Agony Aunt Mikaela Loach Answers Climate Anxiety Dilemmas

This piece is part of The Jade Issue, a special issue of Polyester guest-edited and curated by Jade Thirlwall. Jade handpicked each of the musicians, activists, writers and it girls in the magazine as an exercise in trying to create the publication she wishes she’d been able to read growing up. Get your copy here!

Photography: Lewis Vorn | Makeup: Grace Ellington | Hair: Sky Cripps-Jackson | Photography Assist: Misha MN

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Climate anxiety is real and an ever growing threat without any real answers being offered to what we can do to help. Heads spin with questions like Are we doing enough individually to play our part for the environment? If not, how do we get more involved? And how do we stay hopeful in the face of issues that can make us feel so hopeless? 

To try and give guidance on these seemingly insurmountable problems, we’ve enlisted author and climate justice activist Mikaela Loach. Mikaela has been at the forefront of the UK climate movement for years, having taken the UK government to court and challenged billionaires on their intentions for environmental activism. If anyone is well placed to answer climate-related dilemmas, it’s her. Take it away Mikaela…

Dear Mikaela, I really want to live a more climate-friendly life, but I feel really conflicted about whether that will actually be useful. I hear people say so much that the only changes that will really affect our lives will come from the polluting corporations themselves, so I don’t know if there’s anything I can actually do to help. Have you got any advice?

I think sometimes you can focus too much on individual action. We can become obsessed with, say, our individual carbon footprint and the guilt of that. But the carbon footprint was an idea that was popularised by BP and BP is one of the most polluting companies in the world, so it’s worth asking if they are wanting us to focus on individual impacts, does this really serve climate justice? Or is it more to distract us from their activities?

I remember when I was at uni, I was feeling so climate anxious that I couldn't sleep at night. I would literally lie awake at night, just stressed about whether I'd have a future or not. I would be trying to make my own oat milk and everything. I was living in Edinburgh, and I remember realising that most people couldn't do all that stuff – they can’t go to five different shops to get their groceries. A mum, who has like, multiple jobs can’t do that. I thought, “If all of these choices aren't accessible to people in my community, are they really solutions?”

Instead, I think we should be collectively campaigning for a world in which so-called bad choices have been removed from the equation, so all of us are able to live more climate friendly lives, because if it's just rich people who can live these climate friendly lives, is it really going to solve everything? 

It is, however, a balance, because climate models show that we do actually need to change things in our lives. So we are gonna have to live different lives in some ways, in the sense of, we are going to have to take public transport more and we are going to have to consume less than we currently do. But I don't see that as a loss. I think most of us consume more than we actually need to be happy, but we're kind of told that happiness is consumption. 

Ultimately, I’d say: don't overfocus on individual action, because the most monumental change will come from collective behaviour of people coming together in movements in groups, as well as changing the systems that force people into lives that aren’t climate friendly. 

Dear Mikaela, I’m suffering from a bad case of climate-anxiety. Every time I think about all the news stories I see about the irreversible changes we’re making to the environment, I feel so hopeless and small, and it really stops me in my tracks. How do I get past this so I can actually be useful to the climate movement?

When I was my most climate-anxious, it came from this feeling that there was nothing I could do about it. The idea that I didn’t have agency, I didn't have power. It felt like other people were making choices that were forcing us all into this future. So the only thing that's really helped my general anxiety about the state of the world has been being involved in organising, because I think when we come together, we realise we do actually have power. That actually, changes that have happened in the past haven't happened passively. They also haven’t just happened from like, saying the right things or, or storytelling alone. It's also happening from very material communities organising together.

And if that's how change happened in the past, we can make transformational change again today. When I'm in those spaces with other people doing that, that’s when I feel like I've done something with the anxiety. Sometimes I hate when people's responses to feeling anxious about the climate is: “Oh just go meditate or something.” Because I need to transform the emotion into something else, if I transform that anxiety into action, if I do something with it, then it is like being moved out of myself. I feel that when we're in organising spaces, and we're like, strategically building campaigns and things – and that doesn't have to be this fancy big thing, you can do one hour a week.

The first time that I went to a meeting of an organising group, I remember being really nervous. I wondered whether people would be like, “Why weren't you here before?” And then as soon as I was there, people were just grateful that I was. People just want there to be more hands on deck. 

They're just gonna say, “Oh, thank you for being here. And what are your skills? What do you want to offer?” I've gained the best friends in my life through being involved in organising groups and being in movements and spaces and I've found actual real community. There's so much that we can gain from it.

Dear Mikaela, I’d like to get more involved in climate activism, but there’s also so much wrong with the world that I just don’t know how my time and efforts are best spent. How do I reconcile my concerns about the climate with things that feel more immediately pressing, like war or racism or poverty?

In the face of police brutality and poverty and very real, present existential threats that people are facing across the world, it can sometimes feel almost pathetic to prioritise climate justice. We’re asking people to consume less, but it feels like a lot of people already don't have enough to exist today. Also, what about police brutality? What about racism? What about all of these things that are causing people to have shorter lives today?

For me, however, it was actually engaging with climate justice as a movement that's been around for quite a while. I found it especially engaging regarding points of extraction. 

So where fossil fuels are being extracted, the communities that are being harmed by that today are often not seen as being part of the climate movement, even though what they are doing is climate work. Realising that the people who have been most impacted by climate injustice are people of colour across the world, who are the great majority, and that actually, we have the opportunity for liberation of all of these people if we tackle the climate crisis adequately, made me view it differently.

Dear Mikaela, I really believe in climate justice but I sometimes find it hard when I’m trying to explain to other people why they should have hope too. How are you so confident in your message?

I’m so confident in my message because I just think we actually have the opportunity to create a better world. I think the reason why a lot of people haven't been as involved in that, is that they've been sold the idea that the best that we can get is just a more shit version of this world. And that's not very exciting. 

But there's so much out there – there's so much data. I'm not just yapping here, putting uncited theories out there. There’s data that has shown that we can have a world in which everyone is able to be safe. Everyone is fed and housed, and we don’t have to spend most of our time giving away our labour as work. We can have more time for ourselves. And this world is not just for the global north as well as, it’s for the entire world. Often some people's visions of a better world ignores the existence of the global south, as if the global south needs to service this better future for the global north. I really want to challenge that. And what changed my life is realising that we have this opportunity for this better world. And so I think it can be done, and that made me feel excited and no longer unable to sleep because of anxiety. We can do this. It's really possible.