Red has worked for close to three decades with international climate, development and environment campaigning organizations spanning South, Southeast, East, and Central Asia. He is the author of The Poverty of Memory: Essays on History and Empire and was part of the anthologies Letters to the Earth (HarperCollins, 2019) with Yoko Ono, Mary Oliver, Emma Thompson and Mark Rylance, Humanity (Paloma Press, 2018) with Eileen Tabios, Laura Mullen, and Murzban F. Shroff, Literary Encounters: A Comprehensive Worktext in 21st Century Literature from the Philippines (University of San Carlos Press, 2016), and the Japanese publication The World Can be Changed: An Anthology for Posterity (TUP/Seven Forest Bookstore, Tokyo: 2004), along with Ariel Dorfman, Jane Goodall, Chalmers Johnson, and Sami Ramadani.
As head of the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities (ICSC), he published and contributed to what might be the world’s first literary anthology, Agam: Filipino Narratives on Uncertainty and Climate Change (ICSC, 2014), which was awarded three national book awards. He writes for several publications, and his essays on history, memory, environment and development have been translated into several languages.