Abby Reyes on embodied resistance in environmental justice, advocacy and allyship

Environmental justice work speaks to the visceral nature of systemic oppression, lived through the bodies of Indigenous and local communities at the frontlines of climate crises and ecological degeneration. To defend the land, water and other natural resources is not a question of choice but survival for many communities protecting their territories from extractive industries. How do we then, as allies and advocates, choose to take the risk of offering our voices and organising with environmental defenders, in the movement to collective freedom and justice?

This month, we bring onto the show Abby Reyes, an author and recognized leader in driving community climate solutions. Her first book, Truth Demands: A Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars, and the Rise of Climate Justice releases today, May 6, 2025, from North Atlantic Books. Truth Demands is a salve for anyone navigating the open waters of grief and essential reading for the emerging climate activist and those becoming more ecologically aware. The book chronicles Abby’s own healing journey and pursuit of justice after the loss of her partner and two other land rights advocates when they were murdered near Indigenous U’wa territory in Colombia in 1999. 

Born and raised in Virginia, Abby began her climate work conducting rural environmental legal assistance in the Philippines, her father’s homeland, and later walked alongside the Colombian U’wa Indigenous pueblo in their fight against big oil – an experience at the center of Truth Demands. Today, she is the Director of Community Resilience Projects at University of California, Irvine, where she supports leaders from climate-vulnerable communities and their academic partners to accelerate community-owned just transition solutions. A graduate of Stanford University and UC Berkeley Law, she clerked on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, co-chaired the board of EarthRights International, and is an advisor to the National Association of Climate Resilience Planners. 

Abby has been recognized as a “Model of Resistance” by Barnard’s Scholar and the Feminist Conference, has a TEDx talk on How to Come Home and has discussed her work with the Law & Political Economy Project. She lives with her family in the San Francisco Bay Area.

This conversation centres the themes of Truth Demands addressing embodiment as resistance, chronic fatigue and exhaustion in environmental justice work, and body reorganisation through rest.

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