Mikaela Loach’s lessons on facing the climate crisis with courage

Mikaela Loach’s career plan was to become a doctor and do search-and-rescue in the Mediterranean. Instead, organizing in the climate justice movement for the last 10 years has taken a dominant role in her life, leading the 27-year-old former medical student – who now has hundreds of thousands of followers across Instagram and TikTok – to write It’s Not That Radical: Climate Action to Transform Our World. The book charts the intersection of climate and racial justice and offers context and tools for how to change things on the ground. This year, she released a book for kids, Climate Is Just the Start. 

Loach says she wrote It’s Not That Radical because she felt it was missing from the climate movement canon. She has been surprised, and encouraged, to see who it reaches: young people have told her they have switched career paths as a result, philanthropic organizations set up new funds for climate justice work, and a corporate CEO was moved enough to discuss it during therapy sessions. 

“We can have something better, and it’s time for us to try different ways of getting that,” she told Corporate Knights senior editor Natalie Alcoba in a wide-ranging interview. It has been condensed for space.

Natalie Alcoba: If you don’t mind, maybe we can start with where you are. Where are you travelling from and where are you going? 

Mikaela Loach: I’m coming from the Elmley Nature Reserve. It’s one of the places in the U.K. that has been actively rewilded. It was really interesting to be there. It was a trip with Finisterre, an outerwear brand, which stocked my book in their stores. It’s bizarre that a surfing brand has stocked a non-fiction book, but it’s also been cool because people have found out about the book. And I’m just heading back home, which is somewhere else in the U.K. 

NA: What is your season like? Tell me a little bit about what you’ve got going on broadly. 

ML: I co-run a school of organizing with Jess Mally [an anti-racism educator] for young Black people in London. It’s on Black liberation and climate justice. It basically exists to try to get people the tools they need to organize around these issues and build them up, so hopefully they will go out and organize many more people. I’m really excited about that. The whole thing is in person, which is also really lovely. It’s called Awethu, which comes from the South African anti-apartheid chant “Amandla! Awethu!” – which means “The power is ours.” “Awethu” means “it’s ours”; we want this school to be everyone’s who is a part of it. 

NA: How did you come up with the incubator? 

ML: I have been organizing in the climate justice movement for about 10 years now. In the U.K., the climate movement is disproportionately white middle class and is not representative of the people who have been most impacted by this crisis. And that has a really big impact on what solutions are being prioritized, or even seen as solutions. And also, it means that a lot of Black people feel they can’t be in these spaces. I struggled a lot in the climate movement with that. 

We make it really clear [to applicants of the incubator] that we don’t really care loads about how impressive you are. What we care about is if you care about your community and want to do something about it. 

NA: I’m going to ask the most obvious question that I’m sure you’ve been asked many times. Which is: why did you write It’s Not That Radical? 

ML: Great question. No, but really, I’m grateful to be asked – because sometimes people don’t ask. The main reason was that I just felt that the book I wanted to do didn’t exist. I think there are a lot of really brilliant books on climate justice that are written towards the movement only and that use language that only people in the movement will understand. They are brilliant and great, but they’re not books that I can give to my friend who I grew up with who hasn’t had the same life experience I had or the same educational experience that I had.

I wanted to write something that would feel like a friend was talking to you about this and they’re not trying to sound smart and they’re not trying to look down on you, but instead it’s a conversation between people that feels like an embrace. It won’t be heavy in jargon whilst still retaining a lot of research and the core of the politics. I think it’s very possible for us to make strong, clear, good arguments that are still accessible. I wanted to compel the reader to do something, and not just to feel better for knowing more. 

NA: A lot of what I took away from the book was trying to create an understanding that in the midst of something so overwhelming, there is hope. Is that something that is for you a daily challenge – to look for that? 

ML: Definitely. So, today at this retreat they asked me to say a bit about storytelling. In that particular moment, I felt quite overwhelmed with grief, and it felt quite difficult to answer that question then. I answered it by being honest – which is that the way we tell the best stories is to be honest. If you’re talking about hope but you’re not being honest with yourself about the deep grief you feel about the world and what is being lost, then it’s not going to resonate with people because it’s not real. How we get real hope is by understanding where we are now. So I ended up talking about grief in that moment. The fact that children are being starved to death and bombed in Palestine. I feel such deep grief, sometimes I want to fall into it and let it overcome me. But I know that is not the solution. To have hope doesn’t require us to put blinders on and not see what is going on around us. We also need to see how change has happened before and realize that it doesn’t have to be this way. 

