In this episode of Compost, Cotton & Cornrows, host Dominique Drakeford sits with Heather McTeer Toney, executive director of the Beyond Petrochemicals campaign, 2025 Forbes Sustainability Leader, former mayor of Greenville Mississippi and former Regional Administrator for EPA Region 4. Together they explore what sustainability looks like when it begins with Black life, cultural memory and lived experience rather than policy jargon or extractive frameworks. Drawing from Heather’s leadership in cultural organizing, this conversation reframes environmentalism as something deeply familiar and rooted in the stewardship and wisdom of people who have always lived closest to the land.

From petrochemicals and plastics to fast fashion, beauty culture and agriculture, Dominique and Heather unpack how industries built on extraction continue to harm Black and brown communities while selling convenience as progress. Heather traces the lineage from plantations to petrochemical corridors, challenges loud definitions of wealth and calls for a quieter, more intentional vision of luxury grounded in health, longevity and collective care. This episode is both a reckoning and a love letter, reminding us that storytelling is our most underutilized renewable energy source. This is a joyous call to action to listen differently, consume intentionally and claim our role as architects of the futures we deserve.

https://www.beyondpetrochemicals.org/

Compost, Cotton & Cornrows: the space where Black & Afro-Indigenous Vanguards are redefining sustainability through storytelling!

@Compost_Cotton_Cornrows

In this episode of Compost, Cotton & Cornrows, Dominique Drakeford sits with Latham Thomas, renowned birth justice advocate, cultural theorist and founder of Mama Glow, a global maternal health and education platform transforming how birth, healing and care are practiced across communities worldwide. Known for pioneering a model of birth work rooted in Black feminism, spirituality and justice, Latham has shaped a generation of care workers. Together, they reframe sustainability as a living principle: regeneration grounded in lineage, community and the moral intelligence of Black women.

What follows is a powerful meditation on care as resistance. Latham names how carceral systems - medicine, media, immigration enforcement and state violence extract from Black bodies while denying dignity and why refusing the spectacle of Black pain is itself an act of protection. Drawing from Black matriarchy, Afrofuturism and ancestral technologies, she offers a blueprint for building futures that cannot be destroyed because they are encoded, relational and quietly revolutionary. This episode is an invitation to slow down and build with intention. She unapologetically reminds us to remember that Black women have always set the moral and spiritual standard for what survival, sustainability and freedom truly mean.

https://mamaglowfoundation.org/

Compost, Cotton & Cornrows: the space where Black & Afro-Indigenous Vanguards are redefining sustainability through storytelling!

@Compost_Cotton_Cornrows

This week, Compost, Cotton & Cornrows interrupts our regularly scheduled program. No guest. No interview. No promo assets.

Host Dominique Drakeford offers a short grounded reflection on nervous system care, burnout and the radical necessity of pause as a sustainability practice. In a world saturated with trauma, crisis and constant resistance, this episode reframes rest and re-regulation as political acts of preservation and power - especially for Black women and Black mothers.

This is not an escape from the work, it’s maintenance for the mission.
Because sustainability must center the care of Black women as well as care as an infrastructure. 🌱

Compost, Cotton & Cornrows: the space where Black & Afro-Indigenous Vanguards are redefining sustainability through storytelling!

@Compost_Cotton_Cornrows