Madeleine MacGillivray Wallace

Model, microplastics scientist, climate advocate

https://www.instagram.com/madeleinewallace/

A multi-talented badass, Madeleine's interests go both wide and deep. She's a 24-year old environmental youth activist, scientist, model, and artist.

Born and raised in NYC by an environmental lawyer mother, she became an activist at age 9 when she founded a non-profit organization to raise awareness about climate change. Then at 16, she was part of a Supreme Court lawsuit suing the US government for its role in causing climate change and thereby violating youths' constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property.

In 2018, she graduated from Barnard College with a degree in Environmental Policy and completed her thesis on global microplastics science and legislation at the renowned Columbia University Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

As an ambassador and advisory board member of the 5Gyres Institute, she specializes in marine microplastics pollution research and legislation. Madeleine has conducted research in Indonesia, the Arctic, the Bermuda Triangle, and the Galápagos Islands as Science Communications Manager with 5Gyres.

Madeleine is also currently completing a silkscreen portfolio under mentor Tomas Vu-Daniel, and writing an album with Kyp Malone of TV on the Radio.

Her 5% to the planet goes to Seeding Sovereignty

An advocate for Indigenous people in the age of climate change, Madeleine has traveled to communities like Alberta, Canada, for the Healing Walk with the Beaver Lake Cree Nation, and the remote Secoya territory of the Ecuadorian Amazon, as well as other native tribes impacted by fossil fuel extraction in their home territory.

Madeleine has chosen to give the 5% to the planet raised by her outreach to Seeding Sovereignty, an Indigenous womxn-led collective working to shift social and environmental paradigms by dismantling colonial institutions and replacing them with Indigenous practices created in synchronicity with the land. Madeleine is the Microplastics Policy and Science Fellow at Seeding Sovereignty.

Read our interview with Madeleine and follow her on Instagram.


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