Joy Reeves and Max Sano met on a Zoom call in 2021. Three years later, they’re engaged — and we at Planet Forward like to think that we get a bit of credit for the blossoming of their love story.

Reeves was a Planet Forward Correspondent at Duke University in 2023 and a Storyfest 2024 grand prize winner for her comic, “Your friendly neighborhood spider-party: Community scientists use spider webs to monitor air pollution.” She traveled to the Galápagos islands with Planet Forward and Lindblad Expeditions in July 2024. In the Galápagos, she reported on the Iguanas From Above project, which uses drone research to inform conservation efforts for marine iguanas. Reeves now works as the Assistant Director of Policy and Programs at the Rachel Carson Council. 

Sano was a Planet Forward correspondent in 2021 and a senior correspondent in 2022, in addition to being a multiple-time Storyfest finalist. A recent graduate of New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development with an M.A. in Food Studies, he currently works as the Organic Program Associate at Beyond Pesticides and has written extensively about agriculture and food systems.

The pair met when they were both recipients of the Udall Scholarship, which seeks to identify future leaders in environmental, Tribal public policy, and healthcare fields. We sat down with Joy and Max to discuss their work, their love story, and the role Planet Forward has played in their lives and careers.

Q: What is it that got both of you into the world of both environmental work and environmental storytelling?

Joy: I always kind of knew it was going to be an environmental focus for me. Like many folks, my parents are environmentalists; my dad worked in the EPA when he was my age, and in various organizations in D.C., so I grew up with those values. That, combined with the cartooning upbringing, lent itself very naturally to climate storytelling and environmental storytelling. The Udall Scholarship in undergrad, which is how we met, was a big catalyst in my decision to commit to the field. 

Max: She’s much more succinct than I am probably going to be. I did not grow up with that direct connection to environmental values or issues. I grew up in New York City, and I lived in lower Manhattan when Hurricane Sandy hit. It was a very big eye-opening moment, seeing how even a few blocks away from Wall Street and these huge, powerful institutions, nothing protects you from the climate crisis.

And so, as a 12-year-old at the time, also going to a middle school dubbed the “green school” because it had solar panels on the roof and taught about sustainability, it seemed like such a bizarre disconnect with my middle school trying to be this representation of the future, but then also the climate crisis undermining that.

I always liked to write and had an interest in following political issues; I was an intern at a local newspaper in high school, did different types of writing when I was a Model United Nations kid in high school, and carried on doing reporting in college. I knew I wanted to commit to storytelling, but I was being pulled in a lot of different directions, and I think getting involved in environmental research and learning how to communicate that to implement and change policy, is where I found a natural synergy of, “Oh, I can actually use storytelling and journalism to fulfill an advocacy role.”

Q: So y’all are engaged, and it’s kind of a Planet Forward love story. What is the story of how y’all came together? 

M: We met because we both were nominated as undergrads for the Udall Scholarship, and they help support young people and other professionals at the intersection of environmental policy, healthcare policy, and Indigenous and Native American affairs policy, and so we met through the undergraduate program.

It was supposed to be in person in Tucson, Arizona, for a three-day conference, and the intended outcome of the conference is to bring people together as college sophomores and juniors to begin to build those relationships and connections as we figure out what we want to do. But because of COVID, it was virtual, so I was very disappointed. It was a year out from when the pandemic began, so I think a lot of us were looking forward to building those relationships and connections.

Little did I know that we would be put in one of the Zoom breakout rooms to discuss media and storytelling, and Joy talked about her climate cartoons. At the time, I was part of the executive board for The Greenzine, a project out of my student environmental club, and I thought it’d be very cool to incorporate the work that she was doing. And because I hadn’t seen it before, it really was astounding to me, and I used that as an opportunity to reach out to Joy — through Zoom DM. I learned very quickly how similar we were, and we were able to talk online for a year, actually, before we met in person. We didn’t meet until maybe just under a year later when she was visiting New York, and we just hit it off.

