How I became a climate change activist: from a childhood interest to a true calling
Let me walk you through my journey in socio-environmental activism, and tell you why I believe that the Amazon on Fire project can generate an awakening in people.
Por Eyal Weintraub
Collaborator at Talk2U
👉 Spanish
For as long as I can remember I have been interested in socio-environmental issues. I have memories of elementary school where I fought countless times with friends when they threw candy papers on the floor or left the water faucet open in the bathroom. In the first years of high school, I made the decision to stop eating beef and pork because of the damage that their production generates in the environment, and how it influences global warming. But only two years ago, at the beginning of 2019, I began to understand that individual actions, although necessary, were not enough to solve environmental issues and that the climate and ecological crisis was the greatest challenge of our century. According to reports generated by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), a United Nations agency, we must reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 45% to avoid passing certain points of no return that would change the balance of ecosystems, generating catastrophic consequences that are still impossible to predict. Millions of climate refugees, rising sea levels, lower food production and even wars over water (an increasingly scarce resource).
In February 2019, many of my friends and acquaintances were sharing on social networks a video of Greta Thunberg (a young Swedish girl who was 16 years old at the time). In the video, she was calling for an international mobilization against the climate and ecological crisis to be held on March 15 of that same year. I started to look out if there was any organization or collective that was organizing that same call in Argentina and I found no one.
I called Bruno Rodriguez, a friend from high school, to tell him about the video and express my interest in organizing a mobilization in front of the National Congress located in Buenos Aires that same day, so that Argentina would join the fight against global warming and its terrible consequences. We decided to organize it together, we added people we thought might be interested and that’s how we started Jóvenes por el Clima Argentina, which today is one of the most powerful socio-environmental youth organizations in the region. To everyone’s surprise, including our own, that March 15th we managed to mobilize more than 5,000 people in Buenos Aires and thousands more across the country.
In December 2020, Nicolás Ferrario from Talk2U approached me to tell me about what they were doing in their venture: interactive and playful experiences via chatbots with the use of artificial intelligence to raise awareness of various social and environmental issues. From Jóvenes por el Clima we believe that in order to achieve the necessary structural changes we need massive mobilizations, millions of people to get involved in demanding and working for a sustainable future. To get people involved, they first need to understand the importance of the issue. That’s why when Nico offered me to join the project as a youth climate ambassador to develop an experience on the climate and ecological crisis, deforestation and fires, I was thrilled with the idea. The project doesn’t have a final name yet, but for now we call it Amazon on Fire.
I remembered the epiphany that Greta’s video had generated in me and how it had changed my life forever. When you open your eyes, it’s impossible to look back. I decided to accept their offer and join the team with one goal in mind: that Amazon on Fire experience has the same effect for thousands of young Latinos as Greta’s video had on me.
Structural problems need collective solutions. It is necessary to achieve the active involvement of millions of people around the world in order to solve this tragedy before it’s too late. But something I have learned during these two years of socio-environmental activism, and also based on my personal history, is that change in people does not happen overnight. They are usually a series of small transformations that accumulate and little by little generate changes in habits, ways of thinking and how they see the world, and finally in daily actions.
Amazon on Fire is our humble contribution to raise the bar of environmental discussion by increasing people’s awareness and bringing hundreds of thousands of young people closer to the struggle for a sustainable world.
If you want to find out more about Amazon on Fire, this project in gestation on climate change, and collaborate to build the experience, you can enter here. Disclaimer: it’s in Spanish!
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Eyal Weintraub, 20 years old, activist in Youth for Climate Argentina, author of “La Generación Despierta”, youth climate ambassador at Talk2U and international relations student at UNSAM. He loves fantasy books and in the last few years started listening to more podcasts than music.
