The green influencers, those of the turning point

This article is published in number 43 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until October 26, 2021

“How many men have dated the beginning of a new era in their lives by reading a book,” writes the American philosopher and poet Henry David Thoreau in what is considered his masterpiece, Walden. Life in the woods, defined by the writer Paolo Cognetti as «a Bible of outdoor life and the religion of nature». But when he wrote that sentence, Thoreau was living in 1854, and had just spent two years as a hermit on the shores of Lake Walden in Massachusetts, condensing them into a hymn to the return to nature. Of the two or three things that have changed radically since then, perhaps the first is that many men (today we would say, more ecumenically, human beings) no longer need a book to date the beginning of a turning point in their existence: often enough have a smartphone in your pocket. And this also happens because the screens, which have become our inseparable companions, are populated by new generations of disseminators of environmental and climatic themes who are teaching us to change our relationship with nature, our ecological footprint and, ultimately, the beating heart of our vision of the world. And who knows what Thoreau would say, who wrote precisely in Walden that “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can do without”, in front of @shelbizleee, screen name of Shelby Orme, a young Texas sustainability expert who between Instagram, YouTube and TikTok (where she has just under 200,000 followers) delivers her daily advice to reduce waste and domestic pollution to just under 700 thousand people. On the platform of ByteDance, which has a third of users between the ages of 10 and 19, Shelby alternates
participation in memes and “challenges” (that is, the “challenges” of TikTok, also launched by the platform itself, often based on what we once called catchphrases) with skits to music, because without music on the teen app you don’t go anywhere part: this is the case of the very successful video in which, dressed in a box, Shelby mentions a dance, while on the screen we see the words «what people THINK about when you say“ sustainable fashion ”»; then, as often happens in these parts, there is a decisive detachment and we move on to the protagonist who shows us, worn, “what the sustainable fashion è REALLY », that is, vintage silk dresses, second-hand casual outfits and elegant hand-dyed petticoats. All in about ten seconds, but intense: the message is received, the planet thanks. There is also a handful of valiant Italian “green creators” to tell human beings that there are things that we must “do without” with short clips, ballets and recipes: Sara Giacani, who on her TikTok profile from 15 thousand followers is @greenpills and in life she is a DJ for Radio Rock (her bio, not surprisingly, reads: “I love Green and Rock’n’Roll”). In his videos – and in a linked podcast, which is called Green Pills it too – Sara points the way for more sustainable behaviors and habits, small variations to lifestyles that until now we had considered immutable, but with enormous potential to reverse the course of the decay of ecosystems and the fate of the climate crisis. In the miniseries on “5 things I don’t buy anymore”, Sara – with her fresh face, effective and direct speech and in the background a wardrobe that looks like a bedroom wardrobe – reviews the choices that led her to live sustainable everyday life: plastic bottles? And why, when you can have a filter jug ​​at home and a steel canteen “for everything else” (he shows us both); the good old cotton swabs? Better to greet them in favor of reusable silicone or biodegradable ones in bamboo (here they are: look how beautiful); parchment paper (which, after carefully observing a few hours of video, I discover is a great enemy of green creators)? Let’s get rid of it, in favor of this pretty mat in reusable food-grade silicone, which “can be put in the oven up to 260 degrees and can also be washed in the dishwasher”. How did Sara start? “For some time I have wanted to create a radio format that talked about sustainability, from small daily choices to big issues to which today there is more and more attention”, he explains to Vanity Fair. «During the first lockdown I proposed this initiative to my radio, Radio Rock. Together with Sofia Stella de The Green Choice was born like this Green Pills. Given the interest these topics have aroused on the radio, I thought it might be useful to start declining Green Pills also on social networks “.
Eleonora – indeed, @eleonoraviaggi – instead she is 20 and has bangs. She studies Languages ​​in Genoa, she is a singer-songwriter and, in her spare time (but perhaps something more) she explains to her 30,000 followers on TikTok how to mitigate their ecological footprint on planet Earth: in a video she shows how to do “sustainable laundry”; in another his “eco-friendly house cleaning”; in yet another there is a mini-guide for a “sustainable back to school”. But why on TikTok ?, I ask her after contacting her on the app: «The choice to use it as the main method of disclosure came spontaneously. I had always considered it a very frivolous, superficial and uninteresting social network, until I started using it as content creator and not as a “passive user” », he explained to me. “I realized that the theme of environmental sustainability, which can start from the little everyday things, if told with the same” lightness “that is intrinsic to TikTok (but not to be confused with superficiality) can be a very powerful tool”.

How one speaks to her audience creator environmentalist? «I have sought and am trying to be a point of reference for the younger generations, the person I would have liked to find myself in my growth path. I always try to be a friend / big sister, never as a teacher. And, trivially, without feeling superior to anyone ». But not only of consumption indications and advice for the conscious management of the house and of one’s habits the man (or the woman, or above all the teenager) lives. Those who find themselves scrolling kaleidoscopes of colors and music on Instagram and TikTok have another pressing need: the climate crisis, first of all, you have to understand it. Also on this front, science communicators abound, and if not all of them can offer a commendable level of study, many are rigorous and very serious, at least as much as their saving mission: take Alaina Wood, alias @thegarbagequeen (275,000 followers), environmental planner who on TikTok is mainly concerned with “fulfilling her royal duty”, to quote her, making it clear to her audience how even the smallest plastic bottle carelessly thrown into a remote forest can do damage to ‘environment. Originally from Tennessee, Alaina was recently in California to document firsthand the effects of an oil spill off Huntington Beach, which also affected a protected ecosystem: “Do you know what kinds of disasters are completely avoidable? The oil spills, ”explains the conservationist at the beginning of his video, before using the app’s auto-crop function to insert a California map behind his talking figure. To mitigate “eco-anxiety”, that is, that psychological state with depressive relapses that it can grasp in the face of the magnitude of the climate crisis, every Wednesday @thegarbagequeen it also hosts a column of Good Climate News to look at with a bit of optimism.
And in Italy? Even in our latitudes, something is moving, in parallel with the enthusiasm recently shown by the Milanese boys for Greta Thunberg’s arrival in Italy, and there is an increasing desire to understand what climate change and what are the physical and environmental laws that govern it. In addition to how you can act, in fact, to help change the world. Ruggero Rollini defines himself as a “communicator of science”, he is 25 years old, the face of a good boy and a community of aficionados of almost 90,000 users between YouTube and Instagram. In addition to the inevitable guides for cleaning the oven and various tips for an eco-sustainable diet, Ruggero makes a review of central news on Instagram for those who care about the environment, presented with clear and captivating graphics: “The changes we are observing are unprecedented in thousands of years ”, says a guide (which speaks of the IPCC report on climate change); “They synthesized a sustainable hydroplastic,” reads the title on the first slide of another. What does it mean to communicate science to the very young of 2021, according to Ruggero Rollini? “I think the most fascinating thing about this world is the need to transmit its complexity by simplifying it, but not trivializing it”, he says to Vanity Fair. «The matter we communicate is extremely complicated, and it is no coincidence that climate studies refer to the science that is called“ complex systems ”, the one that has just won the Nobel. Net of the simplicity required by the means, we have to keep “the difficult” against the background of immediacy: it is our challenge ».
And what is the most difficult theme, or message, to get across? «The most complex aspect concerns the ideologization of the discourse. On many issues related to climate change we no longer talk about science: if you want to transfer concepts that conflict with a person’s vision of the world, today you can bring all the data you want, but you will not convince them “, explained Ruggero. You can do without many things, you could reply to Thoreau: but prejudices, just like plastic bottles in pristine woods, are debris that is not always easy to get rid of.

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