I filed this review of ‘It’s Not Just You’, by Tori Tsui for the Business Post in August. While it makes a few interesting points, overall it fails to escape the dense tangle of eco-jargon and will be a struggle for all but the most committed to complete. You can, on the other hand, get a flavour of what it’s about by reading on…
THERE WAS a time when the young were largely free to get on with the job of growing up, while older, more experienced adults managed the serious business of looking after the future.
Lately, this natural order has been upended, with some youthful activists now finding themselves thrust into the unforgiving glare of the global media spotlight as the climate emergency deepens.
Most famous of all is Greta Thunberg, the Swedish activist who burst on to the world stage as a shy yet fiercely determined 16-year-old speaking truth in the plainest possible terms to the world’s political and business elite on whose watch climate change has deteriorated from being a managerial challenge into a dire existential crisis.
Thunberg is, however, one among many tens of thousands of young climate activists who have thrown themselves into the fight, often at huge personal cost. “I felt like I forfeited my youth, play and innocence to become an adult, to become a professional so that my voice is heard”, in the words of youth activist, Katie Hodgetts.
“I felt like the reward of stepping up to be a custodian for the planet and for people was poor mental health and burnout”, she told Tori Tsui, for her new book, It’s Not Just You. Tsui, a Hong Kong-born activist, has conducted extensive interviews with young climate activists and her book chronicles the heavy price being paid by these youthful campaigners, many of whom now also face criminalisation simply for trying to raise public awareness about the climate emergency.
Tsui explores a near epidemic of eco-anxiety sweeping through younger people. She defines it not as a pathology but rather as “a rational response to irrational circumstances”.
Many of these young activists face a dual burden. They are grappling with their own fears about a climate-ravaged future, as vividly illustrated throughout the chaotic summer of 2023, as relentless waves of record-smashing extreme weather events racked much of the northern hemisphere. In addition, many are buckling under the burden of being expected to somehow be the climate ‘saviours’.
“A lot of young people have so much pressure on their shoulders”, activist Dominique Palmer says. “People say: ‘You give us hope, you will change the world, you are more progressive and radical. If you won’t do it, who else will?'”
This intense pressure of expectation leaves Palmer feeling “burnt out and traumatised” and resentful of the idea that a handful of exhausted volunteer campaigners are “the answer to all of the world’s problems”.
While the concept of climate anxiety is relatively new, in the Global South, which has been at the sharp end of worsening climate impacts for which it is not culpable for decades, this has long been a worry, not about the future, but rather the bitter everyday reality.
“My ethnic group is being displaced across West and Central Africa due to climate change and conflict, but ‘climate anxiety’ is something only reserved for the rich and white”, observed Abdourahamane Ly, an activist from Guinea.
“My people are dying in the [English] Channel and stopped from entering fortress Europe while famines are sweeping the continent, but the focus is always on the feelings of those least affected”.
A high-profile campaigner, Tsui details the heavy toll climate anxiety has taken on her own mental health, with the Covid pandemic adding to the collective distress. “It’s a weird existence going from being an eco-conscious climate nomad who sailed the high seas to a traumatised, jobless twentysomething confined to a dingy shoebox of a flat” by the pandemic.
Tsui delves deeply into the links between mental health and issues including climate justice. “The climate crisis is making us unwell, and attempting to address it is my form of therapy, even if one suffers in the process”, she observes.
Tsui’s book suffers from a surfeit of jargon, with terms like “unpacking” and “intersectionality” used to excess. At times the author seems unclear if she is writing for an academic or general audience. As a result, some entire early chapters feel like they have been culled from a Master’s thesis.
It’s Not Just You will appeal to committed young climate activists, especially eco-feminists but it will struggle to win over a wider public audience beyond the eco-converted.
It’s Not Just You, by Tori Tsui, Simon & Schuster UK, €18.20
