When it comes To change your mind, nothing beats experience. That’s how Sylvia Earle saw it. The scientist has spent years trying to get people to understand the effects of climate change and has found that displaying them may be the best way to tell them about the problems the planet is facing. The problem is, you can’t send millions of people to the bottom of the ocean, or, for that matter, make them read a boring climate report. Solution? In fact, it could be TikTok.
At this week’s RE:WIRED Green, Earle spoke to Sophia Kianni, a 20-year-old climate activist in her senior year at Stanford University, about the ways in which climate activism needs to be intergenerational. As Earle noted, older generations don’t even believe that climate change is real, and the research — which can provide evidence to back it up — “is often within the scientific community. This eccentric study is not widely publicized. . Meanwhile, Kianni’s generation has grown up sharing messages on social media.
“I’d like to know from you,” Earle said, “how to strengthen the bridge between the knowledge there and communicate it in a way that people listen.”
For Kianni, that bridge is a social network. In 2020, she founded Climate cardinal, a non-profit organization dedicated to translating environmental information into as many languages as possible. It started as something she did with her family after seeing the effects of pollution in her parents’ homeland, Iran. “The reason my nonprofit now has over 9,000 volunteers is because of TikTok,” Kianni said, “because we can reach hundreds of thousands of people through short, organic video.”
Mediums like TikTok aren’t just good for organizing volunteers; they are also good for spreading information in a way that can be easily used by everyone. “Instead of traditional forms of media, where it would be a scientist or a politician updating the news and covering the latest scientific updates or policy articles,” Kianni said. “We have young people who can get in front of the camera and say after five seconds what they think the headline is. ” She added that there is a big difference between the climate activists of Earle’s generation and hers.
Both Kianni and Earle agree that the key element is having intergenerational communication to allow people to know what they can personally do about climate change. For example, getting young people excited about green jobs. “That,” says Kianni, “is the most effective way that we can have these conversations and really equip people to build the future we want to live in, and have a hope. hope and optimism.”
