{"id":1213719,"date":"2022-09-30T00:50:15","date_gmt":"2022-09-30T00:50:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/09\/30\/the-future-of-climate-activism-is-intergenerational-and-on-tiktok\/"},"modified":"2022-09-30T00:50:15","modified_gmt":"2022-09-30T00:50:15","slug":"the-future-of-climate-activism-is-intergenerational-and-on-tiktok","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/09\/30\/the-future-of-climate-activism-is-intergenerational-and-on-tiktok\/","title":{"rendered":"The Future of Climate Activism Is Intergenerational\u2014and on TikTok"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p><span class=\"lead-in-text-callout\">When it comes<\/span> to changing minds, nothing beats an experience. That\u2019s how Sylvia Earle sees it. The scientist has spent years trying to get people to understand the impacts of climate change, and has found that showing them can be the best way to tell them about the problems the planet is facing. Problem is, you can\u2019t take millions of people to the bottom of the ocean, or, for that matter, make them read a boring climate report. The solution? Actually, it might be TikTok.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">At this week\u2019s RE:WIRED Green, Earle talked with Sophia Kianni, a 20-year-old climate activist in her junior year at Stanford University, about the ways climate activism needs to be intergenerational. As Earle noted, older generations weren\u2019t even convinced climate change was real, and research\u2014the thing that could provide the evidence to prove that it is\u2014\u201doften stays in this nerdy community of scientists and doesn\u2019t get out to the public.\u201d Kianni\u2019s generation, meanwhile, has grown up sharing messages on social media.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"AssetEmbedWrapper-iKAnWF bhyIoG asset-embed\">\n<div class=\"CaptionWrapper-brOcMc hFfCYJ caption AssetEmbedCaption-eYEpeY qwmNM asset-embed__caption\"><span class=\"BaseWrap-sc-UABmB BaseText-fETRLB CaptionText-cNZZli hkSZSE bHMCym faGSa-d caption__text\"><\/p>\n<p>Sylvia Earle<\/p>\n<p><\/span><span class=\"BaseWrap-sc-UABmB BaseText-fETRLB CaptionCredit-cSxGsC hkSZSE bmsBkF iOEyAO caption__credit\">Photograph: Aldo Chacon<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<p class=\"paywall\">\u201cI\u2019d like to know from you,\u201d Earle said, \u201chow to strengthen that bridge between the knowledge that is there and communicating it in a way that people listen.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">For Kianni, that bridge is social media. In 2020 she founded the Climate Cardinals, a nonprofit dedicated to translating information about the environment into as many languages as possible. It started as something she did with her family after seeing the effects of pollution in her parents\u2019 home country of Iran. \u201cThe reason my nonprofit now has over 9,000 volunteers is because of TikTok,\u201d Kianni said, \u201cbecause we\u2019ve been able to reach hundreds of thousands of people through organic, short-form video.\u201d<\/p>\n<figure class=\"AssetEmbedWrapper-iKAnWF bhyIoG asset-embed\">\n<div class=\"AssetEmbedAssetContainer-foMCXx bomDaa asset-embed__asset-container\"><span class=\"SpanWrapper-kHmjLe gbVKFf responsive-asset AssetEmbedResponsiveAsset-eWcsO lgxMZN asset-embed__responsive-asset\"><picture class=\"ResponsiveImagePicture-jJpQhK jEPxaV AssetEmbedResponsiveAsset-eWcsO lgxMZN asset-embed__responsive-asset responsive-image\"><noscript><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Portrait of Sophia Kianni against a green background\" class=\"ResponsiveImageContainer-dmuwLx fydubv responsive-image__image\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/gp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/Sophia-Kianni-Portrait-RE-WIRED-Green-Science.jpg\"\/><\/noscript><\/picture><\/span><\/div>\n<div class=\"CaptionWrapper-brOcMc hFfCYJ caption AssetEmbedCaption-eYEpeY qwmNM asset-embed__caption\"><span class=\"BaseWrap-sc-UABmB BaseText-fETRLB CaptionText-cNZZli hkSZSE bHMCym faGSa-d caption__text\"><\/p>\n<p>Sophia Kianni<\/p>\n<p><\/span><span class=\"BaseWrap-sc-UABmB BaseText-fETRLB CaptionCredit-cSxGsC hkSZSE bmsBkF iOEyAO caption__credit\">Photograph: Aldo Chacon<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Mediums like TikTok aren\u2019t just good for organizing volunteers; they\u2019re also good for spreading information in a way people can easily ingest. \u201cInstead of the traditional forms of media, where it would be a scientist or a politician getting on the news and droning on about the newest scientific updates or policy papers,\u201d Kianni said, \u201cwe now have young people who are able to get in front of a camera and say in five seconds what they think the major headline is.\u201d That, she adds, is a big differentiator between the climate activists of Earle\u2019s generation and hers.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Both Kianni and Earle agreed the key factor is having communication between the generations that enables everyone to know what they personally can do about climate change. Like, for example, getting young people excited about green jobs. \u201cThat,\u201d Kianni said, \u201cis the most productive way we can have these conversations and actually equip people to build a future we want to inhabit, and have a sense of hope and optimism.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When it comes to changing minds, nothing beats an experience. That\u2019s how Sylvia Earle sees it. The scientist has spent years trying to get people to understand the impacts of climate change, and has found that showing them can be the best way to tell them about the problems the planet is facing. Problem is, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1213720,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1213719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrity-gossip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1213719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1213719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1213719\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1213719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1213719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1213719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}