In the final episode of Season 2, Laura Lee Cascada of The Every Animal Project and Campaigns Director at the Better Food Foundation joins Juliana to discuss her journey as an animal advocate, including her recent exposé of the Kanaloa Octopus Farm in her home of Hawaii, leading to a temporary shutdown. They discuss raising awareness for the ocean through mermaiding and co-habitating with a pig.
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Conversations with Animals is a monthly podcast hosted by Juliana examining our interconnection with nonhuman animal lives. Expect interviews with ecological writers, filmmakers, vegan chefs, animal-related spaces, artists, and more! Each month, a fresh companion newsletter is published. Subscribe: www.julianaroth.com/drawinganimals
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Laura Lee Cascada is a land-locked mermaid making waves for a just and sustainable world. She is a queer writer, activist, and budding ukulele player living in the mountains of Virginia with her furry, scaly, and oinky family members. For over a decade, Laura has campaigned for a better planet, including in her current role as Campaigns Director at the Better Food Foundation, where she works to reshape food norms around plant-based eating.
Laura earned her master’s degree in environmental policy from the Johns Hopkins University. She is the founder of Plight of the Hermies, a grassroots campaign advocating for wild hermit crab freedom, as well as The Every Animal Project, a collection of true stories and photographs of animals around the globe that is transforming how we relate with other species—with a print anthology set to be published in 2023. She published her debut novel, Dellie’s Run, in 2019, highlighting one being’s remarkable journey to freedom through a big dream: baseball. Laura also helped found and managed PR/marketing for the annual Hampton Roads VegFest for four years and has led social justice campaigns for groups like Northern Shenandoah Valley Unites.
In her downtime, Laura can be found traveling the globe in search of waterfalls; eating copious amounts of avocados; playing the ukulele; balancing rocks; and, of course, transforming into a mermaid. She is a PADI-certified mermaid and freediver, and her favorite place to go mermaiding is her second home, the Big Island of Hawaii. Her Vegan Mermaid Warrior Instagram and TikTok accounts, through which she has reached hundreds of thousands of people, host her advocacy videos for sea life, social justice, and her dueling disorders of OCPD and ME/CFS.
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Juliana is a writer, filmmaker, educator, and performer. She formerly lived as a volunteer on an organic farm in Maine, out of a backpack in the wilderness of Utah’s La Sal Mountains, and worked for the Ecology Center. She was selected as a VIDA Fellow with the Sundress Academy for the Arts for her fiction. Her writing appears in The Breakwater Review, Irish Pages, Los Angeles Review of Books as well as being produced as independent films that she directs. Her web series, The University, was nominated by the International Academy of Web Television for Best Drama Writing and screened at survivor justice nonprofits across the country. She teaches writing at NYU and is an Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction.
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Thinking beyond hierarchies with Laura Lee Cascada, founder of The Every Animal Project