TED Talks Daily
The eco-creators helping the climate through social media | Zahra Biabani
12 Jul 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hu. What does TikTok dancing have to do with climate action? Well, activist Zahra Biabani makes the connection and points a way to climate optimism. She shows how looking for good news and the solutions in restoring our planet are energizing ways to fight for the future. Her talk is from 2022's TED Countdown New York session.
Thank you so much.
Chapter 2: What does TikTok dancing have to do with climate action?
A survey found that 56% of Gen Zers, the generation that I'm a part of and the largest age demographic in the world, believe that because of the climate crisis, humanity is doomed. This kind of felt like a punch in the gut. I mean, I had just spent four and a half years, tens of thousands of dollars to studying these things.
Countless time organizing on and off campus and energy getting involved with both local and national groups. Yet most of my generation viewed it all as pointless. Now, if we look at the way that younger generations talk about the climate crisis, these feelings of doom and despair make sense. I mean, we're drowning in bad climate news. Headline after headline detail each week's latest catastrophe.
Unprecedented has taken on a new meaning, as each day is unprecedented. And everything is amplified on social media, where there's a remarkable lack of nuance and an oversupply of attention-grabbing rhetoric. Many of us, including myself, seem to believe that if we just share these awareness posts enough times, that someone, somewhere will finally do something about it.
But unfortunately, Joe Biden probably doesn't follow you on Instagram, and he doesn't follow me either, yet. I'm part of a diverse 19-person strong collective called EcoTalk, and we use social media to share nuanced climate education through infographics, memes, and you guessed it, TikToks, to our collective audience of over 4 million people, most of whom are Gen Z and millennials.
And through our work, we've picked up on this pattern. Our comment sections are filled with people who have given up hope. people who say they have weekly anxiety attacks about the climate crisis, or that they don't want to have kids anymore out of fear of adding to the suffering, or that they see no point in taking action when the powers that stand against us are so strong.
Our generation and younger generations need a new way of addressing the climate crisis that unshackles us from the cycles of doom and gloom that so often lead to inaction, because we cannot play a part in making change if we do not believe that change is possible. Climate denialism, which for decades has been peddled by oil, gas, and other big business interests, has met its rival.
Climate doomism, the belief that we cannot save our planet, so why take action? Though they differ in origin, both have the ability to paralyze action and prevent progress. And though things are bad, they're far from over. So how do we find hope when things feel hopeless? And how do we communicate the inextricable link between hope and action?
To answer this, let me take you back to March of 2020, absolutely no one's first choice of when to time travel to. Many of us were quarantined in our homes. People had stopped going out and socializing, yet the stream and virality of bad news certainly had not stopped.
I was finishing up my semester at home, as well as working to move my activism online when I was hit, not only with COVID, but also with burnout. I began to question the efficacy of my work, my passion for environmentalism, and the purpose in studying what I was studying. I knew I needed something to inspire me.
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Chapter 3: How does climate doomism affect younger generations?
It's also what gives us the energy to continue fighting for our successes. virtually the zero-emissions energy source that nobody talks about. So in this process, I realized also that climate optimism is not for everybody. Climate optimism is not for politicians who have stalled on action or corporations who have incessantly pursued profits over people. To them, my message is clear.
Listen to science and act now. Stop failing the citizens and people that you have a duty to serve.
Rather, climate optimism is for those of us here today that have dedicated our lives to fighting the greatest battle of our time, but also to the part-time activists, those who do what they can when they can, and perhaps most significantly, to the marginalized communities and people in the global South who frankly don't have time to get stuck in the cycles of doom and gloom.
the need for climate optimism has never been more urgent. If we limit our vision of the future to one filled with oil rigs, smokestacks, and suffering, we limit our capacity and shirk our duty to change the course of humanity for the better. By looking for good and working towards the good, we empower ourselves to be agents of good in the fight for the future that we deserve.
The alternative, giving up hope, only relinquishes power into the very entities that have gotten us into this mess. Luckily, I'm not alone in championing this movement. My friends at EcoTalk provide a great example of a diverse set of backgrounds, experiences, and voices coming together to encourage this generation and the next. We're not naive.
We know the details and the data that speak to the devastation of the climate crisis like the back of our hands because it's our future to inherit. But we also know that the future we deserve cannot be built on the unstable foundations of fear and anxiety. It must be built with one of the few infinite resources that we have on this finite planet, hope. So we choose climate optimism.
We choose to fight for the future that we deserve. And I hope you will too. Thank you.
TED Talks Daily is hosted by me, Elise Hu, and produced by TED. Theme music is from Allison Leighton-Brown, and our mixer is Christopher Fasey-Bogan. We record the talks at TED events we host or from TEDx events, which are organized independently by volunteers all over the world. And we'd love to hear from you. Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or email us at podcasts at TED.com.
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