There’s no such thing as one type of climate activist. There are artists creating thought-provoking beauty from plastic beach litter, singers crafting lyrics about petrochemicals, and writers weaving fictional storylines about innovative ways to solve the climate crisis. Anyone can be a climate activist: politicians, doctors, protestors, actors, farmers, architects, and drag queens and kings.

In the realm of drag climate activists, Pattie Gonia is a star. She approaches activism through joy, which she discusses in a TED Talk. This approach has garnered her 1.9 million followers (and counting!) on Instagram and landed her a spot on TIME’s most influential creators list in 2025. Pattie is busy as co-founder of the environmental equity organization The Outdoorist Oath, filming TV, and working on her national tour showcase, “Save Her! An Environmental Drag Show.” The decidedly unique show is a mix of everything from comedy to acrobatics, all meant to inspire audience members to get involved to save and protect Earth. Pattie’s following is devoted; the first time the showcase was performed at NY Climate Week in 2023, it sold out quickly.

She may be the most well-known drag climate activist, but Pattie’s not alone. There are other inspiring drag performers bringing intentional joy—plus some seriously gorgeous upcycled and vintage outfits—to the climate activism movement. To close out Pride month, check out these drag and queer artists—some of whom have of course worked directly with Pattie herself.

1. VERA!

One part of the “triad” of touring performers in “Save Her!” Vera can be found performing in California spots like Rebel Kings of Oakland when not touring with Pattie Gonia and Sequoia (see below). They once told NPR that performing in a gown made of reused netting on a beach in San Francisco “creates in that way, like, a big environmental loving family that we have now across the nation.”

2. Sequoia

Tall like her namesake tree, this Sequoia is the third member of the “Save Her!” touring company. She hails from Salt Lake City and is known for her upcycled outfits (she specifically calls them out on her Instagram) and for her musings on gender fluidity in nature.

3. King Molasses

The three headliners of “Save Her!” are joined by a host of other performers at their shows, including DC-based drag king King Molasses. At a show last month, The 19th reports they “performed to Phil Collins’ ’80’s hit ‘In the Air Tonight,’ using the tune’s famous crescendo of intensity to parallel the ‘rising tension’ of the climate crisis.” King Molasses told the news outlet the song made sense given a collective sense of urgency people are feeling to try to save the planet, currently being savaged by data centers, an ever-warming climate, and extreme storms.

4. Fay Ludes

Fashion and food are how this Nashville-based drag queen chooses to approach environmental activism. She’s a vegan who has also been very vocal about shopping vintage and reducing waste versus buying new clothing. And Fay posts anti-fast fashion tips on Instagram about saving items from landfills by fixing up thrift shop scores. For example: “There are times to invest and times to be frugal, this dress and wig was $40, I added vintage buttons & snaps to make it a reveal. You don’t need tons of money, you need an eye for fashion!”

5. Eve Swallows

“Drag … accomplishes a paradox of embracing joy and fun and also really serious issues of liberation and social justice and climate justice,” Eve told KQED, referring to her petrol-themed performance to “Gasoline” by Britney Spears. When not performing, Eve is also the dean of student life at the Stud School of Drag. The Stud, San Francisco’s oldest LGBTQ bar, is a notorious incubator of “boundary-pushing” drag.

6. Nini Coco

You may recognize Nini, a Denver-based drag queen, from her time on Season 18 of Ru Paul’s Drag Race. Nini is also an environmentalist who frequently incorporates eco-friendly, upcycled costuming and nature-themed performance art into her work. This includes a piece about the monarch butterfly life cycle.

This article is part of our occasional series The Climate Questionnaire, where we talk with authors, writers, filmmakers, podcasters, and other content creators about their work illustrating the human impacts of air pollution and global warming.

There are many people seeking solutions to the climate crisis. Dr. Jessica Hernandez argues that Indigenous science is the way forward. In her second and latest book, Growing Papaya Trees: Nurturing Indigenous Roots During Climate Displacement, she explores her contention, honing in on how colonialism causes displacement and how Indigenous knowledge can both foster resilience and be a way for displaced communities to heal.

Dr. Hernandez is an Indigenous environmental scientist and the founder of the organization Earth Daughters, which supports and uplifts transnational Indigenous women and youth as climate justice leaders. Earth Daughters specifically focuses on community‑led initiatives, so that solutions come directly from the people most connected to their lands, cultures, and ecosystems.

