We Breathe Oil & it Kills Us: Climate Change Steals Our Joy & Our Health

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I’ve been much less active in the climate justice space since moving back to the UK in 2021. I've struggled to commit to climate work. I've buried my head amongst the blankets of burnt out and turned my head towards rest and joy. It feels good to prioritise these things… At least, it feels good until the guilt of being inactive crushes me. Guilt is usually followed by anger, at government and business… They are the reason we can’t have our rest and joy in peace. They are the reason we must always be fighting. Fighting for our rights, fighting for rest, fighting for care, fighting for a habitable planet. It feels as though our rest and joy come as a consequence of burnout or else at the risk of the climate and someone or something else’s loss of joy.

A few weeks ago an incident forced me to unpack how much I had been avoiding climate action and why. The answer is… I was scared. I still am scared.

For me, when it comes to fossil fuels and climate change, it’s personal.

I grew up in working-class neighbourhoods. My time was split between weekdays at my parents’ house, where there was a steel parts factory behind the wall at the end of our garden, and weekends with my grandparents where, on the other side of the road, was a casting foundry. When I say at the end of the garden and on the other side of the road, I mean literally. No houses… Only industry.

I have vivid memories of thick, black “dust” coating the inside windows and window sills at my grandparents’ house. Writing my name or drawing pictures in the filthy gritty blackness. It wasn’t until I was an adult I realised this wasn’t dust. It was evidence of health-damaging pollution.

I lived in London for a couple of years, in an area that was a traditionally low-economic neighbourhood (though admittedly gentrified) with illegal levels (exceeding EU limits) of air pollution, predominantly from heavy and idling traffic. Black ‘dust’ was so normalised to me, I thought barely anything of it when it appeared on the window sill of my London flat.

I know now this ‘dust’ is actually soot particles or particulate matter known as PM2.5. These “tiny specks of pollution, once inhaled, lodge in the lungs and can cause a variety of health problems.” I also now see how unevenly distributed pollution is and my eyes are opened to the links between pollution, class and health.

I see that working class-ness and poor neighbourhoods were (and still are) exempt from environmental protection, exempt from the basic human right of clean safe air. Instead, those communities are shafted with polluters right next to or within the community and pollution is allowed to happen, mostly unchecked, at astronomically unhealthy levels.

Environmental classism isn’t a term commonly discussed in the climate and environmental space and it brings hot, angry tears to my eyes when I think of the normalisation, continuation and often the erasure (at least in discussion) of this pollution impacting working class communities.

I have had asthma all my life and, when I was 24, I undertook a health check at work in which a machine measured my lungs as operating at the efficiency of a 54-year-old. A whole 30 extra years older that I actually was…

And… those grandparents I mentioned living with? My grandad died of lung cancer and my nan has COPD — a lung disease. I may never know how the polluted air we have been surrounded by has contributed to these diseases but, I do know is this; fossil fuel emissions alone are accountable for 8.7 million deaths globally. 40,000 deaths in the UK are linked to air pollution every year. We breathe oil and it kills us. Despite this, levels for the harmful PM2.5 pollutant across the UK are currently twice as high as the WHO recommends.

Climate change is personal to me. The impacts of fossil-fuelled pollution go beyond the imagined impacts it has on people in faraway places because I’ve seen and felt the consequences — or some of them- here in the UK. I can’t un-see or un-feel the joy being stolen by the impacts of fossil fuels within my family and the communities I grew up being a part of. And, every time I think about air pollution, yet more joy is stolen because I am terrified of what my future will be. I am reminded that I may share the fate of my grandparents.

Part of the reason I’ve been so vacant from climate action is the sheer overwhelm, terror and helplessness I feel at the combination of a hostile government that funds fossil fuels, the extraordinarily high levels of air pollution across the UK’s towns and cities, and terror of what my future may be.

It was world health day recently, a stark reminder that planetary and human health are intrinsically linked. The degrading health of the planet impacts our physical health, which can impact our mental health, and vice versa.

As the planet gets sicker, as do we.

The sicker we are, the less capacity we have to fight for the planet.

The less we fight for the planet, the more those with power will destroy the health of all.

I have no words of hope for how we can change this spiral of sickness because I am struggling to feel hopeful and healthy. With the crises we’re in and where the climate is at, I don’t know how we simultaneously prioritise our own health and the planet. It feels like we’re at a point where one must be sacrificed for the other, a point where we must work so hard for governments and power to turn things around that we get sick from burnout. Or, we choose to rest and neglect the essential work.

I started writing this because I needed to address my conflict with climate content, in particular, content related to air pollution. It is cathartic to write but I am not healed. I don’t even know if healing is possible, not until everyone has access to safe air.

The only advice I can give to anyone else struggling is the advice I am taking for myself — and it is not to dive deep into climate work. It is…

Take one day at a time.

Be grounded in the present.

Enjoy the joys of now.

These are the things keeping me well. Without them I am thrown into the past and begin to live in the fears of a sick and health-less future where I and the planet struggle to breathe.

Joy is fundamental to a sustainable, happy life. I think we all want more joy to carry with us. I write about joy how power systems steal your joy to highlight the knowledge and tools for you to steal it back. I hope you leave this writing ready to embrace joy and hold disruptions of joy accountable for the joylessness they create.

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