They’re my go-tos.” Brands that don’t advertize their ethical efficiency are even more bamboozling to Valletta. I believe in a great blazer, a pair of boots and tennis shoes. In general, luxury brands don’t overproduce, so they’re safe bets. Her universal wardrobe? “Everyone can wear a tank top or a great T-shirt. Her tip to those looking to shop more ethically is investment purchasing. Fashion has such an opportunity to be a change agent.” She is a bottomless pit of advice. “We want to educate and entertain fashion consumers on sustainability. Valletta is currently looking to fund a documentary called The Changing Room. Before long, she realized the fashion world was lagging. “I believed in conservation, in protecting people from chemicals in food.” She joined the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council) to lobby in Sacramento for a Long Beach clean-up. California and new motherhood woke her up. “At first it was all about the ozone, remember?” she says. Valletta took environmental-related classes at NYU in the wake of Al Gore’s early conversations around climate change. The ocean could be disgusting and full of plastic you can’t eat fish, go to a beach, see coral you can’t have the opportunity to be doctors, scientists or creators. I’ll be dead, but my great-grandkids? To live in a world where they wouldn’t experience this where they couldn’t see elephants or a whale. Valletta is the type of communicator who makes you remember the privilege of being alive – and appreciate the natural world that surrounds us. I’m not diminishing cancer or Aids, diabetes or addiction, but there won’t be anything left to fight for. This is the most important crisis we’re facing. As she was arrested, she could see those buildings. She recounts walking to a street between the Supreme Court and Capitol Hill and yelling. I will risk public opinion, being in jail,” she says. My life is worth putting out there, in order to show that all our lives are worth fighting for.” I can’t sit on the sidelines I need to physically put myself on the line. “I’ve been feeling this need to get loud to step into my own. Before Valletta participated in the recent DC protest, she spoke to her mother over the phone about her memories. “My mom wore a band that said ‘NO NUKES’.” They succeeded. She remembers, too, her mother’s arrest alongside a group of Native American activists who were protesting against the building of a power plant. “It was a brown pond, full of snakes and shit. In the summer, they’d go to the Blue Whale of Catoosa, off Route 66, which sits next to a man-made lake. “My best memories are of outside,” she says from an outdoor restaurant in the Palisades, a coastal neighborhood in LA that she now calls home. Her grandparents had a farm that she spent weekends running around, making forts, playing in the hay. The roots of her environmentalism trace back to her rural upbringing with her mother in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She’s a leader in sustainability in fashion, an activist who was arrested in Washington, DC, alongside Jane Fonda during climate-change protests in November last year. She doesn’t want to sleepwalk into the abyss.
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