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.’”
To write The Children of the Anthropocene, Lack met or spoke virtually to a diverse group of young people all over the world. There were the Indonesian sisters who went on hunger strike to convince the governor of Bali to ban plastic bags from the island. A boy in Los Angeles organising communities against air pollution. The lawyer, Shah, who gradually convinced locals to clean cooperatively, so that now the project is as good as finished and the beach is cleaner if not immaculate.
Lack, who is an ambassador for the Jane Goodall Institute and the Born Free Foundation, and who has only just finished her exams, believes that sharing personal stories of climate activism will “catalyse action more than telling people, like, ‘We have 12 years left to stop catastrophe,’ or, ‘A million species are in danger of extinction’” – abstract concepts that often feel personally unrelatable. By explaining the efforts of young people who, by a coincidence of geography, have been forced into some kind of climate action, she hopes to give those of us not yet in everyday crisis a jolt. “That’s the idea of the book,” she says. “To try to get people to engage emotionally with what’s happening.” When we’re told the stories of teenagers facing and overcoming environmental peril, aren’t we more likely to wake up to the problem?
Lack woke up to the problem as a 12-year-old, when she saw a documentary about the damage palm oil concessions have on orangutan habitats. “It was the most intense obsession,” she recalls. “I had posters of them” – the orangutans – “all over my room.” Soon, Lack railed at school against deforestation, and she fell into campaigning; by 15 she was attending protests. Neither of Lack’s parents have backgrounds in environmental activism. She discovered most of what she learned – “how deforestation links to emissions, and to the climate crisis, and how that links to other social issues; it was kind of like a snowball effect” – through social media, and during visits to her uncle’s farm, in Worcestershire, where she spent lambing seasons and could walk freely through surrounding woodland.
“The most frequent question I get asked is about my parents,” she says. We have drifted through tall ferns towards a bum-worn bench overlooking a pond. “‘Have they forced you to do this?’ ‘Have they indoctrinated you?’” She shakes her head. “It’s kind of the other way around. If my parents had forced me to do this for seven years, I probably wouldn’t be doing it. Kids are stubborn.”
“You’ve indoctrinated them?” I ask.
She nods.
I say, “How so?”
“By sending them drafts of my book,” she says. “They used to come to protests, when I was much younger and mostly doing protests. There are lots of photos of me, my mum in the background looking absolutely miserable.”
Lack describes this process as a kind of “trickle-up activism ”, where young people introduce their elders to new information and slowly, if arduously, convince them to alter lifelong habits. Lack’s mother’s behaviour has changed “in small, personal ways”, Lack says. “Like, in the house, we don’t really eat meat.” (Lack has two older siblings: a sister who is close to becoming vegetarian and a brother who still eats ham straight out of the packet – you can’t win them all.) “When I was doing activism most intensely, at the age of 15, 16, I don’t think I ever went out,” she continues. “I was so immensely overwhelmed, it was all I could focus on.” For a while, she felt a deep responsibility to both help the world and help others help the world. “I got to a point of burnout, I think,” she recalls. “I was thinking, ‘I’m not going to be able to do this much longer. I’ve done my bit.’” Part of the message of Lack’s book is this: change your behaviours, but live your life. “We’re protecting the planet,” she says. “But the planet will be fine. What we’re really protecting is humanity. And, you know, you’ve got to enjoy it while you’re here.”
For a while at school, Lack didn’t tell her friends about her interest in activism, for fear of alienation. “I thought when they found out they’d think it was so strange,” she says. (Her first Twitter handle, a pseudonym, was purposefully obscure.) Now most of her friends are educated in key climate issues, and they share and discuss new information when it drops. Still, Lack struggles with the “activist” label. “There’s a stigma,” she says. “What did Boris Johnson call them? ‘Tree-hugging, mung bean-munching eco freaks?’” She tuts. “That’s the thing about activism. It’s seen as railing against the system. Constantly castigating what’s happening.” She thrusts her hand into the air as if angrily wielding a placard. “What if it were about imagining what a different future might look like? And moving towards something better?” Car-free streets. Cleaner city air. Wild spaces in urban areas. To Lack, the fun and excitement of activism lies in developing solutions for a more positive future. “I think we need to redefine the word,” she says. This will encourage young people to “find their own way” and free them of any anxiety associated with existing labels.
Partway through our conversation, I tell Lack that my son, who is six, recently wrote a story (title: Max and Tommy and the Flaming Sun), and that it dawned on me it was a piece of climate-apocalypse fiction, and that he is likely to be listening in to furtive conversations my wife and I are having about our collective future.
