Shana Sullivan
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I cannot accurately recall a time when I wasn’t aware of the threat of climate change. Throughout this constant awareness, my response emotionally and materially has followed a winding path starting from acute panic, a plummet to despair and then a gentle sink into numbing passivity. It shifted suddenly, finally, with a radical energy that has transformed my life and sense of self – altering my concepts of power, agency and my sense of place and purpose in this world.
I will illustrate this journey, before activism, using a sample of three memories starting with childhood.
1
I was watching the morning news. My uniform was on and I was waiting to be walked to school. I must have been younger than eleven, still in primary school. It was the segment of the news where they looked at the newspaper headlines. Most meant next to nothing to me – except for the final one. The final newspaper they held up featured an image of an ominously backlit Earth hanging in space. The headline, something to the effect of ‘Are we past the point of no return?’ – a reference to the chilling fear of having reached an irreversible climate tipping point. The presenters wince, make a small noise or two of discomfort and then … move on. Smiles return, peppy presenter voices switch back on, ushering the show briskly to the weather segment.
But as the show moves on I am left frozen. Gripped by abject terror, head spinning, breath caught: The world is ending. It’s too late – your future is on fire. You’re doomed, your family is doomed.
We’re all going to die. We’re all going to – But wait!
Forget the end of the world for now: it’s time for school. Finish your breakfast, get your shoes on. Come along.
It’s little wonder I was a deeply anxious child, always thinking about the future. I wondered, why weren’t the adults afraid? Why wasn’t anything being done? Year after year and nothing urgent or drastic was being done. Why? Why isn’t anyone doing anything? Why isn’t anyone else scared? The fear drove me to obsess over the micro things in my immediate environment – recycling, turning off unused lights and worrying over the kind of car the family drove. I knew something needed doing but that
I could not do it, and seemingly whoever could wasn’t.
I wanted to scream but there was no place to do so – all I could do was crumple inwards.
Fear gave way to despair.
2
I’m in secondary school now, learning about population growth as part of a special ‘future day’ event in what would normally be a history lesson. My teacher is presenting a predicted trend chart with a line rising steeply up and insisting to me how dangerous and important this was: ‘The threat of overpopulation.’ I told her, bluntly, that it didn’t matter. She was taken aback – probably because I was usually such a quiet and polite student – then got upset, insisting it does. But my mind was made up: ‘It doesn’t matter.’ I believed deadly climate change would supersede it. Projected population growth meant nothing to me – the future felt like a lost cause anyway, a dead end. The world was ending either way. It felt like being told how many souls are on a sinking ship.
I had been despondent that entire day, worn down, anxious and depressed by the hours dedicated to talking about a future I truly believed wasn’t coming.
Despite this I continued living the way I was meant to, the way I assumed I needed to, getting my GCSEs and A levels. I had dual interests – art and physics. I felt good at both but approaching university felt compelled to pick one. I chose a BSci in applied physics because I thought furthering scientific knowledge may still benefit humanity’s future, whatever that would be. I distinctly felt indebted to the world. I was raised with great love and care, yet guiltily didn’t seem to be capable of being ‘happy’ the way others could be happy. But maybe, I hoped, I could at least be useful in some tiny way.
I was good in academia – and found the stress of my work and relationships filled my head enough to distract me from and dull the constant ache of climate dread. I went into an MSci in space science and engineering. I liked instrumentation and space science. I took modules in Earth sciences and Earth-observing satellites for climate monitoring – still assuming that maybe my work could have some benefit – but I never dared to even think of dedicating my work to climate science.
It scared me too much.
My despair had festered into stark avoidance.
3
Now I’m just over the cusp of twenty – I’m hung-over, nursing a coffee at a greasy spoon and seated opposite a close friend. He’s attempting to tell me about something he’s read about recently. It’s about the climate. It’s not good news. I got angry, told him abruptly to stop. He tried to finish, and I utterly lost my temper and snapped, swore, silenced him, and demanded we change topic. I couldn’t even talk about the things that scared me anymore. And I would rather shout down someone who did, even someone I cared about.
What had I learned, enduring nearly twenty years of climate anxiety?
Certainly not hope – that never entered the equation. What would give me hope? Hope is not blind faith – you need a reason for hope to grow, and the inaction that surrounded me provided only desolate soil.
What I cultivated instead was powerlessness. Not only the internal feeling, but also the performance of powerlessness.
People who weren’t me were the ones who could act – and they likely wouldn’t – so that’s that. The only individual survival mechanism I could then deploy at that point was burying my head in the sand: I can’t do anything about it and hearing about it stresses me out, so if I want to survive day-to-day I simply won’t hear about it.
I had to not only overcome the feeling of powerlessness, but also to unlearn that performance of powerlessness.
That began when, about five years later, I first began to see Extinction Rebellion on the streets of my home city of London. For quite a time these climate protests sat only in my life’s periphery. I felt very positively towards them – but big life changes maintained that buzz in my mind that had so successfully pushed aside nagging voices. But as life calmed (and COVID restrictions lifted) that voice grew louder, insisting I was obliged to give something, anything – and finally pushed me into the movement in late 2021.
