José Elias
"I always want to extend myself for people to understand that, if we really want to become better environmentalists and advocates for this world, we need to reckon with the past."
Isaias Hernandez (@queerbrownvegan on Instagram) creates an online space for education on the interconnected issues facing humans, animals, and our environment, and spreads awareness on how we can address these issues to make a better world for all.
Transcript
Isaias Hernandez: What I hope to bring within my education is the fact that environmental education is a humans and animals rights issue.
Hi everyone, my name is Isaias Hernandez, and I'm an environmental educator and creator of Queer Brown Vegan.
When I was in college, I learned about the injustices that were coming from the industrial agriculture industry and witnessing the slaughter of animals and also the abuse of undocumented farm workers. It made me really realize that I need to do something about the way I eat. And so veganism really presented a intersectional lens for me to understand that a lot of these industries are interconnected in the oppression of humans and non-human animals.
Queer Brown Vegan came out of the fact that I didn't wanna hide who I was, as someone that has really felt ashamed growing up as a queer LGBT person. I always felt that I had to really silence my identity in a lot of environmental spaces. Part of me was realizing that if I want to do environmental work, I shouldn't have to feel ashamed for my identity, my race, and my ethics as being vegan. And for me, I really want to put those three main core values about me, so people know who I am as an environmental educator and to kind of redefine the boundaries of what we look like.
What I hope to bring within my education is the fact that environmental education is a humans and animals rights issue. When we're talking about these concepts, I really try to make people understand that it encompasses indigenous wisdom, cultural based experiences, and lived experiences that include both science and our experiences with academia or school. And this is what I feel that should look like: a holistic view of environmentalism. Because when we deem one culture as less than because they're not scientific enough, how did we really define what science is?
And so for me, I wanted to really make sure that we place also emphasis and importance on many of these Black, Indigenous, People of Color that have co-existed on this planet, and have developed a lot of regenerative practices, that are still doing it today, but yet still face so many threats by colonial and imperialism.
I think the deeper, and the rise of injustices being on news, that really led a lot of people to want to invest in environmental education. At the same time, a lot of people don't really like to have the talks regarding colonial history. So for me, I always wanted to extend myself for people to understand that, if we really want to become better environmentalists and advocates for this world, we need to reckon with the past.
Creating environmental education for me is the bare minimum that I can do for my audience because I realize that we all have different ways of how we communicate environmentalism. And so education for me was really something that is done through the heart of my work. And that is something that I want people to understand. And to also make this world more understanding about intersectionality or interconnectedness of this work.
