Ep.57 So You Want To Educate Yourself On The Climate Crisis? Start Here with Mikaela Loach.

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1:14Because when your operations are smooth, your impact can be bigger. Visit business.warmart.com to get started. I really wanted to kind of create an episode that felt like an accessible starting point for people who feel like they should care a bit more about climate change. I'm going to have to ask questions that are stupid questions. How can we actually change this climate crisis where people are insecure lives? And a way that we do that is... But three degrees of global warming would be catastrophic. Heat waves. Dangerous wildfires. It's just going to get worse and worse. Our world needs climate action on all fronts.

1:42Brown, extreme precipitation, even fire. What's causing the climate crisis? Where the fuck would I start? I hate to be doomy, but certain corals and certain species can only survive at certain temperatures. Many island nations will still not survive. They will be submerged by rising sea levels. Would you be able to talk a little bit about how much we could replace with renewable energy sources? If you were talking to someone who said, I don't know nearly enough about the climate crisis, how would you get them involved? There are things that we can learn in order to be able to myth-bast. I think what's so important about challenging these myths is because the UK government in particular are deliberately trying to push the f***ing out.

2:25What is up guys and welcome back to Working Hard Hardly Working podcast. Today's episode is with the one and the only Michaela Loach. I have followed Michaela for years and years since she took the government to court, which is a big thing to say. And I've absolutely loved her work and she recently released a book called It's Not That Radical, where she's generally presenting the arguments for climate action and how you can kind of take climate action as as in the title not that radical pretty much common sense so a little bit ago we did an episode on the economy and basically the idea was that I feel like lots of people don't feel like they know enough about it but also feel embarrassed to ask things because they feel like they should know about it like you know when you hear someone talking about something political or about the economy or about climate change or sustainability or whatever and you're kind of like yeah like a 100 % and actually really have no idea what they're talking about and what I've always wanted to use this podcast to do it's not about getting the maximum number of views or maximum number of people or whatever I've always wanted to curate this podcast based around what I feel we should know as people and how I feel we should I guess educate ourselves and improve ourselves as people in order to be able to generally just be better and learn more and create a great space for people and a great platform for people who have done amazing work.

3:46So what I really want to do with this episode is to create another So You Want to Know About episode. And this one is obviously about climate change. And so throughout this episode, the aim is to give you a little bit of ammo when it comes to what is what, when people talk about the COP conferences, what are they, what does the Paris Agreement mean, like what even is fossil fuel and can we actually go without it? Is it going to make everything more expensive going to renewable and is that why we're not doing it and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah so I hope you really enjoyed this episode I really really really enjoyed recording it and it goes without saying that Michaela has done some absolutely incredible work and I think we really owe a lot to the people who genuinely dedicate their lives to improving our environment and our politics and social justice issues when a lot of us me included are very happy kind of getting on with our daily lives and like caring about it but not dedicating our lives to it and I feel like that is an important distinction and it is important to platform these people, which is what I like doing.

4:43So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I really enjoyed recording it.

4:50Climate justice activist Michaela Loach advocates for environmental justice, racial issues, sustainable fashion, and fights human rights issues. Alongside her fearless attitude, Michaela has been hailed as a leading influencer in the climate change crisis. In 2019, she even took the government to court for using taxpayers' money to fund North Sea oil and gas companies, supported by the environmental non-profit Uplift and the Pay to Pollute campaign. As part of this, Michaela forced the government to admit in court, when they previously had denied before, that they had given these companies tax breaks.

5:20Referred to as a joyful game changer by Cosmopolitan, Michaela is now taking the internet by storm, launching and co-hosting the Yikes podcast, which breaks down the world's issues in an easy way to guide everyone towards action together. She is also a recent best-selling author of It's Not That Radical, Climate Action to Transform Our World, which gives the public easy, accessible options in moving forward the climate change movement. In this episode, we give a spotlight to the climate change crisis, why it's important to stand up for what you believe in. And Michaela comes armed with the do's and don'ts for real action, lots of which is very, very accessible, and shares the reality of being at the forefront of the climate crisis.

