Young climate activists find a powerful voice on social media

Imagine this: You get an alert about a fire near your home. Acrid smoke fills the air and the sky turns from blue to an eerie orange.

Or this: You hear about a massive coal ash spill just hours from your home, and you don’t know how to react.

Or this: You keep seeing headlines about melting ice sheets — that the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free by 2050 — and you wonder for a moment whether you’ll outlive polar bears.

Where do you go when you need more information? Young people increasingly look to social media as their main source of news. Adweek survey found that 56% of teens ages 14 to 18 learn about climate change from TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and other apps, where young activists are sounding the alarm and urging action.

Alice JoshiFor example, she felt the impact of climate change as a high school junior in 2018, when California experienced its deadliest wildfire season. Today, the 22-year-old is the executive director of Generation-Z for changeAn organization that uses TikTok to empower young people and influence national climate policy.

Shia BastidaThe 22-year-old, an indigenous activist from Mexico, grew up hearing the words “climate change.” At 17, she co-organized a climate march in New York City and took the first steps to becoming a leading indigenous advocate in climate policy. Today she is the executive director of the Re-Earth Initiative, which focuses on the interconnectedness of the climate crisis and has a strong presence on Instagram.

Bastida and Joshi don’t consider themselves content creators; they are social activists who post on social media to spread a message.

Alaina Wood, 28, took a different path to activism. After graduating from college, she worked at a solid waste facility, and later, drafted environmental plans and grants for a local government agency. When state budget cuts ended her work in East Tennessee, she decided to become a full-time content creator, combating misinformation on social media as the “Trash Queen.” She accepts sponsorships and posts sponsored ads from companies that align with her environmental and political views.

These three women, like many of their peers, underscore the need for proactivity and readiness and remind their followers that young people have much more to lose than older generations. They recognize the importance of social media and embrace engaging their peers where they are.

Alice Joshi

Joshi, a 2023 UC Berkeley graduate, began posting during the pandemic. As she read about the climate crisis and the state of environmental policies, including efforts by the Trump administration to roll back protections, she shared statistics on TikTok — that One study found 1 in 6 deaths was linked to air pollution or every degree of temperature rise leads to a drop in crop yields. His eighth video criticizing then-President Trump’s policies on COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter protests went viral and he began to understand the art of using social media as a tool.

“I had no ability to do this, but after four years, I have figured out how to do it,” Joshi said.

Joshi joined other activists and creators in “TikTok for Biden,” which was founded to protest the Trump administration’s policies ahead of the 2020 election.

The organisation changed its name Generation-Z for change in early 2021 to reflect its growing interest and advocacy. Today, Gen-Z for Change has nearly 2 million followers on TikTok, and Joshi has over 200,000 followers on her personal account.

In July 2023, Joshi created a stir on the internet when a video of him interrupting a White House official went viral.

Earlier that year, the Biden administration approved the $8 billion Willow drilling project in Alaska, which President Biden opposed. Pledge At a young voter summit aimed at ending fossil fuel leasing on federal lands and angering climate activists who have been lobbying against it, Joshi took a shaky breath, interrupting White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who had just said that the administration was listening to what young voters were saying about climate change.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, but asking politely does not work,” Joshi said. His voice faltered, but he added: “One million people wrote to the administration urging them not to approve a destructive oil drilling project in Alaska, and we were ignored. … Will the administration stop approving new oil and gas projects and align with youth, science, and front-line communities from Alaska’s North Slope to Louisiana?”

In this conversation, Jean-Pierre said that Biden has done more to tackle climate change than any previous president. This conversation attracted a lot of people on TikTok. Joshi said that after 30 million views, he lost track.

“I got emails from fathers saying, ‘I don’t really agree with you on this oil conversation, but the way you communicated it, I was really proud of how you presented the information,’” he said of the situation that followed. “And I mean, I got death threats … but I think the nice comments outweighed that.”

After the disruption video went viral, Joshi felt there was a “huge change in momentum” with the Biden administration. The White House ultimately canceled seven oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and committed to protecting 13 million acres in the western Arctic — something Joshi said wouldn’t have been possible without the #StopWillow movement and youth organizing online.

