Climate Defenders Saying ‘OK Doomer’ and It’s Not Too Late


Alaina Wood is well aware that, planetaryly speaking, things are not looking that great. he studied scary climate reportswatched disaster weather events and lived through more than a few dark nights of the soul.

He’s also part of a growing cast of people, many of whom are young, battling the climate catastrophe, struggling with the idea that it’s too late to turn things around. They believe that focusing solely on terrible climate news can sow fear and paralysis, encourage inaction, and become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

with the war in Ukraine a driving force for accelerated production They say it’s more urgent than ever to focus on fossil fuels, especially all good climate work done locally. “People are almost tired of hearing how bad it is; The narrative needs to be moved to solutions,” said Ms Wood, a 25-year-old sustainability scientist who relays many of her climate messages on TikTok, the most popular social media platform among young Americans. “Science says everything is bad. But the longer it takes action, the worse it will get.”

Some climate advocates refer to the position of Ms. Wood and her allies as follows: “Okay, Doomer,” “OK, explosion,“Gen Z refutes the disdain from older people.

If awareness of the climate crisis has never been greater, so has a growing sense of fear over its unfolding effects, especially among young people. According to a 2020 Pew survey, two-thirds of Americans think the government is doing too little to tackle climate change. questionnaire Last year, it found that three-quarters of 10,000 youth and young adults in 10 countries fear the future.

There is also a growing consensus that depression and eco-anxiety are important. completely natural responses to the constant barrage of terrible environmental news. Climate legislation stalled in Congress with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its implications for the environmental crisis did little to help.

Yet people like Ms. Wood and her thriving community of climate communicators believe that being stuck in the climate apocalypse helps maintain a status quo based solely on consumption and fossil fuels. Via social media, he and other “eco-creators” offer alternative narratives that highlight positive climate news as well as ways people are coping with the crisis in their daily lives.

As well as alleviating their own eco-anxieties, they found a growing audience that was hungry for what they had to say.

In the summer of 2021, Ms. Wood, whose arm @thegarbagequeen, started creating TikTok videos. refute extreme examples of climate apocalypse — among them, that all humanity will perish within decades — and gains a variety of climate: Creation of North America’s first whale shelter, a planned deal to reduce plastic pollution, construction of a massive wind farm off the coast of the UK.

He said that after making this change, his follower count has tripled from about 100,000 to 300,000 today. Ms. Wood also helped set up a TikTok group of like-minded climate advocates called Eco-Tok, and said the hashtags #ecotok have more than 200 million views.

Caulin Donaldson, 25, @trashCaulin joined TikTok in December 2019 to record her daily events. garbage collection pilgrimage From the beaches near his home in St. Petersburg, Florida. His short videos were upbeat and funny: he aired a “Twelve Days of Trash” series in December. He also furnished his new apartment using second-hand items, framing it as a scavenger hunt. By October 2020, she had one million followers. It reached 1.4 million today.

Ms. Wood and Mr. Donaldson say their followers are taking environmental precautions both online and offline.

Ms Wood, who lives in Tennessee, said she has helped thousands of people sign environmental petitions and participate in climate strikes. “I was able to organize in ways I could never have imagined,” she said.

On TikTok, Mr. Donaldson is highlighting videos of beach cleanups where his followers, whom he says are mostly children aged 7-14, collect and inspire them. By portraying sustainability and climate action as positive and fun “rather than this stale or lame adult thing,” Mr. Donaldson aims to be a gateway for young people to take greater action down the road.

“I hate when people say one person can’t change something,” said Mr. Donaldson. “It takes an entire group, but it takes one person to get started. Someone to inspire. Someone to raise their voice.”

Given that fossil fuel companies, large corporations, and governments are responsible for the overwhelming majority of carbon emissions that warm the planet, there is debate over the role that individual actions play in the climate crisis. Focusing on one person’s influence is useless, guilt-inducing distraction, they say. As an example of changing crime, they point to marketers for oil giant BP, which helped popularize the concept of an individual’s carbon footprint.

