The Herald - The Herald Magazine
The work I do is serious and can be heartbreaking. I wear pink to bring a little joy
SHE TOOK THE UK GOVERNMENT TO COURT. NOW MIKAELA LOACH HAS WRITTEN A CALL TO ARMS ON CLIMATE ACTION. SO WHY WON’T SHE PIPE DOWN?
THERE’S a line that Mikaela Loach likes to say about her Instagram following:“I lure people in with the big pink outfits and they stay for the climate justice.” It seems like a joke, but it’s not quite. The 25-year-old activist does wear impressive pink outfits – a choice which she says simplifies her life since she need only head for the pink section in the secondhand shops from which she buys her clothes.
She has also heard from followers who said: “I only followed you because I liked your pink outfits. Now I’ve changed my entire career to work in climate because I learned lots of stuff I never would have expected to learn. Maybe I wouldn’t have followed you if I hadn’t seen the fluffy pink outfits.”
The clothes may lure them in, but there’s something about her particular style of tough climate activism and heartfelt passion that makes people stay: 163,000 of them on Instagram and rising.
Here is a young woman who has chained herself to buildings and taken the Government to court, but who also wells up when she speaks about her Jamaican grandmother and the tides rising around Hellshire Beach, near Kingston.
Pink enough to do Instagram and a popular podcast, titled Yikes!, but serious enough to have written a handbook that tackles not just climate, but race, class, capitalism and justice.
When she arrives at The Meadows’ Pavilion Café, buzzing from the previous day in which she both graduated from Edinburgh University and spoke to a packed audience of friends and fans at the launch of her book, Loach is wearing a pink jumpsuit and matching fake nails, which she says feels like coming “full circle”.
Back in 2018, she was wearing a different pink jumpsuit for the photos that accompanied the diary of a climate activist piece she wrote for the Herald, documenting her Extinction Rebellion protest that year. “It feels very like, ‘Oh gosh a lot has happened since then’,” she says.
A lot has indeed happened, in the world and in her life. Not least that she spent a year writing a book, It’s Not That Radical: Climate Action to Change Our Word, while living in Jamaica with her grandmother. And then there’s that High Court case, in which she was one of three plaintiffs from a group called Paid to Pollute, who took the UK Government to court for an oil and gas strategy that it argued conflicted with net zero goals.
But we talk about Jamaica first. Loach had been burnt out when she got there and it’s not surprising given the run-up year of 12.5-hour shifts on clinical placement as a medical student throughout the pandemic, followed by the frenzy of COP26 and, hot on its heels, a High Court action.
That visit was the first time she had lived in Jamaica as an adult, but when she got there, she had to stay on her own while her grandmother waited for a vaccine to kick in. She recalls suggesting, excitedly, on the phone with her grandmother about going to Hellshire Beach, which was where her family had often gone when she was a child.
“My grandma just said, ‘That beach doesn’t exist any more. It’s disappearing more and more every year and now the water is up at the level of the restaurant.’ I remember having this sinking feeling in my stomach. I think we can intellectualise this climate crisis and make it seem quite distant, but this was a reminder that it was happening. Sea levels are rising, but this was a real place that I knew. It had been a huge part of my childhood and it’s one of those places that kind of forms who you are.”
So many of her memories of Jamaica are caught up with Hellshire. “All the pictures of me as a baby are of sitting on that beach. I thought that if I have kids they won’t be able to have those same experiences. And there are so many communities living right there who must be thinking, every day – what’s going to happen to our homes that
are getting closer and closer to the sea? My grandmother is only a 10-minute drive from there. It felt very personal and scary. I had to channel that fear to think – what am I going to do about this? Because it can be too easy just to sit in that fear. But, in that moment I think I allowed myself the grief of it all.”
Later, she would go to Hellshire with her grandmother and she recalls “standing on the edge of all the restaurants and I could see water splash into the restaurant where there was previously a whole beach out front”.
LOACH describes herself as “a soft black girl”. She wears emotions on her sleeve, talks about having been so bullied that, as an 11-year-old, she had to switch secondary schools, and describes tears over climate change. But at the same time, she is fiercely eloquent and wellresearched. She is also part of an international network of climate activists – amongst them Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate – all of whom are friends and, she says “a tight-knit community”. She and Thunberg recently messaged each other to exchange books.
The pink, she says, is part of her life for multiple reasons – one being the desire to come to her work as her “full self”. “The work that I do is very serious and sometimes quite draining and heartbreaking. I think I have to find those bits that I can do every day to mend my heart a little bit, and bring a little bit of joy in. For me, wearing ridiculous pink outfits is that.”
“When I was younger,” she recalls, “because of this mix of misogyny and antiblackness that black women experience, I think I thought that to be taken seriously, I had to be a certain person or wear smart dress. I think in my adult life I’m trying to allow my child self – who maybe didn’t get to be as whimsical because of bullies or because of difficult stuff – to have some joy.”
Loach began her journey in activism while she was at school in Surrey, volunteering at the Calais migrant camps, where she recalls “just folding clothes and chopping wood to support the displaced communities that are living there”.
Looking in on the climate movement, she had at first thought it wasn’t for her. “From my perspective, though I did grow up with class privilege I also grew up as a black person in the UK. For a long time, I saw the climate movement as solely white, middleclass, privileged, and that climate action was for those groups and not for the majority of people.”
That, she says, is changing – and her book is partly about inviting people in who otherwise might have thought they did not have a place or a role.
Climate activism of the type she has done has its critics and not just over its image of privilege. What about the oil and gas workers – are we going to throw them under the bus? And, come on, isn’t it just impractical to turn off the taps on oil and gas?
Loach is a reminder that there is a section of the climate movement that is fiercely trying to be inclusive and push for a just transition. She talks about the oil and gas workers not being the enemy. Rather, she says, the shared foe is “the bosses and their higher-ups in the industry who don’t care about the planet or the workers. And are kind of screwing over both of them”.
Asked what she would say to an oil and gas worker who might be put out of a job, she delivers a considered speech.
“I would just want to say,” she says, “that we as a climate movement will be advocating for your rights as a worker as well as the rights of the planet and the rights of people because those are so interconnected. We want to advocate for a real just transition which means funding that kind of training and skilling up into renewable industries and not abandoning entire communities, and creating more and safer jobs for people who are currently in insecure jobs and worried about their future.”
Loach also appears resolutely non-judgemental on lifestyle choices – though that hasn’t always been the case.
As a first-year student at Edinburgh University, she got caught up in trying to cut down on plastic waste, then lying in bed thinking how awful everything was before getting up in the morning and making her own oat milk. “But I was already thinking – this is not enough,” she recalls. “I became obsessive about my own lifestyle because I thought that was what we were being
I did grow up with class privilege. I also grew up as a black person.
For a long time, I saw the climate movement as solely white, middle-class, privileged