We spoke with Dr. Hernandez about her new book, and about Earth Daughters’ mission to elevate Indigenous science and traditional ecological knowledge, which she deems as essential to building the sustainable and culturally grounded climate solutions needed right now. She calls her approach critical because, “Western frameworks alone have not addressed the root causes of climate change, while Indigenous knowledge offers place-based, relational solutions that sustain ecosystems and communities.”

Tell us about your work, and how it’s redefining environmental and climate solutions?

My work redefines environmental and climate solutions by shifting power back to Indigenous communities and centering Indigenous science as the foundation, not the addition. Through Earth Daughters, I build programs where Indigenous women, youth, and knowledge keepers lead the work, from restoring food systems like kalo [the Hawaiian word for taro] cultivation to guiding land stewardship practices rooted in reciprocity. Instead of focusing only on technical climate fixes, my work prioritizes rebuilding relationships between people, land, and culture. This means solutions are not only about sustainability, but about restoring identity, governance, and community well-being. In practice, I am creating spaces where Indigenous knowledge directly shapes how climate solutions are designed and implemented, making them more holistic, grounded, and effective.

How do you bridge or blend traditional ecological knowledge with Western science?

As an Indigenous scientist, I bridge traditional ecological knowledge and Western science by grounding my work in Indigenous frameworks while strategically engaging Western systems when needed. Indigenous knowledge is already a science rooted in observation, relationality, and long-term environmental stewardship. In my work, I do not treat it as separate or secondary. Instead, I bring Indigenous science into academic, policy, and institutional spaces to challenge dominant assumptions and expand how knowledge is valued. For example, through land-based programming, food systems restoration, and research, I integrate ecological practices that come from Indigenous teachings while also translating that work into language that institutions can recognize. My books Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science and Growing Papaya Trees help me bring this into mainstream environmentalism.

You’re essentially connecting environmental health with human well-being—how?

Through my leadership with Earth Daughters, I approach environmental health and human well-being as inseparable. When land is harmed, Indigenous communities, especially women and youth, experience that impact directly through food insecurity, displacement, and loss of cultural connection. My work addresses this by restoring access to land-based learning, traditional food systems, and Indigenous knowledge. By supporting kalo [taro] cultivation, community gatherings, and cultural education, I create spaces where people can reconnect with land while also strengthening mental, cultural, and physical well-being. I also remove participation barriers through stipends, meals, and transportation, ensuring that those most impacted by inequities can fully engage. This work is about healing both ecosystems and communities together, recognizing that one cannot exist without the other.

There is so much work to do on the climate crisis today. What shifts do you see as urgently needed, and what role can Indigenous leadership play?

The most urgent shift needed is a redistribution of power, decision-making, and resources to Indigenous communities, especially Indigenous women who have long been excluded from environmental leadership spaces. Institutions and policymakers need to move away from extractive and top-down approaches and instead trust and invest in community-led solutions. In my work, I am already demonstrating what this shift looks like by centering Indigenous governance, compensating knowledge keepers, and creating leadership pathways for youth.

Indigenous leadership is critical because it brings forward systems of knowledge grounded in responsibility, care, and long-term thinking. My work shows that when Indigenous women lead, climate solutions become more holistic, relational, and sustainable. The future of environmental work depends on not only including Indigenous voices but recognizing Indigenous leadership as essential to shaping effective and just solutions.

Tell Congress: Support Families Displaced by Climate Disaster

Just a few days into summer, Phoenix, Arizona, is expected to hit highs above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. As the hottest city in the U.S., Phoenix serves as a physical reminder how dangerous climate-driven extreme heat can be. Exposure to extreme heat poses direct health risks, including cardiovascular, kidney, respiratory, and mental health disorders, and is linked to increased air pollution and higher energy bills. These risks increase as climate change makes hot days more frequent and intense.

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In an op-ed published in Impacto Media and The Latino Newsletter, Arizona Field Organizer Pita Juarez writes about Arizona’s increasingly common triple digit days, pointing out the risk of fatality, particularly for Latinos, who are disproportionately represented in the outdoor workforce.

“About 80% of the farmworkers in the United States identify as either Hispanic or Latino. Hispanic people are also 21% more likely to live in urban heat islands, which can be up to 22 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than surrounding areas.”

