Webinars

Leah Thomas is an eco-communicator, aka an environmentalist with a love for writing + creativity, based in Ventura, CA. She’s passionate about advocating for and exploring the relationship between social justice and environmentalism. You could say she’s tryna make the world a little more equal for everyone and a little nicer to our home planet.

She is the founder of eco-lifestyle blog @greengirlleah and The Intersectional Environmentalist Platform, which is a resource + media hub that aims to advocate for environmental justice + inclusivity within environmental education + movements.

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 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 environmentalism full time.

Learn more about Leah and her mission in this BuzzFeed video.

Kim Stanley Robinson is a New York Times bestselling author and winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy and the critically acclaimed Forty Signs of Rain, The Years of Rice and Salt, and 2312. In 2008, he was named a “Hero of the Environment” by Time magazine, and he works with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute. He lives in Davis, California.

"The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year, this is an extraordinary novel from visionary science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will change the way you think about the climate crisis."

Photo credit: Sean Curtin

Aurélie Ceinos, Climate Adaptation Advisor & CARE Climate & Resilience Academy Content Lead
Aurélie is a Climate Adaptation Specialist with 12 years of experience and is part of CARE’s Climate Justice Team. Aurélie has extensive experience with developing and implementing climate adaptation programming in Asia, Africa and Latin America. She is one of the experts who contributed to the design of the CARE Climate & Resilience Academy and to the revision of CARE’s flagship tool on Climate Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis (CVCA). She supports and trains CARE teams to integrate climate change into all projects for a better consideration of climate risks. She is passionate about the inter-linkages between gender and climate justice and also how to strengthen our collective voices and actions on climate justice issues.

Karl Deering, Strategic Partnerships Lead - Food and Water Systems Team (CARE USA)
Karl Deering has 23 years of experience in international development and humanitarian work, with a focus on resilience, food security and climate change. Between 2001 and 2005, Karl worked in refugee, displacement and post-conflict crisis management. He has since worked for various NGOs in technical, managerial and policy roles in the areas of humanitarian assistance, food security, climate change and disease control. His core interests are in equity and justice in food systems, gender equality and livelihood-conservation nexus work. He is currently Strategic Partnerships Lead in CARE’s Food and Water Systems team and a member of CARE’s global gender cohort. He has authored several practice, research and policy papers.

Ramón Cruz has over 20 years of experience intersecting the fields of sustainability, environmental policy, urban planning, energy and climate change. He has worked in the public sector in his native Puerto Rico as the Deputy Director of the Environmental Quality Board, the state environmental regulatory agency and as Commissioner of the Puerto Rico Energy Commission.  He has also worked in the non-governmental sector in senior positions at the Environmental Defense Fund, the Partnership for New York City and the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. He has been a consultant for the World Bank, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute and the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ).  

In May 2020, he was elected President of the Sierra Club, the nation’s oldest and largest environmental organization with 3.8 million members and supporters in 64 chapters across the United States.        

Ramón is a graduate of American University in Washington D.C. and Princeton University in New Jersey.      

Julie Sze is a Professor of American Studies at UC Davis. Her research focuses on environmental justice and inequalities, the relationship between social movements and policy implementation, and the areas of public and environmental humanities at the intersection of three interdisciplinary fields: environmental, urban and ethnic studies from the vantage point of American Studies.

Professor Sze is the author of Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (MIT Press, 2007), Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis (University of California Press, 2015), and, most recently, Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger (University of California Press, 2020). Across a wide geographical terrain (New York, California and Shanghai) and scales and issues, Professor Sze's research holds constant a sustained focus on political ecology, urbanization, and planning, including links and interactions between the political economy of spatial form and social relations with nature.