The lights dimmed inside a theater in Medellín on April 22 for the first public screening in Colombia of the documentary Brigitte: Planet B.
Brigitte Baptiste arrived alongside her wife and the film’s director, Santiago Posada, for a panel discussion moderated by Andrés Roldán. Sitting at the center of the stage, Baptiste’s bright blue dress and sheer black stockings caught the theater lights as she crossed her legs to speak.
The documentary follows Baptiste through conversations about biodiversity, gender, Indigenous cosmologies, and climate change, tracing the intellectual and personal evolution of one of Colombia’s most recognizable environmental thinkers.
But beyond the film’s intimate portrait lies one of the country’s most influential — and at times controversial — environmental voices.
Baptiste, 62, is not only one of Latin America’s most visible transgender intellectuals. She is also a biologist, conservation studies expert, former director of Colombia’s Humboldt Institute, and current chancellor of Ean University.
She has become a central figure in debates around mining, fossil fuels, biodiversity, and post-conflict deforestation.
Her public philosophy is rooted in “queer ecology,” a field that challenges rigid distinctions between nature, gender, and identity. The idea, explored throughout the documentary, suggests that expressions of gender and sexuality across species are far more complex than traditional social categories tend to recognize.
“It’s a universal discussion about change and stability,” Baptiste said during an interview with The Bogotá Post. “While we’ve been living better every century after millions of years of evolution and hundreds of thousands of years of culture and humanity, we’ve been used to what we are.”
For Baptiste, transition is not a moment but a condition of life itself.
A politics of transition
In March, Colombian centrist politician Sergio Fajardo announced he would appoint Baptiste as his environment minister if he won the 2026 presidential election. He fell far short of qualifying for a runoff with just 3% of votes.
Nonetheless, Baptiste rejects the idea that ministers can simply impose change from above.
“The ministry has to find ways to open up future possibilities,” she explained. “The role of a minister is to identify quick spots where solutions can be prompted by other actors, by indigenous groups, by mayors in the cities, by entrepreneurs, by international authorities.”
Baptiste sees environmental policy as a process of delegation and concertation, where a minister’s role is to create space for practical adaptation rather than impose rigid ideological positions.
That perspective also informs her views on the global transition away from fossil fuels. Earlier this year, Colombia hosted the first international conference dedicated to moving beyond oil, gas, and coal in the Caribbean city of Santa Marta, bringing together more than 60 countries frustrated by the limited progress of recent climate summits.
Baptiste, who could not attend the conference, nevertheless praised what she perceives as its most imperative aspect in this discussion: recognizing the sheer complexity of abandoning fossil fuels.
“There’s worries that, without oil, economies will collapse,” she warned. “So that’s what the word transition was made for.”
At this point in the interview, the conversation drifted naturally from energy transition to her own gender transition. Transition, Baptiste argued, never fully ends.
“Cultural evolution, biological evolution, technological evolution have a flow, a path that can be opened in many branches”, she said, referring to transition as the rule for evolution. “But every time this happens, the time scale is fundamental.”
Between activism and industry
In 2025, Canadian company Aris Mining appointed Baptiste to its board of directors, presenting her environmental expertise as part of its sustainability strategy. Critics accused her of legitimizing extractive industries at a time of growing ecological crisis.
Baptiste argues that refusing engagement with corporations ignores the realities of Colombia’s environmental conflicts.
Illegal gold extraction, she said, has become one of the country’s main drivers of ecological destruction, corruption, and violence. Unlike cocaine trafficking, gold circulates within the legal economy, making it easier for criminal groups to profit from mining operations.
“Gold is quite important for the economy, and if we have the technology to make gold extraction part of a legal economy, why shouldn’t we?” she asked. “Especially if this approach can also offer options for those doing illegal extraction.”
She pointed to her previous opposition to mining projects she considered environmentally dangerous, including the controversial Eco Oro project in the Santurbán páramo ecosystem, where she submitted testimony on behalf of the Colombian state during international arbitration proceedings.
The same pragmatic logic appears in her views on environmental conflicts involving corporations and local communities. In the recent dispute between Coca-Cola and residents of La Calera over water extraction near Bogotá, Baptiste publicly defended the importance of technical evidence, arguing that local authorities had failed to provide adequate public water infrastructure before turning the conflict into a political battle against the company.
“In many places, the government is using the communities to do politics and to create electoral agendas against companies,” she argued. “In fact, that’s what I think is a risk: that we bash the private sector.”
The limits of conservation
Few issues reveal Baptiste’s worldview more sharply than Colombia’s invasive hippo crisis.
The descendants of Pablo Escobar’s illegally imported hippos have multiplied rapidly across Colombian wetlands, alarming scientists who warn about ecosystem destruction and threats to local communities. A 2022 scientific report backed by institutions, including the Humboldt Institute, recommended euthanasia as part of population control measures.
“We need to really go for the hippos,” Baptiste asserted. “Sacrifice them with all the sadness.”
The debate reflects what she sees as one of conservation’s hard truths: ecosystems are already shaped by human intervention, and preserving biodiversity sometimes requires uncomfortable decisions.
That realism also shapes her interpretation of deforestation in the Colombian Amazon after the 2016 peace deal with the FARC guerrillas. International observers often assumed the end of conflict would reduce environmental destruction. Instead, deforestation surged in regions like Caquetá as armed groups, cattle ranchers, and international criminal networks moved into territories previously controlled by guerrillas.
“The government never reached those forests that were now empty from guerrillas,” Baptiste said. “So they were easily caught again by mafias.”
By the end of the conversation, Baptiste returned to the idea that climate change, conflict, and environmental degradation will continue forcing societies to adapt in unpredictable ways, and to keep in mind that every transition can be fluid. Younger generations, she said, will have to imagine new ways of living through those crises while preserving spaces for disagreement without turning difference into hostility.
“We need to discuss respectfully,” she said. “Even if you think totally differently.”
Featured image: Brigitte Baptiste
Image credit: Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín.
