The gifts of neurodivergence, sensitivity, and an intersectional mindset
The gifts of neurodivergence, sensitivity, and an intersectional mindset
Activist and author Tori Tsui advances the “eco-anxiety” conversation by deeply listening to Global South perspectives and validating lived experience
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It began on a boat
In 2019, Tori Tsui found herself on a schooner, in the middle of the ocean, for three months.
Tori, a climate activist then in her 20s and based in Bristol, UK, was headed to COP25 – the UN Climate Change Conference – in Chile (although it later relocated to Madrid because of Chile’s civil unrest). Stella McCartney had sponsored Tori to sail to the conference as part of a program that gave dozens of young people the opportunity to travel to COP in a sustainable way and attend the discussions.
Tori describes the trip as the most traumatizing experience of her 20s. Partly for the reasons you might expect: she was seasick, confined to a very small space, and cut off from the rest of the world. But as a neurodivergent, racialized woman, she also found the environment predatory and abusive in a number of interlocking ways. And she started to understand, first-hand, that the systems of oppression that destroy our mental health are the same ones creating and perpetuating the climate crisis, and they can’t be separated.
“I think that boat was when I came to realize that all of these different issues like gender inequality, racism, ableism, and all of these things, really coalesced with this experience of eco-anxiety that I was feeling,” she says.
The mental health crisis is a climate justice issue
Tori’s new book, “It’s Not Just You”, is an exploration of this idea: the only way we can make true progress on climate justice is by dismantling the many injustices that prevent marginalized communities from living in the full expression of themselves – most especially because many of those marginalized communities are the hardest hit by climate catastrophe.
“From a very young age, I've been diagnosed with a lot of different mental health illnesses and conditions over the years,” Tori shares. “I grew up in a society in Hong Kong where talking about these kinds of things was just out of the question. Talking about mental health, full stop. People would look at you funny. I think Hong Kong has come a long way since my childhood. But for a long time I felt entirely alone in whatever it was I was facing. And it was actually the realms of climate advocacy that made me realize that I wasn't alone. The climate justice movement as a whole has helped me recognize the interconnectedness of my struggles and how many of us have been labeled over the years as highly sensitive people, which I always say is a bit of a euphemism for a) either caring about injustice or b) being neurodivergent.”
The title, “It’s Not Just You” is a reminder that your mental health struggle in the climate crisis is not a unique or problematic experience or something to be pathologized: it is a reasonable and intelligent response to what’s happening to your habitat.
“As the professionals are reiterating: we are reacting very naturally to unnatural circumstances, and that realization gave me the credence to be like, hang on a second: everything that I've been experiencing in my life up until now is not something that exists in a silo,” Tori explains. “And so all of these struggles that I thought were making me crazy, or that I was weird and abnormal and alone are very, very much rooted in an understanding of the world around me. Eco-anxiety was an invitation for me to recognize that, actually, I'm not crazy. It's not just me.”
But the title also serves as a call to stop thinking in the kind of hyper-individualistic terms that capitalism demands and instead reflect on the many ways our actions impact and depend on and dance with everyone else’s.
“It’s an invitation to recognize that we can have our individuality as organizers, campaigners, writers, thinkers, and citizens of the world,” Tori says. “But that's not necessarily to be conflated with individualism, which to me is part of the reason why we're in this crisis in the first place.”
Who does our language include? Who does it exclude?
Of the many ways Tori sees the climate justice movement as excluding marginalized people, one of the more pernicious ones is some of the language of the movement. Terms like “eco-anxiety” are increasingly becoming part of the mainstream climate conversations, and have brought solace and relief and emotional validation to so many people, Tori included – but she still recognizes that they are borne of a certain privileged perspective.
“There’s a lot of nuance that needs to be unpacked with conversations around emotions and climate change for a lot of people on the front lines,” Tori says. “The word ‘eco-anxiety’ doesn't necessarily speak to the gravity of the situation, nor does it necessarily encapsulate the sociopolitical context of living in a country that has experienced the brunt of colonization and what it means to be a frontline defender in a country like Columbia where police brutality is such a big issue.”
She continues: “So for instance, when I was interviewing one of my friends, Laura Muñoz, she was saying, you know, this term eco-anxiety, first and foremost, I've never heard of it. Which I think is a super-valid critique. I'd kind of gone all enthusiastic being like, ‘tell me what you think about eco anxiety’ and she was just like, huh? Like, what does that mean? And that was a really big lightbulb moment for me where I was like, okay, I can't just necessarily ascribe this language to people who don't necessarily relate to it. And then she divulged, well, as a climate campaigner in the most dangerous country to be an environmental defender, my biggest concerns at the moment are my safety. So I want to expand the definition of what climate justice means, or what environmental campaigning means, to also encapsulate these social injustices. And so that's where we're starting to see that for many people in the global north, they have this definition of what climate change entails, whereas for people in the global south, they're asking a lot of these definitions to widen and to broaden to encapsulate some of the experiences that they have. And interviewing a lot of people made it very clear that for them, they really wanted to make sure that the definition of climate change that’s being used is honoring the experiences and the injustices that they've faced.”
Other linguistic terms that we’ve written about before and that are starting to gain mainstream recognition are solastalgia – distress caused by changes in the environment. Grief over what’s been lost. “Climate grief” is another one. Tori unpacks and questions these as well.