5:54Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having me. I'm very, very excited to have you here. I think that now is a perfect time. Now you've had the release of your book it would be really great to kind of hear a little bit more from you about your background like start from the very beginning how did you get to where you are now yeah I guess if we start from the beginning I was born in Jamaica in 1998 and we only lived there for about um two and a half years and then moved to the UK because it's safer um to want a better life like many people do move grew up in very white environments and experienced a lot of interpersonal racism because of that and so have this deep feeling that things are definitely not as good as everyone's saying they are right I think at school we're often taught in our history classes that like liberation and change is something that was one for us in the past and that now we live in this like golden age of freedom and right we should just be like super happy and not do anything um but I could just tell that wasn't right for so many different reasons then I remember really clearly when I was a teenager um this photograph of a young boy named Alan Curdie on the on the pages front pages of lots of newspapers um and he was three years old when his body washed up on a beach in Greece um when his family were just trying to move for safety in a much more dire circumstances than my own and seeing that photograph which was harrowing and realizing that I was yeah two and a half years old when we moved over and we were able to do that legally and safely and easily just because of the privilege of having a British father it really made me realize how much the world is just like this lottery depending on where you're born and that the borders that are constructed are also just like constructs in that way and that they cause harm and so therefore I wanted to start changing that so I got involved in as a teenager involved in like migrant justice organizing and went to Calais and like did some work on the border but when I say that I think people think it's very dramatic and I'm like I was chopping wood and like chopping vegetables and sorting clothes anyone can do it it's very we went on weekends I went with my mum the first time I remember but that's what first showed me that to be an activist or to be to care about an issue is just being active it's just seeing something and thinking I'm going to do something about it it doesn't have to be dramatic you don't have to be shouting on the streets you can just do something whatever that is and the ordinary people in calais really showed me that that change can come from us and doesn't have to come from big institutions because it was students that set up the organizations that i went and volunteered with and then at university i started to care more about the climate crisis and at first that looked like changing behavior things like going vegan and boycotting fast fashion and those different kind of behavioral changes i realized that that wasn't enough for how big this crisis was and i still had this climate anxiety this panic especially at night i wouldn't be able to sleep and so then I got involved with direct action campaigning so I'm protesting on the streets and chaining myself to things and blocking some roads yeah when it was a bit less controversial than it is now from there have then taken the government to court around fossil fuel subsidies and challenged a lot of different structures and communicated about this the whole way through and through social media and through writing and now I've kind of consolidated all of this into a book on climate justice because I think it's really important that we reframe this crisis is it's not just stopping the bad stuff it's not just how do we stop the like climate chaos and collapse it's the fact that we have an opportunity for a better world for all of us a world where all of us get to live in dignity a world where these constructs that cause harm to people don't have to exist and I feel like we can't let that opportunity slide and that's why I think it's so urgent that we talk about these issues you clearly care about things very deeply as you should we're so privileged in this country to be able to go through our even our teenage years if we wanted to not know about any of these things.

9:21Firstly, you know, it's always true to say that to be apolitical is like a huge, huge, huge privilege and one that I don't think most people should indulge in. From the point that you'd come over here at two, there's so many things out there we need to care about and there's so many things that have affected me, could have affected me even more, that actually in this country, like, that's not the usual teenage path purely out of privilege, like purely out of the point that we do have the luxury of just being like, oh, well, I'm allowed to like not care about that yet. And I think one of the things that I love so much about the angle you've taken from the book as well is this kind of call to action in a way where it's not, you know, we need to be caring about these things.

10:01like it's become very very very apparent like every single leading scientist every single piece of information out there points to the fact that like we need to change the way the world currently operates and for us to we almost it's going to stop becoming a privilege that we have to be to not have a view on this and I think that that's kind of becoming more and more apparent especially like over the past year with lots of the things being overturned that we've been like oh you know fracking no we did actually get rid of that for quite a big reason or even the fact I'm just thinking about how every summer there's just more and more wildfires and more and more extreme heat and more and more flooding.

