The girl is pondering to herself, then the camera angle rises. She acknowledges the viewer, and points to the words How would I like to see action taken on climate change.
She's not still for long. Viewers see her doing multiple things: recycling, turning around to walk, turning off a lamp. She eats a meatless dinner. She makes it clear that she wants the viewer to do more too, such as writing letters to government officials and support and join locally-led movements and strikes, in the end she sates ‘Let’s unite and help save our planet!’
The girl in the video is Monica Wojcik, one of three winners in a recent TikTok challenge by members of the New Haven Climate Movement. Earlier this summer, the group announced that Wojcik, Savannah Lee, and Lauren Wiedenmann had won the contest, which uses the TikTok video platform for climate activism and advocacy. The contest unfolded entirely online after COVID-19 made in-person gathering inadvisable.
“We’ve been doing more work than in real life,” said Adrian Huq, a recent graduate of Metropolitan Business Academy who has become a leader in the city’s movement to fight climate change. Huq co-founded New Haven Climate Movement in 2018; they are headed to Tufts University to study environmental science this fall.
The contest was born in March, as members of the New Haven Climate Movement realized they would not be able to spend Earth Day together due to COVID-19. While the group had already been planning some kind of competition, the pandemic pushed it entirely online. Categories also included visual art and essay. Winners’ names are available at the group’s website.
The prompt for the video category was simple: use TikTok, which has emerged as a popular platform during quarantine, to chronicle the actions young people want to see to combat climate change. Huq said that organizers chose TikTok because the application is fairly accessible and user-friendly.
Lee and Wiedenmann, who placed second and third respectively, each took a slightly different approach to the prompt. Lee’s video used attention-grabbing imagery depicting the toll climate change is taking on nature.
In the video, she points to the words climate change and stares into the camera mouthing “This is where you make it permanent.” Viewers are suddenly faced with apocalyptic images: a burning forest, starved polar bear, ocean full of trash, and a dolphin swimming with a trash bag around its neck.
Then Lee flips the script: she shows viewers multiple ways to battle climate change. She ends her video with the message: “WE CAN SAVE US,” written in all capital letters as if she is screaming. Neither she nor Wojcik responded to requests for comment.
Wiedenmann, meanwhile, presents the problem of climate change and solutions to fix it. Featuring some of her fellow climate change activist friends, she lists in her video ways to take climate action. In the end, she points out that the most important part is to stay green and help put a stop to climate change.
Wiedenmann found that TikTok was the best artistic platform for her, because it allowed for a short video that took on big, hard-to-solve topics.
“The contest gave an opportunity to learn more about climate change and what friends can do to help,” she said.
This piece comes to the Arts Paper through the third annual Youth Arts Journalism Initiative (YAJI), a program of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. This year, YAJI has gone virtual. Read more about the program here or by checking out the"YAJI" tag.
