There were a few tears on Mother’s Day last month when Mikaela Loach’s mum came to visit her at her flat on the south coast. Loach handed her a hot-off-the press copy of her new book, It’s Not That Radical: Climate Action to Transform Our World. Its cover dazzles in pink – as does Loach today, a rapidly rising star in the fight for climate justice, who pitches up for our interview in a pink puffer, rose-pink boilersuit and pale-pink glasses. After her mother read Loach’s acknowledgments thanking her for passing on her “huge heart”, she “had a good cry. And then she called my grandmother in Jamaica who was, like, ‘Why you bawling out like?’”
Loach promptly rumbles her grandmother for having cried herself when she’d read her the accounts of their conversations early in the pandemic. Her grandmother had described how Hellshire Beach, near Kingston, where Mikaela played as a tiny child, had almost disappeared due to climate change. The helplessness Mikaela heard in her grandmother’s voice spurred her on to write the book.
Loach, 25, is a trainee doctor at Edinburgh University and her capacious empathy is part of her armoury. Along with her openness and fearlessness, it shapes her inclusive brand of activism, which has seen her take the UK government to court over what she alleged were unlawful tax breaks afforded to North Sea oil and gas companies, share a stage with Bill Gates, and work with refugees in Calais.
In 2020, Cosmopolitan called Loach a “joyful gamechanger”, and later that year she launched her Yikes! podcast, while Forbes, Global Citizen and BBC Woman’s Hour have hailed her as a leading influencer in the UK climate movement. I ask her if she is the new Greta Thunberg and she laughs. “I don’t think any of us are the new Greta. I also think a lot of us are quite tired of being compared to her, and I think Greta is tired of it as well.
“She is an incredible leader of our movement, but we have multiple leaders as well. It’s important to note that Greta was chosen by the media to be the palatable face of a movement that’s been around for a long time. It was a choice to choose a young Swedish woman, or girl, at the time. What she was doing didn’t really threaten the status quo in the same way as indigenous activists who were chaining themselves to pipelines the same age as her all over the world.”
In It’s Not That Radical, Loach reframes the climate change debate, arguing that it requires racial equality – a pathway to a better world for everyone, regardless of class, colour, where you live, or any other stratification that currently shapes a life. She wants everyone to know that “The climate crisis came from the same systems of repression that cause people harm today.”
“I do see it as part of my calling in this movement to make the diaspora feel welcome, even though we didn’t cause this crisis and it’s not our fault. I think it’s our responsibility because we live in the core of the empire and in the core of imperialism here. We have a huge proximity to power that our siblings on the African continent or in Jamaica and all the Caribbean don’t have.”
The imbalance of power between the global north and the global south grew out of imperialism and white supremacy and, says Loach, allowed the climate crisis to emerge in the first place. Both persist today and need to be dismantled if climate justice – a better world, for everybody – is to be achieved. Despite this, inclusivity is not something the climate movement has always excelled at, many believing it has been racially and socially riven. Loach believes Extinction Rebellion’s “choice to focus its disruption on the government and status quo rather than on ordinary people is timely”. She says it will help bring in some folks who have been alienated from the movement and made to feel like activists are the enemy. “They will now remember that, in actual fact, we all have a shared enemy and that is the ruling class.”
While many of her own efforts are headline-grabbing, Loach has plenty of experience of unflashy activism, and the book makes practical suggestions about how we can work together to move towards climate justice. By 16, she’d become vegan, boycotted fast fashion and was blogging. At 18, she and her mother folded blankets for refugees at Calais. “I remember feeling deeply inspired by these really ordinary people doing the kind of non-glamorous, quiet work of building revolutionary change – tidal change people will never know about.”
Loach’s upbringing laid the seeds for her defining belief in the power of incremental change. She was born in Kingston to a Jamaican mother and British father, and the family moved to a village in Surrey when she was two and a half. Her mother now works in “computer stuff”, her dad in “pension stuff”, what she, with her Gen Z perspective, describes as “conventional jobs that people have for many years”. Her family moved for the same reasons “as many people who end up being part of the diaspora”.
Her parents raised Loach and her younger brother to question the status quo, armed with a breadth of historical knowledge not found in UK textbooks or classrooms. “My dad was, like, you’re going to understand your history. They would force us to watch documentaries about the freedom fighter Nanny of the Maroons, the 18th- century leader of the Jamaican Maroons, “who would wear the teeth of the enslavers she had killed around her neck,” she says of Jamaica’s only female national hero. Nanny led a community of formerly enslaved Africans, the Windward Maroons, in a guerilla war against the British in the mid-18th century, securing victory and their own freedom, in 1740.
“They would teach me about the realities of revolution,” says Loach. “They made it clear that freedom was not something that was just passed down from above – it was something that was fought for from the ground up. That had a big impact on me.”
In 2004, Loach watched as the Indian ocean tsunami made the headlines, “I was, like, oh, I’m so sad about this, and my dad said, so what are you going to do about it?”