10:37And the climate crisis, which I think for a lot of people thought was this like future. A lot of people in the UK in particular thought this is a future issue that won't impact us for a very long time. Are realising that it is here and it is now. And it's also already impacting people. I think about how last summer and houses in London caught a light because of extreme heat. That's absolutely wild that that's happening now. But also we need to remember at the same time that that's been happening for communities across the world for a very, very long time. and that the indigenous communities in particular who've been like in order to exist and live they have to resist um that that's not been a choice like yeah and as you said like a plus being a plus school is not a choice for for these people because in order just to like exist on their lands where they should be able to be they have to resist these big fossil fuel companies or for communities who live in like more arid um climates in in central africa to exist to be able to like cultivate crops or be able to eat um has been made impossible almost because of the climate crisis already and so i do think it's important that we realize this privilege that we have here but at the same time we realize that whilst it's important that we stop the bad stuff it's also important that we realize there's something actually exciting that we can move towards and that's kind of that's why i wrote it's not that radical because i think that so often we're told that with climate oh we're gonna die we're gonna like and then and you wonder why people switch off from that and get panicked and overwhelmed and just want to turn away from it and i think instead if we say oh we actually have the opportunity to create a better world where all of us have more of the things we actually need i think often it's also framed as the climate action is that we will need to have less i think that it's a we need to reframe that as less of what and a lot of the time it's less consumption of stuff we don't actually want or need but that our like current capitalist economy requires us to want to get more and more stuff we don't actually need in order to service its necessary growth that doesn't work with the planet's boundaries and so instead we could have you know shorter working days we could have more like warmer homes in the winter and cooler homes in the summer we get through insulation like very simple things that we um would actually make our lives better for the majority of people and we can have those through climate action i think it's really important that we frame it that way as well accessible like political education is so so important and um that yeah that's the point of a lot of the work that i do it's like i am in a lot of different spaces where perhaps we've been doing this work for many years until we understand a lot of things but if that information or that understanding or that awareness is not going outside of those spaces then we're not really going to be able to change as many things right and so the point of writing it's not that radical as well was like how can I condense the last six years of organizing um and the things I've learned from that into 200 pages so and in an accessible way that I feel like I could give it to one of my friends that I went to school with I haven't seen in many years who isn't in these spaces that was actually a really big motivation it was one of my friends that I went um came and visited me and we were just having chats like very open chats about climate and I realized how I'd been in this kind of echo chamber of people who understand these issues a lot and I hadn't thought about how could we accessibly reach people outside of that and I actually had that friend in my mind the whole time as I was writing it yeah like would this be understandable yeah exactly and that's why I'd ask my editor I'd be like what do you think about do you think that um that this friend would would get it do you think you'd be able to give it to your your mum or your grandma or your friend from uni that you haven't seen in a while and that was kind of um a big motivation in writing it I just think that that being honest is going to bring more people along because if we just think that people who i don't know care about the climate crisis are all perfect infallible people who never do anything wrong and they like they never take an an unclimate friendly approach to life in any way then it's not going to bring other people on because we'll just look at them and think oh i can't be perfect so i might as well do nothing like when actually if we think oh i can relate to that part of their journey i can relate to how they were feeling about that oh i used to also feel that way or i currently feel that way um But there is a path out that's way more encouraging.

14:15And I actually really, I drew on Adrienne Marie Brown's work around this quite a lot. She wrote a book called We Will Not Cancel Us, which is so brilliant. And I'd really recommend it to everyone. It's like a pamphlet. It's super, super short. But it talks a lot about how do we bring people in rather than making kind of movements that are, she describes it as movements. We don't want movements that are like prisons with high barbed wire fences. Instead, we want movements that are sanctuary for people who have caused harm and been harmed to be allowed space to grow. I do think it's actually a really big shame that I think a lot of people feel scared to start talking about these issues because people might react to that as giving more criticism.

