Ben crosses borders of activism, politics, and research to organize for climate and environmental justice. Whether birding in Central Park or humming to impromptu fiddle concerts in the subway, he grew up seeking to reconcile the messy wonder of New York City’s natures/cultures with its poisoned veins of systemic racial, economic, gender, and environmental injustice. A fourth-generation American descended from Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe, Ben finds musical nourishment for change-making with his great-grandmother’s childhood violin. Inspired by the radical potential of critical writing and thinking he discovered at Bard High School Early College, he studied and organized at Swarthmore College on the intersection of environmental justice, climate politics, and biology. Ben pushed for engaged curricula linking anti-oppression, social justice, and sustainability, and helped build alignment on a core commitment to intersectional social justice across the College’s issue-specific student environmental groups. After spearheading a successful initiative to accredit Swarthmore to engage at the UN’s international climate negotiations, he helped lead students, faculty, and staff on the College’s second delegation to COP20 in Lima, Peru. Based on seven months in South Africa, Ben focused his undergraduate thesis on post-apartheid efforts to recast nature conservation as a liberatory agent of social change in the Cape Flats of urban Cape Town. He is now finishing his master’s in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance at the University of Oxford, pursuing action-research on solidarities in-the-making through US movements for climate justice with which he will continue to build.