All names have been changed in the interest of privacy.
Written by Lea Jiang, an undergrad studying Ethics, Society, & Law, Women and Gender Studies, and Political Science at the University of Toronto. Since Fall 2023, Lea has been volunteering with FES to uncover why there is a perception that urban Chinese youth in Toronto seem to not actively participate in climate action. She conducted a series of three interviews with Torontonian youth who identified as part of the Chinese diaspora. This article summarizes her findings.
“Environmentalism is like hospice care. It’s whatever we can do to make ourselves comfortable before the climate kills us all.”
My friend Vic confides this to me during our interview. They were the first to respond to my open call for research interviewees. I’ve been trying to figure out what keeps Chinese diasporic youth in Toronto from being involved with environmentalism, and how the intersection of their identities as settlers and migrants affects their relationship with the lands they live on.
I am a little shocked by their statement; these are the words of a cynic and a defeatist. They demonstrate an apathetic kind of hopelessness that is better narrated in greyscale. Vic and I went to climate marches together! Where is the adrenaline that accompanies a close-death panic? Unfortunately, this declaration is barely pessimistic; you could count on one hand the amount of times it snowed in Toronto this winter. However, the hospice care analogy is useful when trying to answer the question: what’s keeping you from participating in environmentalism?
It boils down to how climate organizing has been making people feel. It’s no secret that environmentalism is a white-dominated domain. From city-wide marches to college club meetings, Vic is just one diasporic youth who can’t imagine themselves in these spaces:
“I think I have a harder time organizing also because like my way into […] climate organizing was a very white introduction, which made me be like ‘Oh, like maybe this isn’t my community. Like I don’t know if I really want to be around these people.” (Vic).
It’s hard to want to be around people who you feel are going to misunderstand what kind of life you’ve lived and how that life has given you your worldview. Vic goes on to say that having to explain her intersectional lived experience is also one of the reasons she does not get involved with activism spaces she perceives as white:
“I have to talk about five different things just to get to environmentalism. It’s exhausting”
No one wants to put themselves in spaces that – consciously or not – force them to justify their presence. It is exhausting to explain how racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and any other “isms” or “phobias” make it difficult to care for a cause touted by people who do not care about you. Spaces like these make it feel like your own individual life, as opposed to the structures which govern us, is where change is supposed to happen.
Green consumerism is one such way this individualist ethos manifests. This is the idea that we can buy our way out of climate disaster by changing the kinds of goods we produce and purchase. It distorts the scale to which consumer-based choices are capable of having an impact on the environment. It’s BP asking what their Twitter followers have done to reduce their carbon footprint while dumping oil into the ocean. No amount of reusable water bottles and so-called recycled plastic packaging can make up for policy which prioritizes profit over planet livability. By making it seem like the problem is individuals making poor choices, mainstream environmentalism alienates diasporic youth who come from working-class backgrounds.
At a fancy organic grocery store, a box of berries grown by exploited migrant labour costs half an hour of minimum wage. It’s expensive, and not necessarily more ethical, to be green. Environmental organizations who do not address the class angle only send a message that, at best, they are ignorant of causes which are important to Chinese diasporic youth. At worst, they actively choose not to align themselves with the marginalized communities around them. Jack, a student union organizer, explains this how green consumerism has made working-class and racialized people feel towards the environmentalism movement:
“I think a lot of the ‘just change your consumption habits and […] we’ll stop climate change,’ messaging has persisted. It is sort of starting to fade now finally, but that really entrenched a negative view of environmentalism as a movement, for a long time. And it also just seemed very tailored to people who have a lot of disposable income and people who can make those sorts of choice-based consumption habits. Whereas, from my experience, a lot of lower income and marginalized people are already limited in the choices that they have. A lot of the time, they are already practicing those sorts of emissions reducing things to begin with. They’re reusing their things because they can’t afford new ones all the time. They’re using [public] transit more because they don’t all have cars, you know?”
In addition to a critique of consumption-based environmentalism, Jack points out that the very things we recognize as environmental action are biased toward favouring privileged activists. He notices that his community members have routines that might be lauded as sustainable if they were being practiced by someone in a different position. It’s like being bilingual; impressive when you’re wealthy and white, invisible when you’re not.
This is where diaspora-specific analysis is needed in environmentalism. What constitutes a home, an environment you feel responsible for protecting, for second-generation migrant youth? This line of questioning revealed that the lack of representation and the tendency to shove responsibility onto the individual are not themselves the reason for non-participation.
They are symptoms of a larger issue: contemporary environmentalism makes people feel lonely.
Marginalized youth don’t feel like they belong, or that their perspectives won’t be understood, so they don’t engage. They divert their attention to different causes, searching for community in spaces where their identities are unquestioned and valued. It is in these spaces where they find their definitions of home:
“I think I feel like home when I’m with community, and I feel like home when I’m in a space that I’ve cultivated, but I’m also very aware that I am a settler on this land. And that means a certain amount of responsibility. […] You choose who your community is and that means you choose who you’re responsible to. If people are going to let me belong with them then I have to also do something for that.” (Vic)
The Chinese diasporic youth who I interviewed all conceptualized “home” as community, rather than land. Our sense of responsibility to each other, and the First Peoples of this land, can and do look like extending our circle of care to the environments we live in. We are all looking for a place where we feel less alone in the fight for our lives. Environmental organizations can and should alleviate the loneliness, and the sense of impending and unstoppable apocalypse, by adopting a much more radical approach to building solidarity with movements that are not exclusively environment focused.
Mainstream environmentalism must do a better job of making their spaces feel like people can belong there. That looks like taking seriously the things that are important to groups outside of themselves, and conducting outreach that follows suit. Demonstrating an understanding that climate change is an intersectional issue makes environmental organizing more relevant to people who have grown up marginalized in a settler colonial country. Most of us are clawing desperately at anything that makes us feel like we are wanted here. Environmentalism must take these emotional stakes into account, and focus on making it feel good to occupy their spaces. It is impossible to gather youth of any diaspora otherwise. Without being able to make the connections that anchor us to the things we’re passionate about, we cannot cultivate any of that passion in the first place.