Young climate activists find powerful voice in social media

Imagine this: You receive a warning about a raging wildfire near your home. The air won’t stop filling with acrid smoke, and the sky has turned from blue to an eerie orange.

Or this: You’ve heard about a massive coal ash spill a few hours from your home, and you have no idea how to respond.

Or this: You keep seeing headlines about melting ice caps — that the Arctic Ocean may be ice-free by 2050 — and you wonder, fleetingly, if you will outlive the polar bears.

You need more information, so where do you turn? Young people, increasingly, look to social media as their main source of news. One EdWeek survey found 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.

Elise Joshi, for example, 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 Gen-Z for Change, an organization that uses TikTok to empower young people and influence national climate policy.

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

Bastida and Joshi don’t see themselves as content creators; they’re activists who post on social media to get the message out.

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

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

Elise Joshi

Joshi, a 2023 UC Berkeley graduate, began posting during the pandemic. As she read up on the state of the climate crisis and environmental policies, including efforts by the Trump administration to roll back protections, she shared statistics on TikTok — that one study found 1 out of every 6 deaths was tied to air pollution or how every degree of warming results in a decline in crop yields. Her eighth video criticizing then-President Trump’s policies on COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter protests went viral, and she began to understand the art of wielding social media as a tool.

“I didn’t have a knack for [it],” Joshi said, but after four years, “I’ve kind of figured out how to do it.”

Joshi, along with other activists and creators, joined “TikTok for Biden,” which was founded to oppose Trump administration policies ahead of the 2020 election.

The organization changed its name to Gen-Z for Change at the start of 2021 to reflect its growing range of interests and advocacy. Today, Gen-Z for Change has almost 2 million followers on TikTok, and Joshi has 200,000-plus followers across her personal accounts.

In July 2023, Joshi captivated the internet when a video of her interrupting a White House official went viral.

Earlier that year, the Biden administration had approved the $8-billion Willow drilling project in Alaska, going against President Biden’s pledge to end fossil fuel leasing on federal lands and outraging climate activists who’d lobbied against it. At a youth voter summit, Joshi let out a shaky breath as she interrupted White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who had just said the administration was listening to what young voters were saying about climate change.

“I’m sorry for interrupting, but asking nicely hasn’t worked out,” Joshi said. Her voice faltered, but she continued: “A million people wrote to the administration pleading not to approve a disastrous 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 the North Slope of Alaska to Louisiana?”

The back and forth — during which Jean-Pierre said Biden had done more to address climate change than any previous president — captured a huge audience on TikTok. Joshi said they lost track after 30 million views.

“I got emails from fathers saying, ‘I actually don’t even agree with you on this oil conversation, but the way that you communicated it made me really proud as to how you presented information,’” she said of the aftermath. “And I mean, I got death threats … but I think the nice comments outweighed it.”

After the interruption video went viral, Joshi felt there was “a huge change of pace” with the Biden administration. The White House eventually 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 would not have happened without the #StopWillow movement and mobilizing of young people online.

“TikTok campaigns are incredibly valuable because they sort of create a context that this thing, that on the face of it is acceptable, becomes not acceptable,” Julie Sze, a UC Davis professor of American studies, said of 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.”

Xiye Bastida

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

In 2015, when she was 13, Bastida’s hometown, San Pedro Tultepec, about 30 miles southwest of Mexico City, flooded after years of drought. “Once you start seeing it in your life, then you have no option but to act,” she said.

Bastida and her family moved to New York City, where her parents began working at the Center for Earth Ethics, an environmental conservation organization, and Bastida started to learn about organizing. There were fewer risks than in Mexico, where Indigenous environmental activists can become targets.

By 2019 she was organizing climate marches for Fridays for Future 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 graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in environmental studies, spends most of her time working for the Re-Earth Initiative.

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

“I think that if I’m able to access the space, I should be able to share the information not only with the people that I’m in group chats with, but with the people that aren’t [only] interested in climate,” she said.

In general, Bastida said, social media platforms have had a positive effect on her life because they exposed her to a community of environmental activists in other parts of the world. Through her work, she connected with Greta Thunberg of Sweden and Helena Gualinga, an Indigenous Ecuadorean environmentalist.

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

Alaina Wood

When she was in middle school, Alaina Wood learned about an environmental disaster — a coal ash spill into the Emory River, west of Knoxville, Tenn., that released toxic sludge containing arsenic and mercury. It was an awakening — the first time she felt she had to do something.

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

After graduation, Wood got a job at a private landfill company as an environmental compliance coordinator before taking on a role for the First Tennessee Development District, an association of local governments, working on solid waste management projects.

When the pandemic lockdowns started, Wood joined TikTok and posted “goofy” videos. But at some point, her “for you” page — the curated feed for users — began to include environmental content.

“Some of them were really good. They were accurate,” she recalled. “Others were kind of concerning. They were either full of misinformation or they were full of the idea that if you’re not perfectly zero-waste, you’re not a good environmentalist.”

Posting as the Garbage Queen, Wood made a video about the zero-waste movement, saying it sometimes produced counterproductive results that promoted consumerism and increased waste. The video took off, and she found a community that cared about what she had to say.

During the summer of 2021, when “climate doom” became a trend, she started work on a series on TikTok called Good Climate News, where she offered a weekly roundup of studies and positive stories to combat a flood of pessimism. In four months, she amassed 75,000 followers, an audience that’s larger than the population of her hometown.

“A lot of people don’t see all the crazy breakthroughs that I do reading scientific studies,” she said. “I think it’s what my job is, to be like, ‘Hi, I saw this really cool thing you might have not otherwise seen. It’s not too late.’”

About 75% of her audience is younger than 40, Wood said, and as she sifts through studies and reports and stories, she feels the weight of making sure what she posts online is accurate and encouraging.

When the #StopWillow campaign did not stop the drilling project in Alaska, she worried it might lead to apathy among young people, but followers told her that her videos inspired readers to pursue a career in environmentalism.

“There have been times where I’ve been very anxious of how things are going to be received because my audience is really young. They’re very volatile right now,” she said. “If I say something wrong, I could send somebody into a panic. But if I say something right, I could keep them engaged in activism.”