Writer. Activist. Founder.
I grew up in then-hippie North County San Diego amongst Fuerte and Hass avocado groves, Poinsettia greenhouses, and in the late 1970s, sprouted whole wheat sandwiches with Jack cheese, avocado (of course), and alfalfa sprouts sticking out all around. I used to boogie board the shore break at Swamis all day. Swamis was within walking distance from my house. Pushing the nose of the board into the cold green of the collapsing waves created the momentum to get out past the break. I would then kick like hell, and catching the wave and accelerating, would experience the air time; when your body is no longer completely solid with less force pushing up against it. Riding a wave is actually the miraculous end of its deep, vertical, open ocean energy cycle. Swamis’ north end had a pointed reef break allowing for both frontside and backside surfing. It was one of the most coveted surf spots in Southern California and I never learned to actually surf. Acquiring surfing skills in my preteen North County subsistence, unlike boogie boarding — relatively easy — equaled high social rank. Naturally, the best surfing spots were allocated for the most skilled surfers with some of them, my peers. Disappointingly, I would be too embarrassed to learn where they could see me floundering.
I met my husband in San Diego and we moved to San Francisco where I studied Liberal Arts at San Francisco State University. I spent my midlife crisis earning a Master’s Degree in Communication there too, graduating just as the curtain of the Covid-19 pandemic started to fall. In graduate school my paper “The Latent Exigence of Climate Change and the Gendered Construction of the Environment” was accepted at the prestigious International Communication Association (2018) conference in Prague, Czechoslovakia. The published version of this paper, “Evolutions in Hegemonic Discourses of Climate Change: An Ecomodern Enactment of Implicatory Denial,” was accepted at the 74th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association in Brisbane, Australia, in 2024. Also, in graduate school, I wrote for Mobility Lab on transportation policy from 2018 to 2020. Since 2021, I am a regular contributor for The Advocate of the City University of New York, writing a lot about queer and climate change.
My alarm about climate change started about 15 years ago. Responding, I used to hypermile my old Toyota pickup. Fleetingly, I would inflate the tires beyond their recommended pressure and drive at frustratingly slow speeds on the highway to achieve higher fuel efficiency than the car was actually rated. The cars would pass my crawling Toyota impatiently, swirling around my inverse provocation of the speed limit. I got a folding bike and started taking public transit everywhere. I played a character called “Climate Action Man” for elementary school kids at Glenview Elementary in Oakland, CA. Again, I was too self-conscious to be an amateur character actor, and I was not solving the problem by empowering children to be the family thermostat monitor. I joined the then bad-ass climate activist group 350 Bay Area, getting involved in a campaign requiring a cigarette-style warning label on gas pumps. These “warming labels” would naturally, disclose the harms of gas burning just like cigarette warning labels did for smoking in the mid-1960’s. I founded a non-profit organization in 2020 called Think Beyond the Pump, and now, all Cambridge, Massachusetts gas pumps display a yellow climate-health warning label!
Before my nonprofit stint, I was a retail shoe salesman in support of my other passion; triathlon. I was a competitive age group triathlete competing in over 30 triathlons with numerous age group trophies. I did the Ironman Coeur d’Alene in 2018 which was hot, and parts of me are still out there on the run course. My husband and I also travel extensively, which is rather hypocritical I know, for a so-called climate activist.