14:48And I think that is a shame because, as I said before, as Adrian Rebrown said, actually, that we don't want movements that are prisons with high barbed wire fences, like where the bar to entry is so high that no one can enter in or when you're in there, you're just getting harmed. What we want is, yeah, movements to be a sanctuary. And I think that a lot of us are not doing that well because I also, I think we always have to ask when we're doing something, it is like, who does this serve? because I think accountability is important like challenging people to be better is important but who does it serve if anytime anyone says anything about the climate or about social issues that we make them afraid to say something about it in the future like who's who's benefiting from that and I think it's more so the ruling classes that benefit from that a lot of the time and I think it is important for us to like yeah call out when maybe something is could be seen as greenwashing or inconsistent but we need to create space for people to actually feel competent in talking about these issues um and we need to allow people to as well people need to recognize that perfection does not exist it's just not an actual thing that exists and it's just going to hold us back in many ways but also something that i've done to work with people who have big platforms that don't normally talk about climate perhaps but are i know they care is i've been doing these kind of collab reel series where i'll be like i'll i'll write a script we can talk about the script afterwards and like talk about what's comfortable and then we can record that together and we'll post it together and so like there's kind of a it's we're in it together in posting it but also that i think people feel confident they're saying the right the right thing yeah yeah as such because they have someone who's like an expert in the area working with them on it and i've done that i paired up also a lot of um my like i don't know if it's weird to say colleagues we don't but other activists i don't know yeah in this space with people as well and we and we did these this big real kind of um output um around the ipcc reports the intergovernmental panel on climate change they put out these big reports which is the most upstate science in the climate crisis um and we found that those worked really well because people who maybe wouldn't have felt so competent to post about it themselves felt more competent because they had someone doing it with them and that actually came from a briefing that we were given which was a briefing on the ipcc report for influencers which i think those things need to happen more of like how can we yeah realize that a lot of people aren't saying things because they're afraid of backlash but also they're afraid of saying the wrong things so how can we make it easier for people in general i think it's that we should think about.

16:57So I want to get into that. First of all, I really want to talk about the fact that you took the government to court while you were at university. When I think of taking the government to court, I think impossible mountain, very hard to climb. And also where the fuck would I start? So I would like to get into that a little bit. How did this even come about? So. The market's uncertain. Revenue's tied and hiring on hold. That's why results-driven companies are using Upwork to keep work moving. Go to Upwork.com today and start hiring proven freelance talent fast. No bulky overhead. No rigid long-term contracts.

