00:01
I recently graduated college where I studied environmental science and environmental sociology. Now during one of my many, many finals week study breaks, I came across something that piqued my interest -- and it wasn’t something I was supposed to be studying. It was a survey of 10,000 young people across ten different countries on their feelings regarding the climate crisis. A survey found that 56 percent of Gen-Zers, the generation that I’m a part of and the largest age demographic in the world, believe that because of the climate crisis, humanity is doomed. This felt like a punch in the gut. I had just spent four and a half years and tens of thousands of dollars studying these things: countless time organizing on and off campus and energy getting involved with both local and national groups, yet most of my generation viewed it all as pointless.


00:53
Now if we look at the way that younger generations talk about the climate crisis, these feelings of doom and despair make sense. I mean, we’re drowning in bad climate news. Headline after headline detail each week’s latest catastrophe. “Unprecedented” has taken on a new meaning as each day is unprecedented. Just count how many times you’ll probably hear it today. I gave you two ones for free right there. And everything is amplified on social media where there’s a remarkable lack of nuance and an oversupply of attention-grabbing rhetoric. Many of us, including myself, seem to believe that if we just share these awareness posts enough times that someone somewhere will finally do something about it. But unfortunately, Joe Biden probably doesn't follow you on Instagram, and he doesn’t follow me either -- yet.


01:42
I’m part of a diverse, 19-person-strong collective called EcoTok, and we use social media to share nuanced climate education through infographics, memes and you guessed it, TikToks, to our collective audience of over four million people, most of whom are Gen Z and millennials.


01:57
And through our work, we’ve picked up on this pattern. Our comments sections are filled with people who have given up hope. People who say they have weekly anxiety attacks about the climate crisis. Or that they don’t want to have kids anymore out of fear of adding to the suffering. Or that they see no point in taking action when the powers that stand against us are so strong.


02:20
Our generation and younger generations need a new way of addressing the climate crisis that unshackles us from the cycles of doom and gloom that so often lead to inaction, because we cannot play a part in making change if we do not believe that change is possible. Climate denialism, which for decades has been peddled by oil, gas and other big business interests, has met its rival: climate doomism. The belief that we cannot save our planet, so why take action? Though they differ in origin, both have the ability to paralyze action and prevent progress. And though things are bad, they’re far from over.


02:55
So how do we find hope when things feel hopeless, and how do we communicate the inextricable link between hope and action? To answer this, let me take you back to March of 2020 -- absolutely no one’s first choice of when to time travel to. Many of us were quarantined in our homes, people had stopped going out and socializing, yet the stream and virality of bad news certainly had not stopped. I was finishing up my semester at home, as well as working to move my activism online when I was hit, not only with COVID but also with burnout. I began to question the efficacy of my work, my passion for environmentalism and the purpose in studying what I was studying. I knew I needed something to inspire me. I was scrolling on social media, and I saw a friend who had been sharing positive news stories. I paired this with the rise of feel-good dance videos that had really emerged on TikTok and started a series called “Weekly Earth Wins.” Here's a look at one of those videos.


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So at first this felt really, really silly. I mean, what did dancing have to do with climate action? And what good was sharing good news when everything felt so bad?


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But then I began to receive people's feedback. People told me that these videos really helped mitigate their climate anxiety, that they looked forward to these videos week after week and that these videos helped turn their anger and anxiety into action. So I continued making them. And in the process of finding good news stories to share, I began to pick up on trends. Week after week, institutions were divesting from fossil fuels. Week after week, land was given back to Indigenous communities. And week after week, states were implementing renewable energy standards.
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