Fund Alex to Be a Climate Organizer for a Year

Hi, my name is Alex, and I’m a 24-year-old climate activist. I organize direct actions to push our government to act on the climate and ecological emergency. The climate crisis is so urgent and we have so little time left that, for the past three years, I have put all of my professional and academic opportunities aside to do this work full-time. This urgency means that I can’t justify allocating my energy elsewhere, even though I’d prefer to direct my energy to studying the natural world and conducting original research. Everything is at stake because our government has been co-opted by the fossil fuel industry.

The urgency of this situation and how far we are from where we need to be is exemplified by how our state government is continuing to approve new fossil fuel infrastructure, infrastructure that will be around for decades. Despite being in a climate emergency and despite our government’s own 2050 Climate Roadmap that was passed last year, the MA government is siding with the fracked gas industry.

For the past year, I’ve been working on Extinction Rebellion Boston’s “No New Fossil Fuel Infrastructure” campaign. Our chapter is pushing the Commonwealth to ban all new fossil fuel infrastructure and to cancel fossil fuel infrastructure projects in the works, such as the Peabody Peaker Plant, the West Springfield Gas Pipeline, and the Charlton LNG Facility. I had the privilege of being employed by XR Boston in 2021, working on growing our chapter through the Emergency Everywhere campaign, in which we worked with activists in 6+ municipalities to pass climate emergency declarations. I consider myself lucky to have found such an incredible crew of human beings, a community willing to do what is needed to prevent the worst impacts of climate breakdown, powered by equal parts of love and rage.

I spend more than 40 hours each week doing climate work. My time is primarily allocated to organizing direct actions, publicizing these actions to make sure they get the attention they deserve, getting new activists plugged into the climate movement, and creating regenerative resources for the climate movement(e.g. climate grief circles).

The way in which we live against nature, dominating and extracting from her, has always disturbed me. I was terrified after seeing Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth as a child. I have a background in ecological landscaping and native plant horticulture, previously running an ecological landscaping business for a few years. I’ve been on a journey trying to unlearn the separateness that our culture has created and reconnect with the natural world. Working in the climate sphere has enabled me to challenge this separateness, this horrid way that we in the West create separateness between us and other humans, us and the environment, and us and our own history. Some of my other interests outside of activism include field botany and foraging, anticapitalist thought, degrowth, whole food plant-based nutrition, studying classical Latin, and reading about the ancient near east.

It makes me uncomfortable to ask you for money, but in dealing with the climate crisis, time and organizers are our scarce resources, not funding. The truth is that the money to fund bold climate activists exists in this community. That is why I am asking you to support me in being a full-time climate organizer.

My intention is to use this funding to continue to push the MA government on No New Fossil Fuel Infrastructure, organize actions on the ecological emergency (e.g. pollinator extinction, conventional agriculture), and map out the MA climate movement to facilitate inter-organization communication.

Some highlights of my direct action work:

Media coverage where I am quoted: