a world that is prioritizes peace and prosperity for people and the planet.
In our highly modernized urban landscapes, the 21st-century man often yearns for the wild adventures of imperial explorers from centuries ago. On weekends, they flee the drudgery of their 9-to-5 routines, seeking solace in nature’s grandeur—long-distance running through fields, climbing to the highest peaks, and gliding down snow-capped slopes. These landscapes promise beauty and joy, and an escape from the monotonous reality of daily life.
Yet, beneath this pursuit of beauty and excitement lies a troubling pattern. The earth becomes a playground for exploitation, a backdrop for thrill and profit, with its habitats rarely cared for and the boundaries of the planet ignored and disrespected. Too often, the well-being of nature is neglected, just as the well-being of women is disregarded and undervalued.
This is not a relationship of reverence, but one of conquest—where nature is engaged with only through doing, proving, and performing. In this worldview, stillness is weakness, and appreciation without extraction is unthinkable.
The male voyager who dreams of visiting the earth’s most scenic destinations simultaneously ignores the degraded ecosystems that lie in between. He prefers that the deforested habitats with eroded soil, reduced fertility, and inability to support plant life any longer remain out of view— like a woman who no longer serves his fantasy. Whether it’s the body of a woman or the body of the Earth, what is not useful to him is ignored.
As men set off on expeditions to indulge in personal growth and discovery by exploring their “motherland,” we women are left to wonder why we have no fatherland. If a woman yearned for the same experience, she would first have to reckon with the threat of violence—from the very men who claim the right to roam without fear.
Under patriarchy, many men relate to women the same way they relate to nature: they desire only select fragments of the experience, never the whole. Their gaze lingers on isolated parts of the female body, stripped of emotion, thought, or need. Likewise, their relationship with nature fixates on curated landscapes that offer escape and pleasure—spaces that ask nothing in return. In both cases, the full being is ignored, left uncared for, while he takes what he wants and offers no restoration or consideration in return.
Just as patriarchal systems fragment and objectify women, the dominant scientific paradigm dissects nature into categories and data points, stripping it of spirit, wholeness, and complexity. Male-dominated science systems, especially under colonial and capitalist influence, have long sought to classify, control, and extract rather than to listen, witness, and honor. The desire to “know” nature is often driven not by reverence, but by a need to dominate—just as women are judged and placed into boxes instead of being embraced in the full spectrum of our experience. In both cases, mystery is feared, and complexity is flattened to serve power.
While it’s important to recognize how Western science has historically been shaped by colonial and patriarchal systems, it’s equally vital to honor the truth in many of its findings—especially when they reveal the urgent need for ecological care.
Scientists warn that ecosystems may begin collapsing as soon as the 2030s under high-warming scenarios. Yet nearly half of conservative men deny the validity of climate science and the integrity of these projections. Just as the needs of nature are overlooked and seen as exaggerated under patriarchal systems—the stories and rights of women are often dismissed as false and treated with the same disregard.
I have been confidently reminded by countless men in my life that nature has a way of healing itself as justification for their lack of concern about environmental remediation or protection. But nature can only heal itself from the current level of degradation if there are actions to support the healing process. This may include afforestation and reforestation projects that improve soil health, water cycle regulation, and carbon sequestration.
This logic, used to excuse inaction, mirrors how society treats women: assuming we will keep nurturing, healing, and caretaking, even as we’re denied support ourselves. Women provide free labor in domestic settings with little support in place to sustain these efforts. The conditioned emotional unavailability of men masked as masculinity leaves women carrying not just the burdens of the home, but the parts of ourselves that men refuse to hold.
Just as women’s caregiving labor is invisible yet foundational, nature performs essential labor that goes largely unrecognized. Ecosystem services like filtering air, cycling water, regulating the climate, and enabling food production are treated as infinite and free, even though they are the very systems that make human life possible. These life-sustaining processes, much like the domestic and emotional work women perform, are rarely accurately valued, protected, or even acknowledged.
