From The Lexy Show, Season 9 — listen here
We spend a lot of time in this space talking about what to buy. The right water bottle. The organic cotton. The sustainable brand over the fast fashion one. Those things matter. But after talking with Ariel DeLaCruz, I’ve been sitting with a different question entirely: what if the starting point isn’t a product at all?
Ariel is an urban environmental activist and community organizer who runs school garden programs through Ground Education in Los Angeles bringing food education into classrooms that don’t always have access to it. She’s been working in this space for over eight years, across pretty much every type of environmental nonprofit you can imagine. And she didn’t grow up outdoors. Her parents took her to parks and beaches, but nature wasn’t something her family prioritized. It wasn’t until college, when she signed up for a backpacking class mostly because she needed something fun, that everything shifted.
She thought the class would be a walk in a park. It turned out to be her first time camping, first time backpacking, first time climbing a mountain. “It was the first time I ever felt peace,” she told me. “And I never knew how that could feel until that moment.”
That feeling is what she’s been chasing professionally ever since.
The Disconnect We Don’t Talk About Enough
Ariel has spent five years watching students in school gardens encounter something that most adults have also lost: an actual understanding of where food comes from. When you throw out an apple, most people see an apple. Ariel sees the sunlight, the water, the labor, the land, the transportation that went into getting it there. The whole chain is invisible until someone shows it to you.
It’s the same thing I see in fashion. A $2 shirt on SHEIN looks like a $2 shirt. But if a company needs to turn a profit on something that had to be grown or manufactured, dyed, sewn, shipped, and marketed, the math only works one way: someone on that supply chain isn’t getting paid. “That in itself costs more than $2,” Ariel said. “So someone somewhere is not getting paid correctly. Someone’s getting paid pennies.”
That’s not a hot take. That’s arithmetic.
Why Guilt Isn’t Working
Here’s what Ariel said that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. Sustainability, as it’s usually presented, is full of blame. You’re not doing enough. You bought the wrong thing. You’re not living right. And at some point, people just shut down. “If I’m not doing enough, why should I even do anything? What difference is it gonna make?”
She’s right that this is a real pattern, and she’s also right that it doesn’t change anyone.
What actually changes people is seeing someone else do something. I’ve watched this happen with my own brother. We have argued about milk for five years. My mom has a standing rule at family gatherings: no milk conversations. But when he came to visit my apartment, he noticed my countertop composter, asked what it was, started asking about my plants, and left with a composter ordered for himself. No debate. No lecture. He saw it working in a real person’s actual kitchen and got curious.
Ariel calls this the ripple effect. One person, one conversation. Then their partner. Then whoever comes over for dinner and asks what that thing on the counter is.
The Question That Actually Helps
Instead of asking whether something is sustainable (a word that’s been stretched so far it barely means anything), Ariel offers a simpler frame: does this help or harm me, and does it help or harm the planet? That’s it. You can apply it to a shirt, a meal, a habit. It doesn’t require a certification or a deep dive into supply chains. It just requires being honest.
When I started paying attention to this stuff, the choices I was making looked very different than what I do now. Five years from now they probably will again. That’s what Ariel kept coming back to — not doing it right, but noticing more over time.
Listen to the Full Episode of The Lexy Show
The full conversation with Ariel goes deep on environmental justice, food systems, her school garden work with Ground Education, and why reaching adults is so much harder than reaching kids. Listen to Season 9 of The Lexy Show wherever you get your podcasts. Find Ariel on Instagram at @arieljune.
Follow me on Instagram & TikTok @LexySilverstein
