The Climate Crisis is a Narrative Crisis

Wawa Gatheru, 25, has been involved in the climate movement ever since she was in high school. But that doesn’t mean she has identified as an environmentalist for all that time. Growing up, she felt like environmentalists looked a certain way, dressed a certain way, and participated in certain types of activities, say camping: that they fit an image that simply didn’t line-up with her Kenyan-American family.

Today, that has changed. As a young climate leader, Gatheru firmly identifies as part of the environmental movement. As such, she’s reclaiming the language and history of the movement to show that there have always been people like her working to protect Earth.

She’s also tackling the issue of representation, calling attention the lack of diversity among environmental groups, and building space and support for Black women and girls in the movement. She’s doing much of that work through Black Girl Environmentalist, a group she founded in 2021 to address pathway and retention problems for Black women, girls, and gender-expansive people in the climate sector through community building, workforce development, and narrative change.

“I really believe that Black women are a very, very critical stakeholder group for solving the climate crisis,” she says. “And I think that our collective power has not been fully appreciated by this movement.”

Gatheru is drawing on her various communities, including tens of thousands of followers on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram and Black Girl Environmentalist’s 1,000-plus members, to grow this effort. She is also joining new ones: Last year, she was named to the inaugural National Environmental Youth Advisory Council, which will provide advice to the administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency on issues that relate to youth.

While Gatheru’s not sure exactly what the future may hold — living amid the climate crisis means things are always changing, after all — she feels that right now, she’s on the right path as part of a “chorus of emerging organizations that are trying to make sure our movement is for all of us.”

“I think that’s what I’m meant to do,” she told me during a call in December. “And what we’re meant to do for the foreseeable future.”

How did you first become involved in environmental justice advocacy and scholarship?

I officially got my start when I was 15. I took an environmental science class my junior year of high school. I didn’t want to take the class initially. I had not done very well in a two-semester-long chemistry course, so the only way that I could fulfill my last science credit was either taking another semester of chemistry or environmental science. So, I took environmental science, and it ended up really changing my life.

I began to understand that the climate crisis was the biggest threat of all time, and also began to understand that while we’re all weathering the same storm that is the climate crisis, we’re not all in the same boat. There are communities around the world that are experiencing the brunt of the climate crisis and environmental injustice because of social, political, and economic circumstances, and existing social ills.

I began to realize that if I wanted to be a changemaker working to empower communities that have been historically marginalized, then I would have to start at climate. Because climate to me is the biggest threat to everyone, but in particular communities of color, and even more specifically, Black communities.

After several weeks in that class, I went home, and I had this big dramatic moment where I just had this feeling, and I went up into my room and I got on my knees, and I prayed for the first time in a really long time. And I was like: God, I think I’m gonna dedicate my life to environmental justice. If that’s not what you want me to do, show me a sign. And I didn’t get a sign. I’ve been doing that work ever since.

Several years ago, you wrote in Vice about the exclusion of Black history and Black experience from environmental scholarship. Can you talk about your experience of that, and how it has informed your work?

One of the reasons why I didn’t want to take that environmental science class, or why the term environmentalist wasn’t one that I actually self-identified with until I was like 19, was because that terminology, that imagery, that I now know was grounded in exclusionary history, I didn’t feel like it served me. I felt like environmentalists looked a certain way, dressed a certain way, made a certain amount of money. And none of those factors were ones that represented me or my family.

I think something that was really important for me in undergrad was learning more about the history of the environmental movement. Jedediah Purdy, who’s a legal scholar, has done a lot of critical work looking at how the roots of the conservation movement laid the groundwork for a language of preservation that was often on color lines, and was often to accommodate and protect people that didn’t look like me — essentially, rich White people, and specifically rich White men. And I think that history continues, unfortunately, to inform funding priorities, programming priorities, and who we see represented in the environmental movement.

I personally identify as an environmentalist. I have for several years now. And I find that in doing so there’s a lot of reclaiming that language, as well as reclaiming that history. Because while it’s true that the American conservation movement was grounded in eugenicist policies, and honestly, White supremacy, the history of people’s relationship with the Earth and Earth stewardship didn’t begin or end with Madison Grant or John Muir. That relationship is one that has existed for as long as we as humans have existed.

Being able to learn more about not just the Black American legacy and history of our relationship with land, but also across the diaspora, has really opened my eyes to the ways in which Black folks have always participated in stewardship and Earth advocacy, even if it hasn’t been recognized in our environmental curriculums, or even by the movement at large. That has really driven a lot of how I approach my work with my nonprofit Black Girl Environmentalist and how I take up space in the climate movement.

What is Black Girl Environmentalist’s approach to supporting Black women and girls and gender expansive people within the climate movement?

Black Girl Environmentalist is a youth led national organization that’s dedicated to addressing the pathway and retention issue in the climate movement for Black girls, women, and gender expansive people. We have the statistics. We have entities like Green 2.0 that consistently looks at the demographic makeup of our movement. And we know that while people of color make up nearly 40 percent of the US population, we don’t exceed a 12 to 16 percent green ceiling.