But presenting the climate crisis as too great or stubborn can cause people to become numb and out of control, said Sarah Jaquette Ray, chair of environmental studies at Humboldt California State Polytechnic University and author of “A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety.” “To combat the sense of powerlessness, it encourages people to see themselves as part of a common foundation of environmental groups working around the world and to resist getting down the rabbit hole of climate horror stories.

He said that if people don’t have control over geopolitical turbulence, they should focus on where they can make a difference. Dr. “If the problem is too big and we’re too small, which is what the apocalyptic narrative is telling us, then we need to make the problem smaller and make us bigger,” Ray said.

He later added that regardless of the administration in power or whether certain policies were implemented, the climate crisis would be “the struggle of our ups and downs”. “It takes courage and discipline to continue to improve community and health where you are, especially in the midst of such bad news,” he said.

Many climate advocates say there are benefits to pushing for systemic change while taking personal action. Individual actions can have broader implications, as with Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, whose solo school strikes for climate eventually turned into an international movement.

“Both can coexist,” said 25-year-old Isaias Hernandez, who posts climate justice videos on social media under this pseudonym. QueerBrownVegan. “There can be big and local changes at the same time. Your input is still important. You are influencing someone around you. Current and future generations can benefit.”

Like many climate advocates, Kristy Drutman has gone through her own dark period of eco-despair. Ms. Drutman, 26, is of Filipino and Jewish descent, and for her, crisis hit home during her freshman year at the University of California, Berkeley. That’s when Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines and left 7300 dead. Soon after, as an anti-fracking activist on campus, Ms. Drutman was horrified that university and state officials did not share her sense of urgency.

She began posting her disappointment on social media under the banner of browngirl_green, and soon concluded that many communities of color already affected by climate change and environmental destruction don’t have the time or privilege to “get lost in the climate apocalypse.” “They need to focus on solutions,” he added, “because their survival is literally at stake.”

Philip Aiken, 29, who hosts the “Just to save the world” podcast, said the privilege was also reflected in his “too late” attitude.

“’It’s too late now’ means ‘I want to be as comfortable as possible throughout my life because I am already relaxed’,” said Mr. Aiken. “’It’s too late now’ means ‘I don’t have to do anything and I have the responsibility and I can continue to exist as I want’.”

Mr. Aiken watches the climate news to avoid his own sense of doom. He found a metric: Focus on 20 percent problems and 80 percent solutions. He’s starting to understand that he has a lifetime’s work ahead of him and is focusing on grassroots movements and influencing local change. “This job gives me satisfaction,” he said, “it keeps me optimistic about a future where we can still survive and thrive.”

Kate Marvel, a research scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University, said that even she froze when faced with fear-based climate messages. But his own focus is on everything humans can still do. He noted the positive effects of federal clean air and water legislation and the Montreal Protocol signed in 1987 for the phasing out of ozone-depleting chemicals that help heal the ozone depletion. prevented millions of skin cancer cases one year and got worse global warming.

Dr. “We still face very serious threats, that’s legitimate,” Marvel said. However, this does not mean that no policy has been effective and that no progress has been made. And that certainly doesn’t mean that progress isn’t possible.”

Or, as Mary Annaïse Heglar, a climate experimenter and co-host of the Hot Take podcast and newsletter, puts it, “Look into all lifetimes at the balance between 1.5 and 1.6 degrees.” He was talking about additional drought, heat, flooding and devastating storms that scientists say will result in some degree of global warming with every fraction of it.

The worse the climate apocalypse is for Ms. Heglar, the worse what she calls “hopeium” – the unfounded optimism that someone else will find a magic climate solution like a silver bullet.

Heglar said, “Under the evil and hope, the ‘Will we win?’ He has a question,” he said. “It’s early at this point. We have to ask ourselves if we can try. We don’t know if we can win or not until we try. It will be worth it whether we do it or not.”



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