“To have hope doesn’t require us to put blinders on and not see what is going on around us.”

NA: I find when we go really micro, even just through a conversation, you can feel something shifting. Is that how you approach it? 

ML: Yeah, I do a mix of the micro and the macro. On social media, I am providing education for 10 million people a month who see my videos for a fleeting moment. Whereas at Awethu – and what I actually love about community organizing – is that it’s about the relationships. This is also the difficult part of community organizing because as people, we can be very annoying. Let’s be real. And being in community means being okay with being annoying. I think that’s the only way we’ll change things, if we know our neighbours and have these conversations. Social media obviously has a role, but it’s not everything. Something we need to all learn is that it’s OK to disagree and it’s OK to listen to each other and not only try to convince that person but listen to what they’re saying. That’s how you’re going to convince people. Make them feel like they are being heard. If people feel dismissed, they’re not really going to hear what you’re saying. 

NA: I assume, also, you can’t really get to a more just world without being OK in that discomfort of not agreeing. 

ML: One hundred percent. I was in New York because Bill Gates asked me to speak [at his foundation’s annual event]. [Loach disagrees with philanthrocapitalism and billionaires controlling the solutions we pursue.] What I said in that speech was that I felt deeply uncomfortable being in this space, saying these words that would not be received best in this space. And I knew they would feel uncomfortable in the audience hearing things that disrupted their world view. But I hoped with this shared discomfort that we could all be transformed through this conversation. 

NA: Even beyond discomfort, you talk about disrupting and damaging the industries that are causing the crisis. What kind of call to action is that? 

ML: I think tackling the climate crisis in a way that the ruling class are very happy with us doing so has not worked. The climate crisis has gotten significantly worse. There are actually parts of it that we cannot reverse. There are parts that we can. In the Niger Delta, the life expectancy is between 41 and 45 years of age because of the damage that Shell has done to the area. My friend was there recently and sent me photos of the water that people have to drink there, and it is literally oil. And that is because of Shell’s extraction. But we have been too nice to Shell for too long. These actions are not respectable and they’re not OK. I’m very supportive of actions, especially in the face of the genocide – we’ve seen dockworkers use their unions [to refuse] to board Israeli goods that will be used in the genocide. Those kinds of actions are disruptive and say we will not be complicit. And we will actually cause you financial damage so you will stop this. Obviously, these corporations want us to ask nicely because they can just write us a new greenwashed ad campaign that tells us that they’re not actually fossil fuel companies, they’re renewable-energy companies, even though less than 6% of their operations are renewables. 

“What is being asked of you is to be a little bit brave and to every day be a little bit brave again.”

NA: Do you think we are closer to understanding and disrupting the idea that climate change isn’t the great equalizer but, as you put it in your book, the great multiplier, enhancing inequality? Has that message gotten through? 

ML: Within the climate movement, I think there has been a significantly dramatic shift. Outside these movement spaces, I think there’s starting to be. I’ve gone and given keynotes across Europe and the U.K., and it will be in those spaces that people come up and say, “I’ve never thought about the climate crisis that way. I’ve never thought about its connection to colonialism or that we aren’t all in the same boat, we’re in the same storm.” 

NA: And understanding that is necessary for change to happen? 

ML: The reason that I write about things like the Overton window, the window of possibility, what is perceived as possible, is because these things have material impacts. What the majority of people believe is true impacts what becomes possible or true, because it makes policy possible or change possible because it is well received. When transformational changes or revolutions have happened, they have been possible because a wide amount of people understood why they were necessary or felt that change was needed. 

Organizing means that communities learn that when the conditions are right, they know what to do. So, say, for example, there is an immigration raid in your area; if your community is organized, then they can prevent your neighbour from being taken. That has happened many times in the U.K. That is happening in the U.S. But that only happens if a community understands why they should care about their neighbours and then organizes to know who to call and what to do in that situation. We need to understand both the why and the how. 

NA: What is your message to young people? 

ML: What is being asked of you is not to do right now the thing that seems absolutely petrifyingly terrifying and risky to do. What is being asked of you is to be a little bit brave and to every day be a little bit brave again. And to always try and push yourself outside of your comfort zone. You’re not being asked to become someone different or be so far away from who you really are. We need a diverse movement with different perspectives and different ideas and different skills. And what now might seem risky and scary, 10 years from now may seem comfortable to you because you’ve been pushing yourself to be a little bit brave every time. I think that’s how we actually create change.