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.