This pattern of denial and devaluation is no accident— it’s embedded in a larger system that places profit above preservation, and domination above care. Patriarchal capitalism has grossly undervalued nature for much of its existence. Global natural capital has been estimated to be worth $125 trillion yet, nature markets today are valued at only $9.8 trillion.
As millions of acres of virgin land are opened to oil drilling, creating a product that will only further degrade the land, man’s inability to see intrinsic value without exploitation mirrors how he treats the women in his life. The global economy is built upon a logic that profits from domination and renders care invisible, with billion dollar industries built on the exploitation of the natural world and the exploitation of women—making it fundamentally reliant on undervaluing both.
Like nature, our beauty is appreciated by man, providing experiences of pleasure and joy. We become the memories that make life worth living. But, we are rarely truly listened to, cared for, or recognized for our full value. We are lusted after, never loved— celebrated for what we offer, but not honored for who we are.
As a woman, I cherish my beauty. I know its light and magnetism. It has given me connection, expression, and even power. But beauty should not be a reason for exploitation, nor a barrier to being cared for. I want to be held in my wholeness—my strength, my abilities, my sorrow and joy, my stillness and storm. I deserve to be cared for, not conquered.
Like a goodhearted, patient woman who puts up with the constant chaos of a fiery man, nature is expected to do the same. To tolerate constant growth and expansion that feeds the desire for economic gain and domination harbored by men in patriarchal capitalist systems.
Our societal structures support relationships devoid of genuine care and connection, enabling further disregard for human and ecological needs on a larger scale. This dysfunction reveals the urgent need for systemic change that confronts the intertwined roots of gender-based oppression and environmental degradation.
Despite how patriarchal systems have long exploited women’s caring and healing capacities—without recognition or support—these traits remain powerful forces for transformation.
Compassion, empathy, and emotional depth—qualities often labelled as “feminine”—must be revalued and woven into the foundations of any system that seeks sustainability, justice, and collective healing. These traits are not weaknesses to be exploited, but strengths that offer a path forward—when shared, respected, and integrated across societal structures.
Throughout history, women have played a critical role in preserving the earth’s health—not just metaphorically, but through direct action. Women in rural and indigenous communities often possess deep knowledge of local ecosystems and have led protective efforts to sustain them.
For example, in 1973, in the forests of the Indian Himalayas, a group of rural women led by Gaura Devi launched the Chipko Movement, which involved physically hugging trees to prevent them from being demolished. Their act of resistance was not only a defense of the forest, but of their community’s water, soil, and food systems. This was an embodied form of care—one that shows how women’s ecological knowledge and care translates into radical protection.
This movement, like many others led by women across the globe, reminds us that care is not passive—it is defensive, assertive, and necessary for survival. In contrast to the extractive logic of patriarchal capitalism, these actions reassert a model of relationship based on interdependence and protection, rather than conquest.
As women under patriarchal capitalism, we must be unwavering in our knowing of our own self worth. We are the creators of life—yet we must still fight to have our contributions recognized, our rights respected, and our full humanity honored. Just as we rise to defend our own dignity, we must rise to defend the ecosystems that sustain all life on Earth.
Many climate scientists, environmental activists, and researchers, including myself, now reject green growth models, not because of an opposition to progress or innovation, but because the promises of “green growth” in already high-income countries are fundamentally incompatible with the scale of ecological and social challenges present across the globe.
This preference toward degrowth is rooted in mounting scientific evidence, supported by a recent groundbreaking review published in Lancet Planetary Health titled “Post-growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries,” which challenges the assumption that economic growth is necessary or even desirable for societal progress.
A central argument made by the authors is that the dominant narrative, which claims technological innovation and efficiency will allow for continued economic growth while reducing environmental harm, is not supported by the data. Efficiency improvements are consistently outpaced by the scale and speed of economic expansion, leading to increased resource consumption, pollution, and waste—a phenomenon known as the “rebound effect.” This effect directly undermines the idea that growth can be decoupled from environmental harm.