“TikTok campaigns are incredibly valuable because they create a kind of context for how this thing, which is acceptable at first glance, becomes unacceptable,” Julie Saez, a professor of American studies at UC Davis, said of the social media campaigns.

“It’s sad that it comes from pressure, it comes from pleading,” Joshi said. “But you know, it doesn’t come from polite Zoom conversations.”

Shia Bastida

Xiye Bastida’s parents met at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, and as she was growing up, climate became a regular topic of conversation over dinner and at family gatherings.

In 2015, when she was 13, Bastida’s hometown, San Pedro Tultepec, about 30 miles southwest of Mexico City, was flooded after several years of drought. “Once you start to see this in your life, you have no choice but to take action,” she said.

Bastida and her family moved to New York City, where her parents began working at an environmental organization called the Center for Earth Ethics, and Bastida began learning about the organization. The risks here were lower than in Mexico, Where indigenous environmental activists could become targets,

By 2019 she was organizing climate marches for Fridays for Future in New York City, but says she found her community in the online world, where she helped build an international coalition with other environmental activists.

Bastida, who recently received a degree in environmental studies from the University of Pennsylvania, spends most of her time working for the Re-Earth Initiative.

During the annual United Nations climate conferences, Bastida will be answering questions from some of her 85,000 followers on Instagram Live about the latest happenings at the event. Bastida says she understands she can play a role in influencing what people see online, especially when it comes to calls to action.

“I think if I’m able to access this space, I’ll be able to share information not only with the people I’m in group chats with, but also with people who aren’t (only) interested in climate,” she said.

In general, Bastida said, the social media platform has had a positive impact on her life because it introduced her to the community of environmental activists in other parts of the world. Through her work, she connected with Greta Thunberg of Sweden and indigenous Ecuadorian environmentalist Helena Gualinga.

“That’s where I found my global community, and that’s how we can reach out to people,” he said.

Alaina Wood

Alaina Wood realized something when she was in middle school environmental disasterR – A coal ash spill into the Emory River west of Knoxville, Tennessee, which released toxic sludge containing arsenic and mercury. It was an awakening – for the first time he felt he had to do something Some.

In high school, she led an effort to get water bottle filling stations installed on campus. At the University of Tennessee, Wood picked up and sorted trash spewed by 100,000 people at football games. She earned degrees in sustainability and geography and describes herself as a sustainability scientist.

After graduation, Wood got a job as an environmental compliance coordinator for a private landfill company, after which she began working on solid waste management projects at the First Tennessee Development District, an organization of local governments.

When the pandemic lockdown began, Wood joined TikTok and posted “silly” videos. But after a while, her “For You” page — a curated feed for users — began to include environmental content.

“Some of them were really nice. They were accurate,” he recalled. “Others were a little bit more worrying. They were either full of misinformation or they were full of this idea that if you’re not completely zero-waste, you’re not a good environmentalist.”

Posting as Garbage Queen, Wood made a video about the zero-waste movement, saying that it sometimes leads to adverse consequences that promote consumerism and increase waste. The video became popular, and she found a community that cared about her point of view.

In the summer of 2021, when “climate doom” became a trend, he began working on a series on TikTok called Good Climate News, where he offered a weekly roundup of studies and positive stories to counter the flood of pessimism. In four months, he garnered 75,000 followers, more than the population of his hometown.

“A lot of people don’t see all the amazing discoveries I’ve made by reading scientific studies,” he said. “I think my job is to say, ‘Hey, I found this really cool thing that you probably wouldn’t have seen otherwise. It’s not too late.'”

Wood said about 75% of her readers are under the age of 40, and as she reads studies, reports, and stories, she feels the need to make sure everything she posts online is accurate and encouraging.

When the #StopWillow campaign did not stop a drilling project in Alaska, he worried it might lead to apathy among young people, but followers told him his videos inspired readers to consider careers in environmentalism.

“There have been times when I’ve been very concerned about how people will respond, because my audience is really young. They’re very volatile right now,” she said. “If I say something wrong, I might make someone panic. But if I say something right, I might get them engaged in activism.”