“The sun burns their clothes off,” I say.
Lack looks briefly concerned and gazes out at the pond, beyond which we can see the far-off roofs of several central London office blocks.
“How does it end?” she says.
“With Max and Tommy eating a nice dinner,” I say.
“So he’s an optimist, then.”
Lack is an optimist, too. When I ask how she’s able to retain hope for the future, she gives the shrug all young climate activists give when people older than them ask inane questions, and says, “What’s the alternative? To give up?”
She goes on: “That’s how we see the climate crisis: a problem to be solved by a few passionate people who care about the environment. It’s fascinating when people call activism a passion. It’s absolutely not a passion. I didn’t ever really enjoy the protest side of it. The many people who recognise the need to make change, it’s not through passion, it’s not a ‘passion project’, it’s a responsibility. That’s what I’m trying to convey: how diverse the people affected by this are, and therefore how diverse the people taking action need to be.
“But that’s the whole thing about redefining activism,” she continues. “It needs to be integrated into many careers and the work of many people. If you’re a lawyer, focus on the eco side. If you’re a chef, curb the impact of the food you’re using.”
I tell her that I recently spoke with a winemaker who had stopped cardboard from entering his premises.
“I see that as activism,” she says. “Making change within your own business towards achieving sustainability. Do you really need to be travelling across the world? Can’t you make video calls?”
Several current environmental campaigns focus on the lack of climate-crisis education offered in the school curriculum; when school leavers enter the workforce, they aren’t equipped with the knowledge and ideas necessary to work sustainably. Lack studied geography at A-level. When I ask if she was taught about the climate crisis, she says, “There was a section about it.” We both look down at the floor, at a loss. “And not a lot of people do geography,” she adds. “Not enough, anyway. And it’s one segment of the course, and it’s really hard to convey how important this is when it’s just one segment of a course along with all the others.”
Through her work, Lack has become friendly with several other young climate activists. Greta Thunberg wrote the introduction to her book; she often chats with the Irish environmentalist Dara McAnulty. Both are bestselling authors under 20. When I ask Lack why she thinks it’s incumbent on young people to publish on climate change, she says, a little angrily, “I’m trying to work that out. I don’t know why older people don’t feel this same sense of urgency. I mean, I know. It’s the futures of young people that are more imperilled. But why isn’t that sense of urgency being felt by everyone right now?”
“Greed?” I suggest.
“Habit, greed, vested interests…” she says. “But I still don’t understand how people would put that above protecting the environment, above protecting future generations. Like, on a superficial level, I get it. But it’s short-termism. People looking at how they might profit in the next month… What’s the point in profit on a dead planet?”
While we talk, Lack begins to cough, and I notice her voice is croaky. “I’m slightly dying,” she says, in the way you’d imagine a 19-year-old might. She has been celebrating the end of her exams, and her mother has banned her from going out again. “I’m not partying any more,” she says, resolutely. “I’m worn out. I’m a shell. But it’s weird doing things like this” – a newspaper interview to promote her book – “and then going to parties. It’s a bit of a double lifestyle. And I think many young people are living this kind of double life, trying to protect the future while also just enjoying being young.”
Most of Lack’s friends feel the same. “I think it comes from the recognition that our future… This is the planet we’re inheriting,” she goes on. “And we’re being given a poisoned chalice, and it’s our responsibility to change that. A few days ago my uncle said to me, ‘My generation is done. It’s up to you now.’ And I think that’s so damaging. He’s only in his 50s.” Turning to me sharply, she says, “I’m sure you feel responsibility to your kids, to leave them a planet that is the same or better than the one you’ve lived in.”
I say, “Yes,” not without shame, for sometimes I, too, eat ham straight out of the packet.
Then I say, “Do you get fed up with being asked how to change the world?”
She sighs.
“Not really. I put myself in a position where I’m expected to give those answers. Sometimes it hits me – it’s the weirdest thing. Why are people asking me? I’m a bit of a messenger in a way. Lots of the things I’m repeating, they’re things I’ve heard from scientists. I think that’s OK. You don’t have to have the label scientist to speak out.”
Sometimes, though, Lack experiences a kind of impostor syndrome. “I’m affected by the environmental crisis in an emotional, forward-looking way,” she says, “rather than in some direct, current way. People don’t want to hear a story about when I watched a video about orangutans and palm oil.” They want to be catalysed to action by hearing from young people who have already been affected, she says. “That’s going to make the change.” And off we walk to find her bike.
The Children of the Anthropocene by Bella Lack (Penguin, £9.99) is available from guardianbookshop.com for £9.29
