Professional drag artist and environmental activist Pattie Gonia has more than 2 million followers on Instagram and has raised $1.2 million for environmental nonprofits by hiking 100 miles, or 160 kilometers, in full drag into San Francisco. She has gained international recognition for using drag artistry to advocate for the environment, in acknowledgment and celebration of hundreds of researchers and scientists in the field who identify as queer. She joins Mongabay’s podcast to explain why joy is a fundamental ingredient missing in the environmental advocacy space, how she prioritizes it in her work as a drag performer and activist, and why she feels the environmental movement must prioritize it to succeed. “If we want people to join this movement, we have to make it freaking fun,” she says. Rather than highlighting the ways in which we are all different or siloing the environmental sector from everyday citizens, Pattie Gonia encourages the movement to embrace what all humans share in common — the natural world — and protect it from entrenched power structures of exploitation and the ultrawealthy. A merging of culture, art and nature is what she wants to see more of.  “The outdoor communities need to start working together, because we have hunters over here and we have like little liberal L.A. girlies over here. And we’re all actually fighting for the same thing. And we have more in common with each other than we do with these billionaires who oppress us all. So how about we work together…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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