Water Protector & Miccosukee Environmental Advocate
Betty Osceola
Betty Osceola is a Miccosukee environmental activist and water protector whose life and work are inseparable from the Everglades. A fierce advocate for Indigenous sovereignty and ecological survival, she carries the knowledge of a place that remembers everything, where water is not a resource, but a relative.
Through her leadership, Betty helps translate the Everglades not as scenery, but as a living system under pressure, and a teacher we've been ignoring. In A Guide to Being a Good Neighbor, she grounds the series in lived truth, guiding us through the spiritual and political stakes of water, land, and survival with clarity, grace, and unshakable resolve.
Artist, Python Hunter & Everglades Transformer
Elle Barbeito
Elle Barbeito is a Miami-raised artist and designer whose work turns confrontation into craft, transforming invasive Burmese python skins into fashion, objects, and living symbols of ecological consequence. Her practice is visceral, meticulous, and deeply place-based: she hunts, skins, and preserves materials herself, bridging survival knowledge with high-level artistic language.
Working at the edge of beauty and brutality, Elle asks what it means to live responsibly inside a damaged ecosystem, and how we metabolize what threatens it. In A Guide to Being a Good Neighbor, she brings a rare kind of story: one where climate, art, and ethics collide in the body, in the swamp, in real time, making environmental truth tactile, wearable, and impossible to ignore.
Marine Biologist, Coral Cultivator & Art-Science Storyteller
Colin Foord
Colin Foord is a Miami-based marine biologist, coral aquaculturist, and filmmaker whose work dissolves the boundary between science and wonder. As co-founder of Coral Morphologic, he has helped pioneer new ways of documenting, cultivating, and protecting coral reefs, building a visual language that makes ocean ecosystems feel intimate, alive, and urgently worth defending.
His practice isn't just education; it's translation: turning the hidden rhythms of marine life into something we can finally see, feel, and respond to. In A Guide to Being a Good Neighbor, Colin expands the series beyond land into the luminous, vulnerable worlds offshore, reminding us that being a neighbor doesn't stop at the shoreline.
Two-Spirit Poet, Miccosukee Activist & Love the Everglades Movement
Houston Cypress
Reverend Houston R. Cypress is a Two-Spirit Miccosukee poet, artist, and environmental activist whose work moves through ecology as ceremony, story, and resistance. As founder of Love the Everglades Movement, Houston bridges Traditional Ecological Knowledge with contemporary cultural language, advocating for land and water protection while holding space for spirit, community, and sovereignty.
Through practices like deep listening, ritual, and service, he offers a worldview where the Everglades is not a backdrop, but an ancestor, and where healing is not separate from action. In A Guide to Being a Good Neighbor, Houston brings the series its deeper frequency: a grounding reminder that ecological survival is also cultural survival, and that reverence can be a form of power.
