Young Change Agents Combat Climate Grief
Here are just a few examples of young people who have decided that inaction was not an option. They have identified one small piece of the environmental problem jigsaw and taken positive action.
“Trash Caulin” has made it his mission to pick up trash from his local beaches. He has kept it up so far for more than 700 days – and has shared his work with more than 1.4 million followers on TikTok. Many of these people have been inspired in turn to help clean up their local environments.
Caulin got angry about people leaving their rubbish behind on the beaches they said were their favourite places. “So I went to my first ever beach cleanup,” he says, “and the dude was like, ‘bro, all of us are mad, but you’ve got to fight this with positivity.’ I tried it and it did work – I was getting more reciprocation from the positive messages.”
Franziska Trautman isn’t turning water into wine, but glass into sand, returning it to the eroding coastlines where she lives. The US state of Louisiana had no glass recycling facility, so any wine bottle she emptied would go into landfill. She and a friend therefore founded Glass Half Full, the state’s only glass recycling operation. She too is sharing her work with her 260 thousand TikTok followers.
Her message is enabling: “to always to take my story as something that you can also do. So we saw an issue in our community, and instead of continuing to wait for someone else to solve it, we decided to just go for it. We didn’t have any money, any recycling knowledge, we didn’t know about glass and sand issues. We learned everything along the way. If you see a problem that you want to solve, just go for it.”
Zahra Biabani aims to disrupt the enormously wasteful and resource-greedy fast fashion industry. Her aim is to create the world’s first sustainable clothing rental company, In the Loop, by making sustainable and ethical brands more accessible to young people.
In an innovative scheme, renters can rent a piece of clothing for 75% less than the retail price, for three and a half weeks, then return them in reusable shipping bags. In the Loop cleans, restocks and ships out the next month’s cycle.
Her message to young people like her? “We’re not able to make change if we don’t believe change is possible. So climate optimism is just a framework for unlocking the full potentiality of climate solutions that we desperately need.”
Thomas Lawrence is a new David who is taking on on the retail Goliath, Amazon. He is building a sustainable alternative marketplace, Good People Inc., which offers more than 200 products to ethical consumers in the UK and is just launching its operation in the US. Participating retails have to adhere to a number of regulations, which include zero waste packaging, no use of plastics, and transparency about the provenance of ingredients and the treatment of staff.
“I think that my generation and millennials are starting to realize they have to take the matter into their own hands,” says Thomas, “rather than waiting on the people that are currently in charge to help.”
For more details, go to the source at The Guardian.
Contributed by Wendy Morgan