J: There is some truth to the “Planet Forward love story” because he was in New York, I was in North Carolina, and we did not get to see each other very often. We were broke grad students. It was hard to get the plane ticket, get the train ticket, whatever it was — it was always difficult. So we ended up often applying to the same conferences and letting those conference experiences be a convenient coincidence to also spend time together.

But Planet Forward was different. I could tell Max was bringing me into his world and an organization he really connected with and cared about. I came to the Planet Forward Summit as a spectator, tagging along with Max, and by the end of it, I had gone to all these workshops, talked to all these people, and felt like a part of Planet Forward. I met a bunch of the correspondents, and I actually pulled Max aside and was like, “Am I stepping on your toes? Can I share this with you, or do you want this to be a Max thing?” And he very kindly was like, “No, you can totally apply to be a correspondent.”

So our Planet Forward Summit that we went to together was in 2023, and we started to picture ourselves living in D.C. for the first time. We were both here, we really loved the city, and then he proposed to me in May, so a month after the Planet Forward Summit.

Q: Both of y’all were Planet Forward correspondents and Storyfest finalists — y’all did all the really cool Planet Forward stuff. How do you think Planet Forward helped prepare you for the careers you’re working in now?

M: In the world of advocacy, you need to know how to leverage the power that journalists and journalism platforms have to help push forward new ideas that perhaps the general public hadn’t been thinking about. Part of what I have been doing is trying to figure out how we can leverage letters to the editor and op-eds to help push forward some of the objectives and the policy work that we want to do.

But also just learning how to distinguish between different characters and different actors and how to step into different shoes of different types of organizations, individuals, and entities — I feel like that’s something that Planet Forward was really helpful with for me. Knowing your audience when you’re trying to advocate for a certain type of policy solution is super important because how you talk with a farmer might be very different from how you talk with a public health professional or with a pesticide spraying company.

I think knowing how to take a step back and remove yourself from agendas that you agree with and agendas that you disagree with, and learning how to frame your solution in different ways is super powerful. That was something that I think Planet Forward was really helpful with.

J: I second all that, and I think the storytelling background has helped me in everything from meetings with senators to internal Zoom meetings on a boring Tuesday where storytelling might just brighten up the team’s day. So I think working in advocacy, and my work in advocacy, is grounded in the foundation of factual storytelling and journalistic integrity that I learned through Planet Forward.

I felt like I was able to just accelerate to the next level, because I had some comfort finding stories, but I had no idea how to even operate a digital camera until I went to the Galápagos, but I’m almost certain I’m going to keep pursuing photography for advocacy purposes, and that’s really exciting.

M: A big part of what I do as well is public comments, like testifying for and against bills. The only way you can really do that effectively is by crafting stories and making sure that you’re amplifying people’s lived experiences, and how they would be impacted by a new rule that the EPA is coming out with, or the reversal or the improvement of a certain rule that you know makes people’s eyes glaze over if you read it. But if you are able to come up with a template that is modifiable for members of your organization, it can be a super powerful tool for advocacy in that way too.

Q: Anything else y’all would like to share with the world of Planet Forward?

M: Being vulnerable is scary, whether it’s in your professional life or in your personal life, and that was definitely something that I think I had to consider when reaching out to Joy because I knew that our relationship was going to blend both worlds, but that’s part of why I knew that I wanted to pursue our relationship.

It was the perfect blend of having these shared professional and personal values. So I think that ties into advocacy and journalism work too, because learning how to be vulnerable and connect with your interviewees, and being able to just connect on a human level is very underrated and under-discussed. Part of being a journalist is learning to build that trust — if you can’t build relationships, it’s sort of a non-starter.

J: There is a certain beauty to starting a romantic relationship with someone who shares your values, fundamentally. And all jokes and memes about dating within the environmental movement aside, I think at the end of the day, when you’re sitting on the couch and you’re watching frustrating climate news or debates, and you have someone sitting next to you who’s on the exact same page as you and is being vulnerable and sharing those values, I would choose that person 1,000 times over. And that’s why, that’s why I chose Max.