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18:47When it was 2018, 19 years become a blur in my head at some point, i was part of a group called extinction rebellion scotland um we were much more rad than the other xr groups but that's what i'm gonna say um but we had a site outside westminster abbey called power and truth so at that time the department for business energy and industrial strategy was right next to westminster abbey that's the same department that was both meant to be tackling the climate crisis and it was also giving billions in subsidies for the fossil fuel industry and so our site was there to raise awareness of this issue so we kind of blocked the road for about a week um and had a site they would be doing political education we talked mps as they walked to work and that was and i put myself in a restful position in in there to kind of raise awareness of this and then from that i met a lot of people who also cared about this very niche issue of fossil fuel subsidies that is not very sexy and therefore doesn't get much screen time or air time often because people like why should i care about fossil fuel subsidies what does that even mean so basically the fossil fuel industry are kind of propped up by billions in subsidies it can amount to 11 billion a minute which is wild or even more than that actually in subsidies and these are what make it profitable for the fossil industry globally to continue operating so subsidies are basically payments that the government give to these companies um to allow them to continue their activities and in the uk since signing the paris agreement in 2016 the uk government had actually given over four billion pounds of public money in these subsidies or in tax breaks so basically oil and gas companies in the uk they were operating in the north sea so just off the coast of scotland they were not having to pay tax on their operations in the north sea even though these are multi billion pound companies so companies like shell and bp these are huge huge corporations they weren't paying any tax and they were actually being paid money from the public fund and so money that could be being used on hospitals or you know the big old nhs that we love exactly or schools you know things that actually are for public good instead they were being paid to these already multi-billion which already make profit yeah and they did this to make the north sea the most profitable place in the world to extract oil and gas so to make it even more profitable um when they're already these companies are profiting from very harmful activities i was obviously super angry about this as were some other people um and we'd done this kind of direct action route of you know protesting and and not enough change we'd seen happen so we were like what's the next so direct action is already a last resort tactic yeah but what's the next last respect tactic legal action and so we came together um and we met with lee day which who are our lawyers um and we formed a legal argument arguing that basically these subsidies were unlawful and they didn't make sense as well given that the government had signed the paris agreement and agreed to climate action will you just give a brief kind of like one-liner on what the paris agreement is for anyone yes of course sorry i realize i've mentioned things so the paris agreement was this really really big climate agreement that was signed in like 2016 2015 and basically it was at one of the COPS so COPS just stands for conference of parties it's the once a year every country in the world meets in one place in 2015-16 it was in Paris and they agree on a climate agreement the reason why Paris is such a big deal and why we talk about the Paris agreement so much is it was the time when the kind of 1.5 degree target was agreed to this target of of how much warming we are going to be aiming for to be the minimum of warming and in the Paris agreement the country signed on to this agreement which was a really really big deal at the time to say we are going to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees and the reason why that 1.5 degrees was chosen is because 1.5 degrees is kind of the maximum with which a lot of countries in the global south in particular can survive and so it's a really really big win for those countries to get this agreement signed by all these countries it's also important to point out that in the Paris agreement which is this big agreement that we often talk about as being you know the climate thing that we all want um fossil fuels aren't mentioned once the words which because there are hundreds of lobbyists that go and make sure that doesn't happen um and that's where the social license thing i think comes in again but so basically it's it's a really big deal the paris agreement it's really important and the uk signed it so therefore they should be did every country sign it yeah so in order for an agreement to come through all the countries have to agree which is why things like fossil fuels don't end up being included because some countries will be like well we're not going to do that and and worth saying as well that for exactly the reason that when you hear like a 1.5 in the uk that means very little to us we're like oh yeah i can go to brighton in the summer and go to the beach but like for as you say people in the global south that is and many other places it becomes unbearable things catch on fire things you know like everything changes yeah 1.5 doesn't sound like that much but what's important is so actually the day when i decided to put myself in an irrepressible position in the direct action was because we did a live reading of the 1.5 degrees report so basically each person would kind of relay on reading a part of the report and i read the bit about oceans and coral reefs and at 1.5 degrees or about actually or two degrees and we lose our coral reefs like it's that dramatic and at 1.5 degrees many island nations will still not survive like they will be submerged by rising sea levels and it sounds like such a small thing but 1.5 degrees of warming the impact that that has on arctic sea ice for example or on global sea temperatures is actually huge because nature is in a very delicate balance like it's meant to operate as it is certain especially in the seas certain corals and certain species can only survive at certain temperatures and so 1.5 degrees is actually a huge change we've already made it to fairly close to that already and we're I don't I hate to be dumi but we are on track for about three degrees of warming at the moment with current agreements and so we really really need to change um very very rapidly and something that really needs to change is our fossil fuel kind of expansion and usage and that's why tackling these subsidies was so important because if we can tackle these subsidies we make the industry a bit less profitable they're going to be pursuing less oil and gas fields and therefore we can keep more of it in the ground and prevent more warming which is really really important and i think one of the misconceptions is that like we can't do a lot of things that we could do with fossil fuels with other more renewable energy sources would you be able to talk a little bit about how much we can we could genuinely replace with more renewable energy sources for sure the so the most recent ipcc report the intergovernmental panel on climate change this like all these hundreds of thousands of scientists come together they said that the cost of tackling the current crisis is far far less than the cost of not taking action and also when it comes to renewables renewables are actually i think more than it's i wasn't sure with five or three so we'll go three um because that's the conservative one but um at least three times um cheaper than fossil fuels to produce energy from to produce electricity from so it's actually much much cheaper to use renewables than it is to use fossil fuels but the reason why we have all these doubts i think comes from the fact that the fossil fuel industry have invested more money probably than they've invested in renewables into these kind of pr the pr campaigns these to make us believe that like to doubt the science to make us doubt these things to make us believe oh we do need actually more oil and gas but in the uk in particular if we if we look at the uk and the north sea the uk government released this kind of energy security strategy after when the war in ukraine began and oil prices spiked and the cost of living crisis really really began so they were like we're gonna we're gonna tackle energy security we're gonna bring out this report in this report there was nothing on insulation which is something that would actually help people in both the short and long term and it would actually reduce people's bills because they'd be spending less money on energy instead they were like we're going to just make more oil and gas in the uk and that would lead people to think okay more oil and gas in the uk will lower my bills but in actual fact any oil and gas extracted is sold on the global market to the highest bidder the uk has no control over setting those prices at all the market sets the prices and also the uk has no control over holding that oil and gas in the UK.