In other news

• In an interview with Yale Climate Connections that ran on 700+ radio stations across the country, National Manager for Health Justice Almeta Cooper (pictured) warns that tailpipe pollution—particularly in Black and Brown communities—is likely to worsen amid federal rollbacks.
• After a Q&A session with developers attempting to build a data center in Springdale, Pennsylvania, Field Organizer Vanessa Lynch notes to Trib Live that she is concerned about potential pollution from diesel backup generators.
• In May, Freepoint Eco-Systems announced they would be suspending operations at their “advanced recycling” plastics incinerator in Ohio—a decision that came following a year of advocacy kicked off by Moms Field Organizer Amanda Rowoldt‘s footage of billowing black smoke at the facility. Several outlets, including MSN, Chemical & Engineering News, and Courier Journal, reported the shutdown; the facility had blatantly violated Ohio EPA regulations and endangered surrounding communities. Despite the clear health risks of plastics incinerators and the need for stronger protections, EPA is currently considering a proposal that would ease air pollution rules and exempt these facilities from crucial regulations, as noted in British Brief.

Honorable mentions

Over the last few weeks, Moms earned a mention in News Break.

Tell Congress: Support Mental Wellness for Communities Facing Weather Disasters

This article is part of our occasional series Life Under Threat, where we share the stories of families whose health has been put at risk by polluting industry, from AI data centers to “advanced recycling” plastics incinerators to oil and gas operations.

Alfonso Espino was born and raised in Elyria and Swansea, adjacent neighborhoods in northeast Denver, Colorado. The second of eight children, he grew up mostly in his grandfather’s house in Elyria, and much of his family still lives nearby. “It’s the only place we know as home,” he says. That’s why he joined the staff of the GES Coalition, a community organization serving Elyria and Swansea as well as a neighborhood called Globeville. The coalition was formed 10 years ago to protect local families in this historically exploited area. These days, the GES Coalition is fighting the encroachment of Big Tech in the form of a massive three-building, fossil-fuel-powered CoreSite data center campus. This is Alfonso’s story of resistance.

Tell Congress: Protect Families From Dangerous Data Center Air Pollution

As told to Julie Kimmel by Alfonso Espino:

I serve as a staff lead organizer for the GES Coalition, an organization that came out of our neighborhoods’ struggle against displacement and gentrification due to the Central I-70 redevelopment. Our communities are overburdened by pollution. All three of the neighborhoods that we work in are surrounded by freeways and trains. We have the BNSF railyard in Globeville and the Union Pacific Railroad yard in Elyria. These are massive operations that already bring a lot of pollution just from the trains. We also have the Suncor oil refinery just north of Swansea.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment reports that we’re in the 90th percentile or above for exposure to diesel emissions because of the freeways and heavy industry around us. We have the highest rates of asthma in the city. We have higher rates of cancer, and on average, we live 20 years less than the rest of the city.

Highway redevelopment is just the beginning

The I-70 redevelopment project that led to the formation of the GES Coalition was part of the Colorado Department of Transportation’s effort to “modernize” our highways. Before they redeveloped it, the portion of I-70 through Elyria and Swansea was a three-mile-long bridge that went over the community. For the redevelopment, they demolished the bridge and then brought it below grade and widened it to add toll lanes. The whole project was a 20-year process, but construction happened in five years—2018 to 2023.

This redevelopment brought billions of dollars of investment from the public sphere, and the private market followed because they knew that a lot of these areas would be revamped. Colorado State University built their extension campus, CSU Spur, here in the new National Western Center. The Brian Boulevard corridor was reconstructed and transformed from an industrial area into luxury apartments, restaurants, and shopping. The city built the A-line train to the airport as well as the end line that goes north with a stop at the National Western Center. All this has happened in the last 10 years.

Big Tech enters the fray

In late 2023, CoreSite, a subsidiary of American Tower Corporation, proposed a three-building data center campus in Elyria, a stone’s throw away from housing in the area that remains dedicated to low-income and working-class people. Our only rec center and park are right across the street from the site, and all of Elyria is within a quarter mile of the project.

Construction started on the first data center in 2024, and it’s supposed to be operational by the end of this summer. It is 180,000 square feet, just over three football fields, and would use up to 18 megawatts of energy, enough to power up to 15,000 homes. Although not yet up and running, the building is already connected to the grid and has diesel generators for backup energy. It’s a very weak grid here, so the coalition thinks the generators will be used as a main source of energy more often than not.

CoreSite will lease out this server space to other tech companies. They won’t tell us who; that’s not publicly available information. But if you look at their reports, they’re marketing to AI companies.

For the local community, this giant data center campus is another contributor to the cumulative impact of the highways, trains, and industry all around us. What’s extremely concerning is it’s not on the edges of the neighborhoods; it’s literally right next door. And it’s not just about air pollution from their diesel generators. We are concerned about the strain on the grid because a power outage could be lethal. What are people supposed to do if they can’t use their oxygen machine because of a data center-caused blackout or if they can’t turn on the heat in the winter?

