California and new motherhood woke her up. “At first it was all about the ozone, remember?” she says. Valletta took environmental-related classes at NYU in the wake of Al Gore’s early conversations around climate change. I vacillated from being melancholy to being overwhelmed with anxiety to partying.” After relocating to LA and having a child in 2000 with her ex-husband Chip McCaw, she transitioned into acting and made her first major film appearance in Robert Zemeckis’s What Lies Beneath. “I started modeling at 15!” Within a few years, she was making more money than she’d ever known. The first act of her life was a whirlwind. She modeled for Prada, Gucci, Versace et al. She belonged to the era of the ‘Supers’ and flat-shared with fellow ’90s icon Shalom Harlow. She’s been on the cover of American Vogue 16 times. In the ’90s, Valletta wasn’t known for environmentalism but for fashion. The ocean could be disgusting and full of plastic you can’t eat fish, go to a beach, see coral you can’t have the opportunity to be doctors, scientists or creators. I’ll be dead, but my great-grandkids? To live in a world where they wouldn’t experience this where they couldn’t see elephants or a whale. Valletta is the type of communicator who makes you remember the privilege of being alive – and appreciate the natural world that surrounds us. I’m not diminishing cancer or Aids, diabetes or addiction, but there won’t be anything left to fight for. This is the most important crisis we’re facing. As she was arrested, she could see those buildings. She recounts walking to a street between the Supreme Court and Capitol Hill and yelling. I will risk public opinion, being in jail,” she says. My life is worth putting out there, in order to show that all our lives are worth fighting for.” I can’t sit on the sidelines I need to physically put myself on the line. “I’ve been feeling this need to get loud to step into my own. Before Valletta participated in the recent DC protest, she spoke to her mother over the phone about her memories. “My mom wore a band that said ‘NO NUKES’.” They succeeded. She remembers, too, her mother’s arrest alongside a group of Native American activists who were protesting against the building of a power plant. “It was a brown pond, full of snakes and sh*t. In the summer, they’d go to the Blue Whale of Catoosa, off Route 66, which sits next to a man-made lake. “My best memories are of outside,” she says from an outdoor restaurant in the Palisades, a coastal neighborhood in LA that she now calls home. Her grandparents had a farm that she spent weekends running around, making forts, playing in the hay. The roots of her environmentalism trace back to her rural upbringing with her mother in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She’s a leader in sustainability in fashion, an activist who was arrested in Washington, DC, alongside Jane Fonda during climate-change protests in November last year. She doesn’t want to sleepwalk into the abyss. Here, modeling our new-season edit of sustainable clothing, she talks to EVE BARLOW about fashion, faith and her greatest fear.Īmber Valletta is a straight shooter. These days, though, the actor and activist is right in there – getting loud and getting arrested, protesting and putting herself on the line. As one of the original ‘Supers’, AMBER VALLETTA was a name associated with style and glamour, not climate and conservation.
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