26:18So there's no way that we'll either see the oil and gas in the UK. So for example, currently 80 % of oil and gas is exported. So it doesn't actually end up staying here. But also we can't control those prices. What we can have control of the prices of is renewable energy, like and community controlled renewable energy, which is happening in places like Bristol. So we can have more autonomy, we can remove ourselves from the volatility of the markets, and renewable energy won't be impacted by a dictator deciding to take war against another country and it can be cheaper as well so i think it's actually important that we tackle these and bust these myths yeah because we have to realize that these myths have been out there and i'm not saying that people don't want people to feel bad about believing these things because there's been a very deliberate campaign to make you believe these things that there is doubt or that there isn't certainty or that it's too expensive or too difficult but actually we actually have all the solutions that we need we just need to prioritize them before our case the government actually denied that they were giving these tax breaks and these subsidies but on yeah well then we all know it's wrong yeah but then in court they can't deny it they can't lie and so they have to say oh yeah actually this is true but they'll try and spin it obviously but and they actually tried to spin it as they were like these aren't subsidies because we create a different definition sure they were like even though the international monetary fund and every other body defines this as a subsidy in our definition it's not which is really funny it's quite funny i'm like you tried so putting things on the legal record is really important on public record making an injury visible so making an issue visible one that possibly has not been known about as much before so that kind of happened through our campaigning and to put it on the political agenda so that it's something that people are really actively thinking about um and so it means that even if and then it was another one is to win and then change the law sure but even if you don't win and change the law you still have achieved a lot if you are thinking about it as like as a campaign i'm sure lots of people who knew about that campaign and that legal action won't have known what the outcome was and i think goes to show obviously how well you guys handled it and how you managed to kind of point that in the right direction I feel like it's so interesting in a social media world as well but like what actually happens is not the point it's the how do we draw attention to things and actually all of those things you were talking about point to that social license like how do we remove the social license for the fact that this has been under the carpet how do we draw attention which I think a lot of you know actually from the if you're not in a kind of legal space or don't have a lot of contact with I guess like legal professionals which I do not know exactly like you're not going to necessarily know that actually the majority of things that you hear about in the press never even go through never come to fruition whatever it might be the actual you know talking about it and putting it out there is 80 of the battle it's it's storytelling is is really really really important and I think it's how we tell these stories because so we we went to court and our case was given permission to court so it was seen as a valid case because that the suit the court does not often do that to went to the rural courts of justice I wore a ridiculous pink suit then worried if the judge would go against our court because our case because she didn't like pink I was sitting in the back of the didn't realize that you have to bow as you leave a court so I got up to go to the loo and then everyone was like bow bow bow and I was like okay I'm bowing and walking out it was a bit of a strange day it was quite difficult actually that day to be honest because hearing the government's lawyers make arguments that i don't think are very moral and in the just in the sense that they're doing their job but they're saying like oh the government is so proud to be supporting companies like shell and bp and when i work with impacted communities who have been impacted by these companies i work with communities um in solidarity with or have or have friends who have been really they've had their water poisoned by these companies they've had um family members murdered um in relation to activities around these companies and it was quite hard to sit there and and have and hear them defend that support in the end um we got a result from that so on that day you don't get a result on the day I remember just feeling quite overwhelmed I think I was quite burnt out at that point and then a month later a few weeks later um I got an email from our lawyers being like you can't tell anyone but we've got we've got a result and I'd had this feeling that we'd like lost on the legal grounds I just like I've just felt it and we had we had lost on the it wasn't seen as unlawful so under UK law it was not unlawful for them to be paying this money so this was happening but they just deemed it the judge deemed it on that day not to be unlawful um and in that moment I did feel like we'd failed but then I got perspective very soon after thankfully to realize that we'd we'd done a huge amount of of work and that it was a mammoth um task to change the law in that instance on this very specific law on this very specific issue I remember seeing um a comedian called Hassan I can't remember his full name did do like a skit where um he went into a fast fashion store and changed all the labels um to have the true cost of it on it of like who the how much that person was paid the like the situations they're being put into and the harm that's caused and when and then people went in they obviously didn't buy anything because they were like oh I wouldn't if I knew that that was the cost of it I wouldn't do that so the most sustainable and cheapest clothes that um any of us have are the clothes we already own and kind of repairing those making them last for