While our focus is often on pathways, we don’t spend a lot of time talking about and addressing retention. Black women have the lowest retention rate of any demographic in the green space. Where are the initiatives? Where is the programming? Where’s the resourcing to really make sure that when we do get into the space, we’re staying?

I really believe that Black women are a very, very critical stakeholder group for solving the climate crisis. And I think that our collective power has not been fully appreciated by this movement. I think in a lot of other spaces — especially every four years — Black women are propped up for our allegiance, for example, to the Democratic Party, and how we uphold democracy in this country, and are the first line of defense against fascism. But when it comes to Earth stewardship, and when it comes to climate solutions, and when it comes to climate leadership, we are not even in the picture at all.

So Black Girl Environmentalist is working to support early career folks who want to become climate leaders, who want to be able to push the needle forward in solving this crisis, but often are under-resourced, under-mentored, and under-appreciated.

How can the big green groups and those of us within the movement assist with building a truly inclusive, representative movement?

I have two answers. One of them is the answer that Black Girl Environmentalist is attempting to work under, which is our guiding principle, the Black Women Best framework. This is a term that was coined by [economist] Janelle Jones, and this framework argues that if our government would bring Black women from the margins to the center, and intentionally create policies that pull Black women out of economic precarity and into economic prosperity, that everyone would benefit.

The other thing that I would say is, you know, I am a part of the youth. The Youth Climate Justice Fund has done a really in-depth research study that found that, out of all the philanthropic dollars that go towards climate, only 0.76 percent of that goes to youth-led organizations.

I think our movement needs to do a lot more on expanding where our dollars go. I know, it’s difficult, because climate still is amongst the least-funded issues out there. But at the end of the day, when we talk about uplifting the next generation, when we talk about making sure that frontline communities are being properly resourced, then there is this disconnect.

A lot of your work is around storytelling. Can you tell me about the power you see in storytelling as a tool?

I really believe that the climate crisis is a crisis of many things. It’s a crisis of connection. It’s a crisis of culture. It’s a leadership crisis. It’s also a narrative crisis. We don’t know how to talk about it. We don’t know how to really connect climate in ways that everyone can understand.

So narrative change is one of Black Girl Environmentalist’s three impact areas. We’re working on developing and creating educational resources really asserting that Black women have been here for quite some time.

Think about American nature writing. One of the very first examples of an American writer describing the natural world in a really beautiful way is Phillis Wheatley [a Black woman who was kidnapped from West Africa and enslaved in Massachusetts in the 1700s]. Yet it’s only been in recent history and that she’s been acknowledged as being one of the first great American nature writers. Why?

Narrative work and narrative change are all about reclaiming narratives, reclaiming the ways in which we’ve understood environmentalism, the ways that we’ve understood stewardship and Earth advocacy. Understanding that, historically, many people have been left out of the dominant narrative and the dominant culture. Reclaiming that and writing ourselves into existence. So, we tell our stories. I tell my story. Our team members tell their stories. And that’s the way that we connect with each other. And that’s the way we that we’re able to connect with our membership base.

You reach so many people on social media. I’m curious if you experience any tension on platforms like TikTok and Facebook, which are incredible tools for sharing information, but also are used to spread disinformation.

I wouldn’t say its tension in a way that makes me question whether or not I or any other, I would say, voice of reason in climate conversations, belong there. I think we do. I would love to see more climate voices of all ages, not just you know, Gen Z, utilizing TikTok or Reels or whatever it might be. Because the whole reason why I started making content on TikTok and on Instagram wasn’t because I wanted to be an influencer. My goal was to be able to provide information in the midst of overwhelming climate misinformation.

The climate crisis can be overwhelming and lead to anxiety or even grief and anger. How do you think of those emotions in relation to your work?

I think that hope is a really powerful tool. I think that hope is a discipline. Hope is something that you earn through action. [But] if you could call hope an emotion, I don’t think being hopeful is the only emotion that we can lean on to guide us in navigating our complex climate emotions. I think that we really undervalue a lot of other emotions that we are told to feel ashamed about. We’re told to feel ashamed about feeling anger. We are told to feel ashamed about feeling grief. We are told to feel ashamed about feeling hopeless. We are told to feel ashamed about so many colorful and real emotions that are human. And I think that when we are told that these things are bad, we’re closing a door into really sustainable action.

I really believe that the love that we have for our planet, for communities, for ourselves, is what grounds all those emotions. And when we work through them, when we’re honest with them, when we talk about them out loud, when we find community with other people experiencing these things that we’re told to feel ashamed about, I think, on the other side of that is a sustainable pathway for action.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Going back to the community end of things, I really think that we can make communities out of anything, no matter how silly they are. I recently had a new friend of mine come over to my apartment for the first time. And she knew I had cats, but she didn’t know that I’m like an insane cat mom, because, I really am. And she is too. And we were calling ourselves climate cat moms. And I was like: Imagine the community that can come from a ton of cat moms or cat dads or cat parents that care about the climate crisis and are just brought together by this common love of our feline friends. And I think that’s so real.

Sometimes people think that climate community has to be super serious ... And I just encourage people not to be intimidated at the idea of creating spaces for community or getting tied up in it needing to be serious because, we’re people.

Well, as someone with a cat on her lap right now, I appreciate that a lot.

I love that.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.