Brenda Gabriel’s environmental consciousness was ignited after witnessing the destruction caused by Australia’s bushfires and a BBC documentary on waste.
Brenda Gabriel, 39, from London, recalls the moment her climate awareness deepened: watching the catastrophic bushfires that tore through Australia between September 2019 and March 2020. By the end, approximately 18.6 million hectares of land had burned, 5,900 structures were destroyed, three billion animals affected, and 34 lives lost.
Frustration surged as Gabriel watched, aware that Indigenous communities had warned of such fires. Her environmental concern had already been sparked by a 2018 BBC documentary on the impact of throwaway culture, with images of plastic waste flowing across oceans to distant countries, leaving her angry and discouraged by the scope of environmental damage.