Back in 2020, before the world shut down, I remember walking out the doors of my high school on a Friday morning and joining a growing crowd of my peers. As we marched downtown holding signs emblazoned with slogans like “There is no planet B,” we screamed call-and-response chants at the tops of our lungs:
“What do we want? Climate justice! When do we want it? Now!”
“Hey hey! Ho ho! Fossil fuels have got to go!”
“No more coal, no more oil, keep our carbon in the soil!”
This was the first of many school strikes for climate action I would participate in, a movement popularized by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg in 2018. Back then, I and so many of my Gen Z peers were full of hope, or at least confident enough in our own capacity to effect change that we spent much of our time and energy protesting. Eventually, something seemed to knock the wind out of our sails. The fire within us died down, but the world went on burning.
I was not alone in my waning enthusiasm for climate activism. Many of my friends also stopped protesting in favor of posting the occasional infographic on their Instagram stories or sharing a link to a petition against an oil pipeline. Despite our posts, the pipelines kept being built. We felt eclipsed by the power of the insatiable fossil fuel industries and their corporate lobbyists. We felt unseen and unheard by the federal government and even our local ones, no matter how loud we screamed about needing to save the planet. So we stopped screaming, and many of us stopped talking about these issues at all.
This phenomenon is empirically supported beyond just anecdotes. According to an international study of 10,000 participants, 56% of people aged 16-25 agree with the statement that “humanity is doomed.” Despite her status as the face of the youth climate movement, we’re not all Greta Thunbergs — in fact, she may be an exception to the norm.
Gen Z tends not to feel culpable for climate change. We are not responsible for building the infrastructure that perpetuates it, such as carbon-intensive heating and cooling systems, gas-powered automobiles and pipelines drilled deep under Indigenous lands to facilitate the transport of crude oil. We are not responsible for the establishment of capitalism, a system which provides profit incentives for externalizing costs in the form of environmental damage instead of manufacturing goods and powering facilities responsibly. We cannot be blamed for the harm caused by previous generations, yet we are the ones who will have to live with its repercussions. We are the ones who have to grapple with the moral bankruptcy of our economy and attempt to make ethical choices around consumption despite the fact that these choices are financially disincentivized. We are the ones who feel the crushing burden of responsibility, the ones who have to save the planet, the ones who aren’t even considering having children because we deem it unethical to bring them into a world on fire.
We are aware of the predatory multinational corporations responsible for most of the world’s carbon emissions, as well as the animal agriculture industries, and we know that it’s a systemic rather than an individual issue. Perhaps this is why we feel so powerless; we have woken up to the reality that modifying our individual carbon footprints isn’t nearly enough. Simply turning off the lights when we leave a room won’t save us. We feel we have been defeated in our efforts to mitigate climate change before we’ve even begun. When the topic of the damage done to our planet comes up in conversation, it is almost immediately dismissed simply because so many of us feel so hopeless. Unfortunately, we seem to have gotten bored of talking about climate change because the demise of our planet feels like a foregone conclusion.
It seems that a large portion of Gen Z have adopted a mindset of climate nihilism, detaching ourselves emotionally from the catastrophe at hand in order to protect ourselves from living in a state of existential anxiety or crushing depression. People actively avoid looking at the news in the name of protecting their mental health. We can barely stand to acknowledge reality anymore. Ignorance truly is bliss. We are humans coping with a chaotic world in the best way we know how: by sticking our heads in the sand. As long as the sun keeps on rising, we push climate change to the back of our minds in order to make the most of another day.
