A few years ago, the environmentalist Bella Lack travelled to Versova Beach, on the Mumbai coast, to stand on a huge heap of rubbish. Lack was 16 at the time and studying for her A-levels; she was also writing a book, The Children of the Anthropocene, in which she tells the stories of young people involved in projects that address the climate crisis. She was in Mumbai to meet Afroz Shah, a lawyer who had taken it upon himself to clean thousands of tonnes of washed-up plastic from the beach. Shah had begun the project with no funding and no official support – only his 84-year-old neighbour had offered to help; to Lack, the task seemed impossible. “The problem facing us felt so big and insurmountable,” she wrote later, thinking of the beach but also of climate activism more broadly, “that I wondered whether I should stop with all the campaigning, the speeches, and just enjoy my teenage years while they lasted.”
Recalling the moment now, Lack shrugs. “It’s that recognition of the scale of the problem that makes you think: ‘But what can I do?’” she says. We’re walking together through Richmond Park, south-west London, on one of those unforgivingly hot days in July. Lack arrived by bike – she grew up and still lives nearby – but without a lock, so for a while we wander around looking for a bush big enough to hide her ride. “You can imagine the stench,” she goes on, of the beach. “Plastic as far as you can see. Plastic that stretches out beyond the beach and into the water. Plastic that becomes islands of waste. I just thought: ‘Most of this isn’t even from here.’”
