For some, adding the environment to the laundry list of concerns about the future is too much to handle.
- More immediate concerns like unemployment make it hard for young people to prioritise fighting climate change.
- Global warming is impacting mental health, causing eco-anxiety and ecological grief.
- Young people are at a crossroads, unsure if they have it in them to take up this cause.
It’s 2018 and Ayakha Melithafa is a teenage girl like any other. Her school days consist of laughing with friends and teasing each other about their latest crushes, trying to pay attention as teachers drone on about Shakespeare and trigonometry. Occasionally, her mind will wander to her mother, still in the Eastern Cape.
On the phone, Ayakha tells her about Day Zero, and how Cape Town has worked itself into a frenzy. The taps are still running, even if the water is a little dodgy. She asks her mother how she’s doing back home. “Oh, I’m fine, everything here is fine,” she tells her daughter. The drought there has spread, but they’re managing, she shouldn’t worry.
For Ayakha, the end of term can’t come soon enough. She says goodbye to Cape Town, and travels east, back to the small farm that is her childhood home. Over the phone, her mother had put her mind at ease. In person, though, Ayakha can see that the worry in her eyes betrays her words of reassurance. The extent of the drought can’t be ignored. Fields that should be green are cracked and brittle. Livestock, once healthy, look thinner as they meander slowly on sparse grazing land. Her mind is full of questions for which she has no answers.
She returns to Cape Town, her heart heavy with the fear that things are changing for the worst. Just two weeks later, her life sciences teacher would hand out pamphlets for the YouLead initiative, a youth programme by climate justice organisation Project 90 by 2030. That would be the moment her climate activism is born.
Young activists, like Ayakha Melithafa, have taken the challenge of fighting climate change head-on. Photo: Afribeing.
The fight feels too big
Today, the feeling of despair that Ayakha felt is what experts are calling eco-anxiety. For her, it lit a fire to act. But for others her age, it is breeding a quieter response: tuning out or convincing themselves that the climate crisis is someone else’s problem. Young people are caught in the tension between fear and indifference, searching for ways to reconcile that their inheritance is a burning planet.
For South African youth in particular, climate change is just one of many looming threats to their futures, and caring about them all can be too much to shoulder.
“I’m not big on worrying about things that I can’t control. If I think of all the things that are happening in this country that are scary and that I know are going to affect me in the future, I ask myself what am I going to do about that? I see climate change the same way,” said Ntokozo Seoka, a first-year engineering student.
“Am I going to stop the rain, am I going to stop the floods? I could start an organisation or something but it’s going to take a much bigger collective action to change anything, so I don’t even bother,” she candidly shared.
For Ayakha, this disillusionment is understandable, but still disappointing. “That mindset is a little bit scary. As young people, there’s always going to be something else that we’re focusing on and prioritising. But if we don’t look towards the future, then we will always be in survival mode,” she said.
Rather than allowing the climate crisis to demoralise her, Ayakha insists that the solution is to tackle this issue head on and try to find the opportunities in it, as others have. “In the global north, these young people have clocked it. […] They’re developing climate tech and coming up with advanced ideas, while in the global south we’re still trying to understand what climate change even means,” she said. “It’s not about trying to be them, it’s about being in a state of readiness.”
Research shows that young South Africans have several climate-related concerns. Graphic: Mbali Khumalo.
The human toll of a warming world
Humans often forget that we’re of the earth, not just on it. Climate change is not something we’re seeing happen around us, it is also happening to us, on a physiological level. Plastic pollution is a clear example. “People on the frontlines, scientists, have found microplastics in blood, air, even human placentas,” said Hellen Dena, Project Lead for the Pan-African Plastics Project at Greenpeace Africa. She insists that environmental crises are also human health crises.
Darshnika Lakhoo, clinical researcher at the Wits Planetary Health Research Division, has found that the impact on the mind is far more nuanced than just a passing concern about dry rivers or melting ice caps. “Psychoterratic syndrome is a term that encompasses a lot of ecological related mental health impacts of climate change,” she explains. “The terms under this umbrella are eco-anxiety, ecological grief, which is the mourning related to the change in your environment and the loss of the natural world. There is also solastalgia, which is stress caused by environmental changes.”
Environmental justice organisations see this within their ranks. “Eco-anxiety is very real among young people. There’s a lot of fear and frustration, and also just grief about nature as a whole,” said Keletso Malepe, co-founder of the South African Youth Biodiversity Network. “We’re experiencing drought, floods, heatwaves, even wildfires. […] These climate risks don’t exist in isolation. They interact with all the other vulnerabilities that young people face like poverty and high unemployment,” Malepe said.
A generation at a crossroads
The youth are left in a climate catch-22. The task of reversing the damage done by older generations is so daunting that some would rather avoid it altogether. However, to do nothing only increases the risk of worsening their physical and mental health, as this crisis continues to destroy livelihoods and displace communities.
For those like Ayakha, there was no choice. Climate change didn’t knock on her door, it kicked it down. Stories like hers mark the test the youth face today. “Each generation had a great challenge,” said LLB student Aiden Chetty. “Ours is the environment, and to avoid it would make us the first generation too cowardly to embrace its cause.”
Students at Wits University had their say on how the climate crisis is impacting their wellbeing. Video: Mbali Khumalo
FEATURED IMAGE: Climate change has become a generation-defining fight for the youth. Image: Chris de Beer-Procter.
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