The belief that technological solutions alone can address today’s ecological crises exposes the use of binary thinking to address a multifaceted problem. This technological optimism can distract from the deeper, systemic changes needed to address how societies produce, consume, and define prosperity. Overreliance on technological solutions risks obscuring the fundamental drivers of climate change and social inequality. While technological shifts and innovation will play a role, it cannot substitute for the deeper structural changes needed to address how societies produce, consume, and define prosperity.
Research shows that market-driven approaches and the current economic system delay effective climate action by hindering the deployment of transformative technologies. Many promising climate innovations struggle to secure funding or scale because profit-driven systems tend to prioritize short-term returns over long-term societal and environmental benefits. Ironically, green growth models also rely on rapid technological deployment as a climate solution, while many proposed solutions are either unproven at scale or insufficient to address the magnitude of the problems.
Moreover, renewable energy and other sustainable technologies are not without environmental and social costs. The extraction of minerals essential for batteries and electronics, such as cobalt and lithium, is frequently linked to environmental degradation and human rights violations. This is not to suggest that clean energy should be dismissed, but rather that its deployment must be accompanied by systemic reforms. Without broader economic and policy changes, such technologies risk perpetuating existing patterns of overconsumption, social inequalities and human rights violations.
Crucially, the pursuit of endless economic growth is fundamentally incompatible with the Earth’s ecological boundaries. Humanity has already exceeded six of nine planetary boundaries, threatening the stability of Earth’s life-support systems. The drive for economic expansion, especially in high-income countries, is largely responsible for this overshoot, often achieved at the expense of labor and resources in lower-income nations. High-income countries, in particular, have a disproportionate impact on global emissions and resource use, and their current levels of consumption are unsustainable. If these consumption patterns persist, they are likely to precipitate ecosystem collapse and irreversible climate impacts across the globe. To avert ecological catastrophe and biodiversity loss, high-income countries must significantly reduce their material and energy use.
Green growth strategies tend to prioritize harm reduction through technological innovation and decarbonization, while neglecting the restorative practices needed to regenerate ecosystems.Even when labeled as “green,” economic growth models frequently fail to deliver meaningful social or ecological outcomes due to the fact that market-driven interventions often neglect ecosystem restoration that is viewed as “non-profitable”. A shift in priorities is needed—from GDP growth to enhancing human well-being, equity, and ecological regeneration.
True sustainability requires a deliberate reduction in material throughput, regeneration of depleted ecosystems, and advancement of social equity. It is not enough to simply shift to “greener” forms of production and consumption if they still enable the exploitation and oppression of nature and non-dominant groups.
As highlighted in recent research published in The Lancet Planetary Health, degrowth offers a scientifically grounded pathway to remain within planetary boundaries while improving health and well-being (Beyer et al., 2024). By intentionally reducing overall consumption and production—particularly in high-income countries—and reorienting economies toward equity, social cohesion, and ecological restoration, we can address the root causes of environmental degradation and social inequality.
The Lancet article emphasizes that degrowth is not about austerity or deprivation, but about prioritizing human flourishing, reducing unnecessary work and consumption, and ensuring that everyone’s basic needs are met. This approach has the potential to lower pollution, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and restore ecosystems, while also improving life satisfaction, reducing stress, and strengthening community ties.
These findings point the way toward a healthier planet, fairer societies, and a higher quality of life for all—achieved not through endless economic expansion, but through a fundamental transformation of our values, priorities, and systems. It’s time to embrace a new vision of progress—one rooted in ecological balance, equity, and genuine well-being.
Girls’ education and rights-based family planning are critical climate solutions through their dual impact on slowing population growth and accelerating climate action.
Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash
The Climate Impact of Population Growth
Population dynamics directly affect emissions, for example slower population growth reduces demand for energy, transportation, housing, and food which are major contributors to global emissions.
Project Drawdown’s modeling shows that achieving the UN’s medium population projection of 9.7 billion by 2050 (rather than higher-growth scenarios) through expanded family planning and education could reduce CO₂ equivalent emissions by 68.9 gigatons by 2050.
Rights-based family planning strengthens climate resilience by preventing unintended pregnancies, reducing maternal mortality, and keeping girls in school. Scholarships tied to marriage/childbearing could reduce women’s educational attainment as these life events can often alter one’s ability to complete school.
