Women who blaze a trail

Move over Greta. Meet the young women changing the way we think about travel and sustainability. By Shivani Ashoka

In recent years, the question of sustainability has taken a singular approach – despite the success of the movement requiring people and profit-led initiatives to progress alongside planetary ones. Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American lawyer and civil rights activist, understood this in 1989, when she coined the term “intersectionality” to describe how socio-economic factors determine the ways in which people encounter the world. The concept remained relatively obscure until a few years ago, when it began resonating, but it was last year’s reckoning with racial inequality that made the environmental and travel sectors – that often go handin-hand – take notice.

Leah Thomas (known as “Green Girl Leah”) has been leading the push for environmental justice since last year’s resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement – after her call for change in the predominantly white climate sector went viral. She now dispenses advice, promotes eco-brands and snaps her own travels, from Utah to Nevada, via Instagram to her 219,000 followers. Thomas’s website, IntersectionalEnvironmentalist.com, provides resources for people wanting to understand how social justice and environmentalism are intertwined.

Intersectionality is something that Mya-Rose Craig, the ornithologist and Bristolbased race campaigner, also finds non-negotiable. She set up “Black2Nature” to encourage children of colour to explore nature through supervised and culturally sensitive trips, after noticing, in her early teens, how few others in the coun

tryside looked like her biracial family; in November, the project received charity status. It couldn’t come at a better time when more of us than ever before are thinking about domestic travel.

At 18, Craig has seen half of the world’s species of birds, set up an advisory board to help environmental companies break down barriers to entry for people of colour, and has two books in the pipeline – one of which sparked a 14-way bidding war among publishers.

Kampala-based Vanessa Nakate, another force in the climate justice sector, whose book – A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis,

due for release in November – also became the subject of a literary tug of war. Nakate’s advocacy seeks to rebalance the inequality in who contributes to, as well as suffers from, climate change.

Even sustainable fashion has had a wake-up call. Aditi Mayer, an ethical fashion blogger based in Los Angeles, regularly unpicks the effects of colonisation – for example, anti-blackness in the South Asian diaspora. She educates more than 50,000 followers about environmental and social threats.

The overarching message is that conscious consumers must embrace a more holistic model for sustainable success and, fortunately for them, this generation comes armed with tool kits.

i Mya-Rose Craig is been leading the sustainability charge with Leah Thomas, inset