A reason for hope

Last month, the Denver City Council passed a one-year moratorium on data center zoning permits and development, with an option to extend. They’re going to establish a working group to come up with policy recommendations for these facilities. The first building in the CoreSite project will likely not be impacted by the moratorium because they’ve already been issued all their permits. But it does prohibit CoreSite from moving forward on their second and third buildings for one year. And these buildings will be subject to any new rules that come out of the working group recommendations adopted by the city.

The GES Coalition is interested in figuring out ways to make this pause permanent for CoreSite and possibly even get the first building to not be allowed to go into operation.

The moratorium feels like a good first step. It wouldn’t have been as politically viable if it weren’t for the organizing that GES Coalition has done in our community. We want to push that all the way to the end. We don’t want this data center to exist right next to all the residences; we want to protect our community’s health from data center and diesel generator pollution. We’re also very hopeful because we know that through organizing we can change the world around us.

Tell Congress: Protect Families From Dangerous Data Center Air Pollution

This Juneteenth will be observed by a nation currently in a fight for democracy, says Catherine Coleman Flowers, environmental health researcher and author of Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope.

Through her organization, the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, Catherine works specifically on water, sanitation, and wastewater failures nationwide, bringing together infectious disease experts to expose and address infrastructure issues.  “What we’re seeing in our rural communities is the lack of investment in all kinds of infrastructure to support a healthy community,” she says. Working infrastructure is an environmental issue, but it’s also a key tenet of democracy.

Infrastructure, resources, and democracy

Catherine was born and raised in Lowndes County, Alabama, a rural county near Selma and Montgomery. She says that when rural communities lack resources, there’s often also a lack of investment in infrastructure. “I remember when I was growing up, the U.S. Public Health Service paid for doctors and people to be trained in the medical profession, and then as part of paying that money back, they would go and serve in underprivileged communities. And now we’re seeing an attack on all those kinds of programs that provided services to communities that didn’t have access to them otherwise,” she says.

The recent ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that struck down a challenged Louisiana congressional map as racial gerrymandering, for example, was, Catherine says, essentially a strike against democracy itself. In a 6-3 decision on April 29, the High Court struck down a congressional map drawn in 2024, with the majority declaring it an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

The ruling stopped short of overturning Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act outright, but it represents another blow to the 1965 law that emerged from the civil rights movement to defend the voting rights of racial minorities—a statute that a string of recent court decisions has quietly hollowed out. The ruling weighs heavily on Catherine, especially leading up to observing Juneteenth.

“When you put this in place, and you start drawing lines based on political affiliation, we’re ending democracy for all of us. I think that it’s wider than Jim Crow. I think it’s wider than the Civil War. I think that the purpose of the Civil War was very different; this seems more like tyranny. This seems different,” says Catherine, a retired teacher and one of Time’s Most Influential People of 2023.

“I strongly feel that anybody who believes in democracy and supports the Constitution can’t support this, because if they can draw lines and eliminate people who have the right to vote based on their goals to maintain power, then that means that anybody who disagrees with the position that they are taking will be subject to the same thing.”

Fighting for rural communities

Catherine’s environmental work is essentially to extend democracy to all. She chronicles her fight for those in rural communities—like where she grew up, a region historically nicknamed “Bloody Lowndes” because of its violent past against Black Americans during the civil rights era—in her first book, Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret.

As a climate researcher and a 2020 MacArthur fellow, Catherine says the fight includes global warming. “We’re having droughts more frequently, more widespread. In some places, stronger storms. There are island nations that are disappearing. The glaciers are melting. Nothing has changed. And water scarcity is still a problem because in a lot of places, water is drying up, or it has become so contaminated that it can’t sustain life,” she says.

Finding hope this Juneteenth

Catherine’s hope is that this Juneteenth will be a national moment to focus on the Constitution and its promises for all Americans.

“It’s a chance for all of us to rededicate ourselves and use Juneteenth as an opportunity to save democracy for everybody. For those looking for inspiration, they can look to Juneteenth and the role that African Americans have played in this country in expanding access to democracy for hope and as a strategy for how we move forward,” she says.

Catherine, the former vice chair of the Biden administration’s inaugural White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, also finds hope in young people, religion, and even the communities that have recently come together to fight back against the health and environmental impacts of data centers. “These data center fights are bringing together people who would not have worked together otherwise, across racial lines, political lines. They all realize the importance of fighting to maintain the integrity of their communities and the environment for generations to come. So, all that makes me very hopeful.”

Tell Congress: Protect Families From Dangerous Data Center Air Pollution