I showed up to the meeting points for marches, completely alone, still disempowered and thinking I would only be useful as a body for bulking out the crowd. I felt I could give so little, but I knew I still should give it. But I found roles holding banners and met other young people who shared my pain. I did police-station support alongside mothers and teachers who shared my fears. I found Scientists for XR and attended meetings, participated in actions and met individuals who shared my experiences – and with whom I wrote new ones.
Something important happened to me as I joined these communities and took action. It happened as I walked my first march, blocked my first road, attended my first meeting, painted my first banner and made my first challenges to the authorities in our society.
Where anxiety and fear once lived in my chest, another feeling began to take root. Where fear had been a constant mutter, another sound was rising in volume to challenge it. I discovered the things I had been missing and – once found – things I couldn’t live without.
Community and Solidarity
The world is made up of people and systems in synergy. People create and hold up the systems, and are simultaneously constrained and controlled by them. We are inducted into systems, learn to perform within them, re-enact them, and therefore perpetuate them. The strength of systems comes from the collective power of the people performing them – often unconsciously, as I was[1] – but they are therefore weakened when we resist taking part in them. In this way, every single human being has the potential to transform the world through the transformation of themselves, and the creation of new systems and communities to resist existing ones.
In building movements we not only find people with whom we’ll protest, we find individuals with whom we seek to build a better future. This work requires care, empathy and mutual aid. And therefore – if done right – results in care, empathy and mutual aid between those that undertake it. If we wish to create a fairer, gentler and compassionate world because that is where humans would flourish, then we flourish best in the here-and-now by creating that in our movements. And the creation of this kind of community is precisely what is needed in the face of a present and future where we need (and will increasingly need) to look after one another better.
My anxiety has been replaced with an assurance that whatever the future holds I am part of a community that will respond with care and conviction. I have demonstrated to myself that I have the ability to be responsive to crises with a community I trust.
Agency
I believed, all my life, that the power to change the world was in someone else’s hands. Someone more powerful than me. And therefore the only solution was to convince them to change – a task I couldn’t fathom achieving.
I’ve come to a new belief that we should not need to appeal to ‘power’ for system change. Instead, a better world is made by uncovering and using the power we ourselves possess. While ‘appealing to power’ to make change may feel necessary in our current heavily hierarchical system (and I don’t argue we shouldn’t also apply pressure to existing power structures) we should not let that further lend legitimacy to those who make claim to that power and nor should we show approval of such structures. The creation of a system that works for the many requires power to be held by the many. Every act of civil disobedience and direct action is a demonstration of the power of the individual and communities to deny the status quo, hence deny it its power over us, and instead to create an opposing system. We channel energy away from the systems and hierarchies we oppose and place it into a new system.
In a world made up of systems, that is of itself world-changing.
If we want a world of fairly distributed power, of people looking after each other, of action and care for the environment and justice for all, we must not merely request it but must enact it ourselves. A world of active love and care requires active humans, hence by taking action in our social movements we are manifesting this change in real time.
Agency lives within us all, but cannot be freed until we understand where our power lies. In my own circumstances[2] I could do this through taking direct action: placing myself where I once thought I could not be and doing the things I once thought I could not – and finding I can. I uncovered the extent of my own freedom through action, creating in me a person no longer paralysed by fear, despair or avoidance – but energized in all facets by love, resilience and agency.
Hope
A harsh truth of activism and social movements is that the fight never ends; there will never be a day you ‘win’. It is a constant push for a better world, an ongoing struggle to a horizon you will never fully reach. But while there is no definitive win-state there is also no fail-state. We can always struggle onwards, and if our struggle has created activated, experienced individuals and resilient, caring and life-changing communities, then we have already made the world a better place along the way.
I do not fear our efforts will be for nothing if our demands are never met – I believe we have already changed the world. Because I am part of this world, and I am transformed.
So I can continue to fight to change the world, emboldened by this fact that I already have.
That fact, indisputable, gives me the hope I need.
Footnotes:
[1] And still may be continuing to do so, participating in systems I have not even identified as such. For example, the performance of gender is a system that many of us subconsciously perform everyday through clothing selection and behaviour. This isn’t as overt as, say, the system of capitalism – but on the flip side may be easier to resist, depending on the individual and their circumstances.
[2] As a person living in the Global North and with all the associated privileges of being white and economically secure. The agency we materially have and the ways we can express this agency differ tremendously depending on differing circumstances, and I am only speaking from my own (albeit narrow) experience.
Shana Sullivan was born in Massachusetts and is a dual citizen of the Republic of Ireland and the United States. When she was two years old her family moved to London where she was raised. She achieved a BSc in Applied Physics at St. Mary’s University College and an MSc in Space Science and Engineering: Space Technology at University College London (UCL). She worked in the Netherlands for a year in industry before moving back to London and becoming an astronomical observatory technician and beginning a part-time PhD in astronomical instrumentation. Shana joined Extinction Rebellion in 2021, helped form the UCL Staff Climate Activist Network in 2022 and in 2023 founded the Education Climate Coalition, an organization that connects and aids collaboration between student, staff, academic and external climate action groups that operate in the educational sector.
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