Youth Climate Journalist & Editorial Intern

Solar One

She/They

Mahiat Noor, known as May among friends and colleagues, is an avid angler, a bookworm, and a gardener with the opposite of a green thumb. They are a rising freshman at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. May’s parents immigrated from a small village in Sylhet, Bangladesh, in search of chances stolen from their homeland’s soil. There, reaching the nearest produce store meant crossing a fragile bamboo bridge. At six years old, she arrived in the US, where a bodega is just a five-minute walk from her home in Queens, New York.

May envisions a future where survival does not demand the sacrifice of conscience — where dignity is non-negotiable and care is practiced collectively, not conditionally. Committed to defending both the land and its people, they hope to work as an environmental lawyer in the nonprofit sector while pursuing PhD research in conservation, because real change requires confronting the systems that determine who bears the burden and who thrives off their sacrifice.

Currently, they are a Writer & Editorial Intern at The Warming Times, a climate journal created by Solar One’s Youth Advisory Council (YAC), of which they were also a proud member. Engaged in social, political, and climate activism since age 14, with a focus on their intersections, May has two years of experience coordinating grassroots mobilizations, served as DOE sustainability co-coordinator at her high school, led the establishment of its first greenhouse, and held a leadership role in communications and outreach for a progressive candidate in the 2025 NYC mayoral race.

She dreams of a future where we stop destroying our two greatest sources of wealth: the earth and its people. The pollution choking our planet is more than damage — it’s a war waged against nature, communities, humanity itself, and the futures yet unborn.