Summer Rayne Oakes

Oakes was named Summer Rayne due to being born during a downpour in June 1984. Oakes's concern for the environment began early: while growing up, she would post photographs of appliances and dead animals left alongside local roads, hoping to shame the owners into removing their litter. While she attended Lakeland High School, she also worked at the Lackawanna County Conservation District biosolids program, which applied treated sewage sludge onto farmland. to Cornell University, where she studied natural resources, ecology, and entomology. There she jointly published two papers on sludge toxicity and contaminants, but she was frustrated by how she couldn't communicate the relevance of her work beyond a narrow audience of scientists, and noticed how much more attention advertising and media received. == Career ==

Model 2013: (left to right) Summer Rayne Oakes, Petra Němcová, Stuart Chapman, Kyleigh Kühn Oakes began modeling in New York City during her sophomore year in Cornell. The moniker has since been taken up by multiple newspapers in the US, UK, and Canada. These principles lost her multiple campaigns and her first New York City modeling agency contract, before she signed with Faith Kates of Next Model Management, who approved of them. and was featured in a CNN video interview as part of the series "Young People Who Rock". In 2011, Oakes represented Aveeno beauty products in creating a temporary "pop-up" forest in Times Square. She also appeared in an environmental short film, eXtinction, which was shown at festivals around the world. She was photographed for the 2013 Pirelli Calendar by Steve McCurry. In 2012, designers for the Toyota Prius C said that they created the subcompact hybrid electric vehicle with Oakes in mind and named the "Summer Rain Metallic" paint color after her. Activist . Oakes says she sees modeling as "a conduit to get into socially responsible causes" such as fair trade and pollution from the textile and garment industry. She spoke about fair trade and the textile industry at the Hong Kong World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference of 2005 She teaches others to grow plants in a Brooklyn neighborhood community garden. She hosted the 2007 season of Singapore-based environmental television program Eco 4 the World. In 2008, Oakes became an environmental reporter on Planet Green, an environmental-focused network from Discovery Communications. She served as a correspondent for the program G Word, during which she reported from a methane-recapture farm, climbed windmills, and swam in the Pacific Trash Vortex. She had her own environmentally friendly fashion and beauty advice column "Ask Summer Rayne" on the Planet Green web site. Discovery relaunched Planet Green with a different focus in 2012. Oakes launched her first book, Style, Naturally, in early 2009. It is a shopping guide to eco-friendly fashion and beauty products. SugarDetoxMe began as a 2014 blog and website to document Oakes's 30-day removal of free sugars from her diet, then grew to a program to help others do the same. In 2017, it was joined by a book of recipes of the same name, partly based on Dr. Mark Hyman's book The Blood Sugar Solution; Hyman also endorses Oakes's program. Oakes's third book, How to Make a Plant Love You: Cultivating Your Personal Green Space, scheduled for July 2019, grew out of her experiences with the hundreds of plants she cultivated in her apartment and is accompanied by a website "Homestead Brooklyn", a YouTube series "Plant One On Me", and an online course "Houseplant Masterclass". Entrepreneur In April 2009, Oakes partnered with Payless ShoeSource to create "Zoe & Zac", a line of eco-friendly low-priced shoes and accessories. Products were made of organic cotton, linen, hemp, jute, recycled rubber, and water-based glues and priced at or below $30. Her website, Le Souk, formerly Source4Style, founded with business partner Benita Singh in 2010, connects environmentally conscious fashion designers to small-scale, ecologically friendly fabric producers. Oakes says that companies listed on the site were put through a sustainability questionnaire based on the Eco Index, and their certifications were checked. The site also contains articles about sustainable fashion. Celebrity "curators", including Amanda Hearst, Angela Lindvall, and Ada Zanditon, wrote content for the site. Source4Style won a 2011 Cartier Women's Initiative Award, including $20,000. == Home ==

in her home, in 2018 Since 2005, Oakes has lived in a loft apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which she has filled with plants: over 500 plants by 2016, and 670 by 2017. A bedroom served as the headquarters of Source4Style for the company's first 18 months. When the company left, Oakes began transforming the room into an indoor vertical garden. Her first plant was a Ficus lyrata, which had grown to tall and conformed to the ceiling by 2016. Other plants include herbs, sweet potatoes, pineapples, bananas, and her favorite genus, Peperomia. Her kitchen hosts a mason-jar plant garden that Oakes built with her father, as well as compost and vermiculture bins. A closet is filled with kitchen plants, succulents live in the bathroom, and vines drape over walls and furniture. The plants take 30 minutes each day to water, and 90 minutes each weekend to fertilize and prune. In January 2021 Summer officially acquired two plots of land in Spencer, New York, for a purchase price of $540,000. These two plots, 49.97 acres and 9.15 acres, in addition to her already owned 14.34 acre plot total 73.46 acres. The lot in between, which is 24.7 acres, most likely completes her 98.16 acre compound. The land was purchased by her and two friends pooling money together and purchasing it under the limited liability company, Compound Collaborative, LLC. She and her two friends subsidize the cost of the compound by capitalizing on the community in the Ithaca area as a resource – generating advertising revenue on each YouTube video published explaining the life of a local. In June 2017 Oakes began to foster a Rhode Island Red hen that was an abandoned Easter gift. Oakes named her Kippee (from ) and took her on the street in a bird carrier, on the subway, and to photo shoots, attracting attention from media and passersby. Eventually Kippee got photo shoots of her own, including commercials for Lululemon and Celestial Seasonings tea. Kippee died in November 2019. == Publications ==

Peer-reviewed articles • • Books • • • == References ==