Leah Thomas is an intersectional environmental activist and eco-communicator based in Southern California. She’s passionate about advocating for and exploring the relationship between social justice and environmentalism and was the first to define the term “Intersectional Environmentalism.” She is the founder of @greengirlleah and The Intersectional Environmentalist platform. Her articles on this topic have appeared in Vogue, Elle, The Good Trade, and Youth to the People and she has been featured in Harper’s Bazaar, W Magazine, Domino, GOOP, Fashionista, BuzzFeed, and numerous podcasts. She has a B.S. in Environmental Science and Policy from Chapman University and worked for the National Park Service and Patagonia headquarters before pursuing activism full time. She lives in Carpinteria, California. She is the author of The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet, and Winner of the Creative Force Foundation Award 2023.

"Learning about environmentalism in school, you look at specific figures like John Muir, etc. And I wanted people to also have that association when it came to the environmental justice movement because I think sometimes that really is a helpful learning tool for students.

So in particular, Hazel M. Johnson, I'm so fascinated by her because she's often not really written about in environmental textbooks at all. She was just a woman in Chicago who had no environmental experience, but she started realizing that a lot of people in her community, including her husband, were getting all sorts of forms of cancers and other heart diseases and things like that at what she suspected were alarming rates. So when she investigated, she found that her neighborhood was built on top of toxic waste and other things, and she defined this term called a toxic doughnut that her community and so many other communities that were similar to hers that were lower income and primarily Black neighborhoods that were formerly redlined were surrounded by a toxic doughnut of waste, of landfills, highways running through their neighborhoods, and sometimes even buried radioactive waste, etc.

So she was one of the first people who really made a stir about this, and I think something that's really cool in her work, and then also Dr. Robert Bullard, to formalize that research or that hunch that she had and produced the first study on toxic waste and race and really made the field of environmental justice is that they also were really just faith-based people that spoke about this amongst their churches.

And I think again, that's something that's really cool because in the environmental or scientific community, sometimes people do try to separate faith advocacy from science. However, these are people who were mobilizing in their churches and talking about it in their sermons and seeing how they could transform their communities to be better for people and the planet.

So I think it's just a great story, and I really want people to know the names of people like Hazel Johnson and Dr. Robert Bullard just like they know the names of people like John Muir because they've done such a beautiful job, and I want their legacies to be remembered."

www.intersectionalenvironmentalist.com
www.instagram.com/greengirlleah
www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/leah-thomas/the-intersectional-environmentalist/9780316281935/?lens=voracious

Season 2 of Business & Society focuses on CEOs , Sustainability & Environmental Solutions
Business & Society is a limited series co-hosted by Bruce Piasecki & Mia Funk
www.oneplanetpodcast.org