“For me, this fixation on the speculative future that I'm largely seeing in climate communities here in the global north really speaks to the Eurocentrism of the climate world as a whole because people are fearful for the future, and rightly so. It's not invalid to be worrying about the future. But I'm sure you know about Sarah Jaquette Ray's work, which asks: is eco-anxiety just white people holding onto that privilege and sucking up all the air in the room from people of colour who have long endured a lot of these climate injustices? Many people have seen the earth's changes over the years, not just through the lens of Western environmentalism, but through the extractivism economies that have been invading Indigenous territories and communities in the global south.”
We need a more inclusive climate conversation
But for Tori, when she sees new, international conversations taking place that aim to broaden the range of people they include, she feels a shift coming. She feels hope.
“Having been on international calls with people from all around the world and being able to listen to those perspectives is so paramount because you realize that your perspective can't speak for everyone, right? It's not just you. It's not just your perspective. I find that organizations that really strive to make those cross-cultural, international spaces are really, really important and serve to build solidarity. For me, solidarity is understanding that this system, this crisis, is making us all unwell to varying degrees. Solidarity is about recognizing that we are all struggling and we would do well to make sure that those who are most marginalized in society are being centered and uplifted because when they succeed, we succeed.”
Tori hopes that her book will carve out another space for people to have these types of discussions, examine their blind spots, and welcome in perspectives on the climate crisis that they perhaps haven’t before.
“I do feel like this book is a really delicate and tender space for a lot of campaigners and allies who identify as being in the global north to be like: hey, how can we create these meaningful discussions and actions to make sure that no one's left behind?”
“It’s Not Just You” is out in July and is now available for pre-order below. Please consider supporting your local bookstore over mega-corporations!
If you liked reading this, feel free to click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏🏼
Making Waves
Join us on May 31 @ 8PM ET for an interactive webinar, Having Children in a Climate Crisis Join a discussion with experts and Gen Zers about how climate change is impacting the way we think about families. In this event, we’ll explore the ways climate change is affecting our mental health in relation to decisions about family-building. Attendees will watch two documentary films: The Climate Baby Dilemma, which will be available to screen before the event, and Gen Z Mental Health: Climate Stories, which is an 8-minute film that will be screened for the audience during the event. The event will feature a panel discussion with the filmmakers, leading experts in the field of climate change and mental health, and a climate psychology clinician. The conversation will make room for a range of experiences, and both parents and people without children are welcome.
Plum Village and the International Earth Holder communities warmly invite you to join the Global Earth Retreat: “Love is Freedom” from June 17 - 22. It will be the first Plum Village ‘hybrid’ online and onsite Global Earth retreat where we will explore together the essential environmental and social justice issues of our time and foster our connection with each other and with Mother Earth through the collective energy of mindfulness, concentration, and peace. It includes workshops and panels on the themes of spirituality & activism; social & racial justice; how to take care of our grief and eco-anxiety.
For the online retreat, we have carefully curated four adjusted schedules to cater to different time zones for your convenience: Europe/ Africa, the Americas East and Americas West, and Asia/ Pacific.
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‘Till next time!
Very insightful. As someone raised in a Eurocentric education system but not being of European origin and subsequently living in three “developing” countries and traveling to much more, I find the depth of thought in this post incredibly hopeful.
Thank You, as a person who could clearly see the destruction of Our biosphere (climate system) by age 39 in 2004 and entered university in 2005 to study to address it - and was diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum "Disorder" (ASD) about 2 years ago I appreciate your insights.
I see our climate system as the interconnected living totality it is, a system of systems that evolved from Earths abiotic formation then became "Gaia" as defined by lovelock in " the practical science odmf planetary medicine" - 2000 edition, and have drafted a summary of the evolution of our climate system we are part of.
Thus my definition of Anthropogenic Climate Change covers all our destructive actions which currently predominate - and potential constructive actions which I have encompassed in the term " Ecologically Responsible Geoengineering" which basically involves rapidly restoring a functional biosphere using dynamic context appropriate technologies where they will have positive impacts and diverse effective actions could produce positive "climate change" impacts far greater than the sum of their parts.
Currently diverse destructive actions are producing destructive outcomes far greater than the sum of their parts.
I prefer the term "Autistic Spectrum Condition" as related in a recent BBC article.
I believe the "disorder" is contextual - it is reasonable to be disorderly In the face of injustice and deliberate misunderstanding as occurs when members of the normal powerful majority deliberately or by rote learned brainless habit - project whatever narrative makes them happy when a neurodivergent person is trying to explain something to them that threatensvtheir entitled "superiority".
I felt very alone until I saw Greta Thunberg speak.
And I have less alone since thanks to the efforts of people like you.
Thank you ❤🌏💙
My name is Bob Baker by the way, I am camped near Armidale, Australia, trying to convert an agressively unwanted PhD into an "inverse school strike" - a novel instrument less restrictive than a flat Earth PhD.
My honours thesis title was "Developing an integrated renewable energy and water supply and carbon management system for Australia as an alternative to fossil fuelled systems".
A rough foundational effort I did in 2009, I could send a Dropbox link but I have done much more and extended the concept In many dimensions since then.
The first step is to get normal people to understand that we are all in this together- this is not his or her problem, it is everyone's problem and we can remain as part of the problem - or strive to do better.
Thanks again!