That’s when she took her first action, aged five, baking cakes to raise funds for the victims. “It instilled in me early on that we don’t have to just watch things happen, even if it’s doing a small thing like a bake sale, and that if you can do something about it, you probably should. As I grew up, my dad would challenge me on that more and more. Now, when I see something, I don’t just passively watch.”
In late 2019, she took part in Extinction Rebellion Scotland’s Autumn Uprising. She camped outside Westminster Abbey and, nervous as she was about her safety and compromising her medical career, agreed to chain herself to the XR stage.
It was that same year, again at “personal risk”, that she and two other climate change activists took the UK government to court over the tax breaks afforded to North Sea oil and gas companies, supported by the environmental nonprofit Uplift and the Paid to Pollute campaign. David did not defeat Goliath but, says Loach, “The government was still forced to admit in court that they had given these tax breaks.”
Loach, today, is an outward-looking connector. But four years of being “severely” bullied at secondary school, from the age of 11, left her feeling isolated and “terrified” to go to school. She sought refuge in books and self-worth in academic achievement. “I’d get chased out of school with cricket bats. It was quite bad. Not quite bad – it was awful. It was terrible. I was not well at all.” She finds it hard to recall those earlier years. “I think that when you have trauma, your brain kind of blanks.”
Her parents moved her to another school, midterm. “I don’t think I would be alive right now if my parents hadn’t…” Her voice falters. “Oh gosh,” she says, “that makes me cry a little bit… if my parents hadn’t pulled me out.” After completing her GCSEs, she went on to a new school for sixth form, on a scholarship.
She finds it “very bizarre” to have the platform she now does and to be a “hope machine”, as she has described herself, albeit one who has grappled with impostor syndrome, had panic attacks from the pressures of social media and, when she chained herself to the XR stage at Westminster, realised she wasn’t “adequately prepared” and felt “just so scared”, scared of being arrested, of “being that visible” and becoming someone that far-right groups “would be keeping an eye on” and, as a Black woman, of police brutality.
“In my head I was like, I’m going to be in a cell tonight, I’m gonna be alone, and all the names of people who died in [police custody] kind of went through my head and I started crying. It really felt like I was forced into that position. I think that’s how a lot of people feel. You do it, but it’s a last resort.” It is Loach’s ability to connect that has given her a platform. We talk about whether being the connector she is today may have stemmed from being shut down and shut out as a child.
“I think that when you’ve been rejected so severely by your peers and then you do find connection, to me it really shows how powerful it can be when you do feel accepted. Being able to feel safe and connected really did transform my life.” A perfectionist and high achiever at school, she applied to medical school and received blanket rejections two years running before she was finally accepted. “I believe it was God’s plan for me,” she says. “I needed to be taken down a peg or two. I knew I could get perfect marks. It became obsessive. I needed to be told that academia is not everything.”
In 2017, she worked in a local care home for six months, as a carer, then a receptionist, before travelling in south-east Asia. All the residents were white. Most of the care workers were immigrants and “not paid enough for the work they do”. Casual white staff “did not last longer than a week”. Those who did were from Eastern Europe, India, or the African continent. “They would work so hard and care so well for these people. In the face of all the anti- immigrant rhetoric we get in all the papers, these populations are holding up this country.”
She made friends with a 90-year-old resident. “He taught me a lot,” she says. “Like a lot of people in my generation, I used to think that old people suck. I’ve been like, oh, they don’t care about our future. Bear in mind,” she adds, “Donald Trump had just been elected and we’d just had Brexit – all these things that weren’t the choice of my generation.”
Openness, another of Loach’s star qualities, is perhaps another word for grace, a word that comes up more than once. “I’ve got a lot of grace for those kids now,” she says of her childhood bullies. “At the time I was like, these people are just horrible. But then as an adult especially I look back and I’m like, they were just kids, and they were just being kids.” Being judgmental is not Loach’s thing. When I ask, for example, if it is helpful to ask if boomers and older people are doing enough to fight climate change, she says, “There is too much blaming of different generations. I think there’s this idea it’s only young people who are doing enough or doing the right work and I don’t think that’s true. I’ve worked with people who are 70 or 80, or 10 years old. For Stop Cambo to be successful, for us to stop that oilfield, it was only possible because of the work of decades of campaigners who didn’t see the successes of their work. But they continued to work, and I am so grateful that they did that work.”
Rather than asking who is doing enough, she says, “We should be asking how can we challenge ourselves to push a bit more, how can we reach out to our own community and try to bring them along with us.” If, in the process, you find yourself up against someone who is close-minded or uninformed, she has a tip – pause for a second, then “See if there’s someone that you already love that you can see a part of in this person.” Next, ask yourself if you can “maybe try to meet this person where they’re at instead of trying to come at them as if you already think they’re a terrible person”. A moment later she jumps in: “I’m not great at doing that all the time. I think I’m better at talking about it.” Either way, it’s a lesson in nuance from a 25-year-old who doesn’t believe in heroes, but in collective action. An activist who is nobody’s mascot, nobody’s Greta, but simply herself – a young woman dedicated to the struggle for a better future.
It’s Not That Radical: Climate Action to Transform Our World by Mikaela Loach is published by DK at £16.99. You can buy it for £14.95 from guardianbookshop.com