longer making sure we take care of them really well and then shopping for our friends wardrobes instead is a much more sustainable and much more much cheaper option than going out and even buying new fast fashion which ends up actually not being that cheap anyway because it breaks and you have to buy more of it yeah if you have a piece of clothing that you really look after for a very very long time that you really care about um that perhaps you save up for and you invest in then that's going to be yeah much more sustainable were much cheaper and you also like it more because then then you don't buy as much just random shit like I think so much so many of us I mean I remember I used to I would just get something because I think it looked kind of nice yeah I don't know because I'll be like oh that looks okay like whereas now if I get something I have to feel absolutely amazing and I have to be like I will want to wear this all the time I'm gonna have to wear this a hundred times so I'm gonna love it that much that I'll still be wearing it however many years from now and I think that's made me love my wardrobe so much it's so true when you confront some of those habits when you're kind of like again I thought the exact same and I thought that to be an influencer I had to be wearing x amount more and whatever it might be especially on influencers and people on social media I think it puts this pressure on to be living like an aspirable life in some way and therefore to have to do certain things in order for people to look at your life and think oh I want a life like that or even if you don't realize it consciously but I even realized that I was like oh with book events for example I'm like oh I've worn that to a different book event I'm like who who cares like firstly it doesn't mean same audience and secondly it's actually I love that I look great why do I not want to look great again yeah don't change it if I'm broke exactly yeah no I completely I completely see that I think that it's obviously there's it's such a cyclical thing because obviously it's the you know the influence of the people who are the who are kind of setting the trends and showing what's you know what's the done thing and also they're the ones who have the pressure to be able to kind of constantly evolve in that way of kind of being seen in different outfits and showing you know and some people's jobs is in fashion and fashion like sustainable fashion is the biggest oxymoron like it's about consumption and it's going to be so it's going to have you know it's going to be part of the problem no matter what it looks like and I feel like that kind of um you know more of that open approach to like of course there is a spectrum and of course there is better like I want to be very very clear about that but the open approach in terms of kind of like that looks different for all of these different people but as long as you are pushing yourself to be better and aware of the impact like you have to none of us who are buying fast fashion don't have access to the internet like we you do and as much as this kind of like calling in is so incredibly important you have enough access to be able to look at what the you know I mean watch the true cost kind of like as you said I was about to say because for me I watched the true cost and it I could not buy fast fashion after watching it because I just hadn't been as aware I was I was thinking I was a teenager at the time but I was like I remember just be thinking oh my gosh I wish I'd known this but you know what I didn't know before and that's and I didn't know and that's all right yeah yeah but once you do know I think it's when you're being willfully ignorant when yeah when anytime a video or something comes off on your social media that is talking about it and you keep scrolling maybe notice that and wonder why maybe it's because there's some discomfort there and challenge that discomfort it so that's actually what made me change to vegetarian in the first place I remember where it was kind of like I was seeing everyone talking about all of the documentaries and then I was like I can't watch the documentary because I'll feel bad and then I was like okay so that's willful ignorance and then I moved to cognitive dissonance so then you move to the fact that you know something but you decide to stay kind of not taking action against it like you know you don't like it and like of course everything takes time and of course things are going to take kind of you know going to take like steps and trying things and learning and realizing like what you're capable of and all of that I think one of me like one of the most important things was actually at least moving from that willfully ignorant place to knowing that you know I still very like there are always going to be things that I you know partake in that are more harmful like all of these things but actually not allowing myself to be in willful ignorance in terms of things like making sure you're following pages like yours like pages that generally kind of raise awareness and will educate you for free on kind of what's going on in order so that you're at least moving to cognitive dissonance like that's better than willful ignorance then when you're at that point I did start to realize that I was just like as long as that's on my feed I'm probably going to check myself like a little bit more regularly and that was just a way that like not even publicly didn't say anything about that but it's like so starting to surround myself with things that would make me feel worse about certain things that I knew I shouldn't be engaging in but it still was I get asked sometimes like oh do you wish you just didn't care I just find such a weird question because I think us not knowing these things or us not caring about them wouldn't mean they aren't happening sure like me not caring about climate justice doesn't mean the climate crisis goes away or like me not knowing about the harms that fossil fuel companies like inflict doesn't mean that they just stop happening um and I I think that the only way that these things are going to actually change is not by us not knowing about them or us being ignorant