Description: Drawing from her book Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes through Indigenous Science, Dr. Jessica Hernandez offers a compelling critique of Western environmental models, highlighting their exclusion of Indigenous voices and the tendency to view the environment as a resource rather than a relative. This presentation will explore how meaningful environmental progress necessitates the dismantling of extractive conservation paradigms and the integration of Indigenous knowledge systems grounded in land-based relationality and kinship.
Speaker: Jessica Hernandez, Ph.D. (Binnizá/Zapotec & Maya Ch'orti’), Founder of Earth Daughters
About the speaker: Dr. Jessica Hernandez is a globally recognized Indigenous scientist, climate justice leader, and best-selling author whose groundbreaking work is redefining environmentalism through an Indigenous lens. Rooted in the Pacific Northwest, she bridges Indigenous science, traditional ecological knowledge, and Western frameworks to address the most urgent environmental crises of our time.
Read more about Dr. Hernandez.