Policies regarding women’s education and reproductive activities must remain rights-based, emphasizing autonomy and access—not coercion. Allowing women equal access to education and expanding family planning services are not just social imperatives but high-leverage climate solutions that address both mitigation and adaptation.
The Clash: Trump’s Pronatalist Agenda vs. Climate Progress
The Trump administration’s proposed pronatalist agenda, which includes baby bonuses, marriage-based educational privileges, and a “National Medal of Motherhood,” signals a return to traditionalist policies that ignore climate realities.
Trumps Core Pronatalist Policies
Financial Incentives
$5,000 “Baby Bonus”: A one-time cash payment to mothers per child
Tax Credits: Expanded child tax credits, though specifics remain unclear
Educational Privileges
Fulbright Scholarships: Reserve 30% of spots for married applicants or parents
Financial incentives such as a $5,000 baby bonus fail to cover the true cost of raising a child, especially in a climate-disrupted economy.
Regressive policies reduce women’s voices and participation in the workforce—particularly in emerging climate sectors like clean energy, where women already make up only 33% of jobs.
Fertility-focused education replaces comprehensive reproductive healthcare, reducing access to contraception and skewing public health priorities.
Cuts to family planning programs, including Title X and CDC maternal health research, further restrict reproductive autonomy.
The proposed policies normalize financial incentive as coercion for sexual acts, stripping women of their humanity and ability to live their lives as they choose. Placing a $5,000 price tag on birth is offensive to the value life and the experience of motherhood, while attracting people who may only be incentivized by the “baby bonus” and are not equipped to raise a child.
Contradiction With Climate Mitigation Strategies
Energy and Emissions:
Emissions Scaling Issue: Even modest population increases have outsized climate impacts. The U.S. already has one of the highest per capita emissions rates (14.44 metric tons CO₂/person). Adding millions more high-consuming Americans (as targeted by “baby boom” policies) would directly counteract emission-reduction targets under the Paris Agreement.
Resource Demand Surge: More people = more:
Energy: U.S. households account for ~20% of national energy use
Transportation: 28% of U.S. emissions come from cars/planes
Food: Animal-based diets (common in U.S.) generate up to 20x more emissions than plant-based options
Women’s Leadership Advances Climate Innovation and Governance
Climate Policy: Countries with greater female representation in parliament not only adopt more stringent climate policies but are also 27% more likely to ratify environmental treaties—highlighting the impact of women’s leadership on accelerating effective climate action.
Change Makers: Women are powerful changemakers in climate technology, policy, and research however they are underrepresented in each of these sectors, which could be further exacerbated by policies that erode reproductive rights and incentivize domestic labor.
Direct Costs: Climate-driven disasters cost the U.S. $165 billion annually (NOAA 2022) – a burden worsened by population growth in vulnerable areas.
Gender Equity Backslide: Cash incentives for mothers ($5k/baby) could pressure women into caregiving roles, reducing workforce participation and climate leadership opportunities
Demographic Myths
The Trump administration’s policies hinge on a misleading narrative: that declining birth rates threaten America’s future. In reality, U.S. population growth is slowing due to rising early adult mortality rates which experienced a sharp rise during the pandemic and remain elevated.
Conclusion: A Crossroads for Climate and Human Rights
As discussed above, educating and empowering women is a net-positive for people and the planet, however the Trump Administration’s framing of “Fertility Education” and incentives for Fulbright Scholarships weaponizes this positive connotation to increase traditionalist patriarchal power.
Coercive and regressive pronatalist policies pose a dual threat—accelerating emissions while exploiting the very people driving climate innovation.
Climate leadership demands a different focus—one rooted in lowering per capita emissions, not expanding the number of high-emitting households. Empowering women’s voices and rights-basedfamily planningnot only promotes gender equity but offers some of the most effective, evidence-based solutions to the climate crisis.
As climate impacts worsen, our policies must elevate—not restrict—human potential. A truly resilient future is one where women are empowered, populations are sustainable, and climate action is just, inclusive, and science-driven.