to them it's by us like forcing ourselves to look at them and then moving forward and changing these things and I think that that like feels like a much more like I don't know it feels like such a best for me I felt better since doing that because I think when I'm deliberately ignoring something or I'm deliberately looking away from something you know in your head that you're doing that you know you're doing that and it does make you feel a bit shit and I and I think I've felt a lot less shit since I've started being like I'm gonna face I'm gonna face the darkness and I'm going to challenge it and and pour light into that space instead because that's the only way these things are going to change and as you mentioned before as well that's not necessarily about then knowing about those things and then confronting them perfectly there's still going to be holes in the way you're dealing with things there are going to be certain things that are going to be easier there are going to be certain things that you're like do you know what I'm just not ready to move away from like my one fast fashion order at the beginning of summer every year or like whatever it's going to be different for everyone I'm not kind of co-signing anything not kind of but it's going to be different for everyone and as soon as you also allow yourself both to not be cognitively dissonant but also to be able to approach it with a kind of I can be imperfect about it as long as I know what I'm imperfect about and therefore can maybe open myself up to changing it in future yeah or at least be aware of it like that willful ignorance I think is the most harmful stage especially when there's so much information out there now I think also a lot of us are very anxious about these things as in generally like whether it's social social issues what's going on in the world or it's the climate crisis i think a lot of people especially like recent studies have shown how much climate anxiety as a thing for example is impacting people and my dear friend tori and choy wrote a book about this called it's not just you which i'd really recommend she keep plugs my friend um but climate anxiety is something that's impacting a lot of us and i think that people think in order to feel less climate anxious anxious just don't think about it don't look at it stay away from it but for me that didn't help for me the only thing that's actually helped is i think of emotions like energy like it energy can't be created or destroyed but only transformed and the same way i think our emotions they they are not really like created or destroyed they are transformed within us and if we are ignoring the anxiety that we're feeling if we're just looking away it's just going to fester within us and we're going to feel worse about it and we're going to feel more anxious and we're going to like yeah it's going to manifest in lots of different ways but if we transform that feeling of anxiety into action if we transform that by changing something by doing something by coming together with other people who feel similarly um then it's not going to fester it's going to be transformed and also it's going to actually change the thing that we feel anxious about and that's the best thing that we should we should actually do in how we respond to these things I've really really really enjoyed this conversation I feel like it's been very very very important and I hope that it will open people up to feeling like and myself as well like I don't say like open people up from a point of like expertise and from a point of like you know perfection or like any of this at all like not even in the slightest I just mean in terms of I feel like the more we know the better yeah the more we feel like we can act no matter what it looks like the better I always need like a reinvigoration like I do allow myself to get kind of you know willfully ignorant appointed and I allow you know we need to kind of have this kind of reinvigoration read like pushing towards where we kind of want to move and what we think is right um and I feel like this will be very helpful for a lot of people in terms of kind of opening that up and working out what type of action might be right for them and why they should care and a lot of things around what you know when we hear it in the news about the cops and about the different you know the Paris Agreement and all of these things it feels like a lot to learn it feels like a specialty that you know is is tough to kind of get into and I think the work you're doing is incredible on showing that well it's not that radical to use that the title yeah I mean because if I can like add one thing at the end um because i think that yeah often in order to take action that does transform our world or that doesn't tackle the climate crisis or that does like yeah make a better world for all of us or that does tackle these systemic issues of white supremacy and capitalism all these big things it is framed as being ridiculous or like impractical or not possible or extreme or radical in some ways and i think that what's so important for us to do is to reframe this as this is common sense and this is what we all actually want and this is what we actually can do and it's very possible it's very possible within our lifetime to do um and so that's why i wrote it's not that radical um and i and i just i really really really really would love people to to take the time and read it because i do think it's like an accessible way that people can learn about these issues in a way that will move you towards action it won't require you to leave behind every single thing that you care about or love in your life but instead it will just move you in a way which hopefully will transform the world around us um and i i've condensed it into a short space so um so hopefully it'll be helpful and and thank you so much for this conversation and for all of your support generally over over the years it's been um well received and i'm really grateful for it not at all you've done the work and i'm just happy to be there like woo um but thank you so much for coming on you've been amazing thank you

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