Tori Tsui
Activist & Author
Tori Tsui (pictured above) is rolling up the leg of her grey-marl tracksuit. She wants to show me the stick-and-poke tattoo she got to mark her love of cold-water swimming; there, etched on her right thigh, is the figure of a woman floating on her back, arms splayed. It’s a beautiful ode to Tsui’s most recent hobby, which has become a way to decompress from her work as a climate activist that has seen her taking on world leaders at global forums, writing an award- winning book, It’s Not You, about eco-anxiety, and sailing from Europe to South America for climate conference COP25.
But Tsui, 31, isn’t just any activist. She is, she says, a ‘bad activist’. ‘It’s a play on Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist – this idea that you are inherently imperfect by virtue of being human, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t try to be better,’ Tsui explains. ‘It also recognises that the systems we live in are imperfect… Being a bad activist is a reclamation of the things people have used against us and to shame us.’
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That idea is being tested, as she fights even harder in an age of rising authoritarianism and climate deniers. ‘This year, I’m going in with a real systems-change approach to a lot of what I do,’ she says. ‘[I’m looking at] where the power lies, and how it transforms our world in a way that’s not equitable and not actually sustainable.’
Beyond challenging the powers that be, Tsui is fascinated by the intersection of climate activism and pop culture. In 2019, she was scouted by Stella McCartney’s team while on an Extinction Rebellion march and invited to walk in the label’s AW19 show. She’s since worked on projects with musicians Billie Eilish and Brian Eno, and this year will be part of the judging panel for the first Climate Fiction Prize: ‘To see the nexus of sustainability and activism intersect with popular culture is a powerful combination. And we need more of it.’
Tsui’s journey into activism began when she was growing up in a small fishing town in the northeast of Hong Kong, and typhoons would regularly prevent her from going to school. She didn’t connect the dots with climate change until she started learning about it in the classroom at the age of 14. She studied climate science at university and was about to do a PhD when she realised, ‘I couldn’t necessarily stand up for justice through facts and figures. I had to be out there in the streets as a spokesperson.’
Her Whatsapp groups include Emma Watson, Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate – ‘we send each other anecdotes, memes and photos’ – but a lot of her intention and discernment as an activist has been inspired by her dating life. ‘It is why I really lean into just being a young woman in her early thirties trying to figure her life out – and the trials and tribulations of dating as a climate activist/public figure who has very strong politics and is trying to find someone who meets those needs but is also a soft human being. Who would have thought,’ Tsui muses, ‘that dating would be such a huge part of my character arc as an activist?
Rhiane Fatinikun MBE
Founder of Black Girls Hike UK
For the very first walk that Rhiane Fatinikun organised for Black Girls Hike in 2019, she found the route – around Hollingworth Lake near Rochdale – in a newspaper article, posted it on Instagram and then turned up with the goal to create an opportunity for Black women to reconnect with nature.
Now coming up to its sixth anniversary, Black Girls Hike (BGH) has more than 5,000 members, with hikes organised every weekend around the country, as well as international trips to places such as Brazil and Morocco. ‘I wanted to do it mainly for my wellbeing,’ says Fatinikun, 38, a former civil servant, ‘but also to challenge the lack of inclusion and representation that you see in the outdoors.’ Her energy is galvanising: ‘When you’re going into something for the first time, you need a little bit of a push – I feel we’re cheerleaders, really.’
This year, BGH will continue to challenge stereotypes by training up more volunteers and growing its youth programme: ‘Sometimes [the kids] say, “Am I allowed to be here, Miss?” And I’m like, “Yeah!”’ says Fatinikun, who was awarded an MBE in 2023. ‘Afterwards, they get this grit; it makes them feel they can go and accomplish things in different settings.’
But it’s the intergenerational friendships that Fatinikun loves forming the most: ‘My best friend at Black Girls Hike is called “Queen Liz of BGH”. She was 70 last year, and was the first Black councillor for Labour in Liverpool back in 1987. She comes to everything because other rambling groups aren’t as inclusive, and she wants to be around other Black women.’
Meanwhile, Amina Hassan (photographed), 27, is an outdoor adventurer who was inspired by Fatinikun’s message that the outdoors belongs to her ‘as much as it does to anyone else, and not to feel othered or like you don’t belong there’. For yoga teacher Natalie Reid (photographed), 48, joining BGH has prompted her to do things she never would have imagined: ‘I was such a city girl before… now I’ve jumped in Lake Windermere.’
As for Fatinikun, she would never leave her job now that her office is the great outdoors, even if she has found herself in risky conditions, such as being caught in an earthquake during a BGH expedition to Morocco: ‘You never know what you’re capable of until you’re in a certain situation. It was so empowering [getting everyone to safety]. I was like, “I’m a baddie. I just got this lot through a natural disaster.”’
Photographed with members Amina Hassan and Natalie Reid.
Danusia Samal
Co-founder of Green Rider
A lot happens on film and TV sets that we never get to see. But if you watched Mark Rylance roam the corridors of power in the latest Wolf Hall adaptation or Gemma Arterton in Funny Woman, you were watching a show that had a much greener set than most. ‘We trialled it out last year to see how well it worked,’ says Danusia Samal, 35, one of the founders of Green Rider, a movement campaigning to make the film and TV industry more sustainable, starting with its sets.
‘We’re aiming to change what a rider means. If you’re on set for a day then can you travel by train or car share… and if you’re in something long term, then can you ask for more?’ Whether that’s banning the use of private jets for big stars or turn-ing off air-conditioning units in trailers, the idea behind Green Rider is about changing the norm. As its online manifesto says: ‘Art has historically played its part in societal shifts: the 1980s cultural boycott of South African Apartheid, the rise of #MeToo, our industry’s resourceful adaptation to Covid, and 2023’s WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes prove we have the power to act collectively and make big changes when necessary.’
For Samal, an actor and writer who has worked on the television shows Gangs of London and Bodies, the waste on sets can be overwhelming: ‘Everyone’s working so hard and we’re making something great, but we’re also creating a problem.’ She launched Green Rider at the Edinburgh TV Festival in 2023 alongside fellow actors and campaigners, Fehinti Balogun and Will Attenborough (yes, of that Attenborough legacy), to empower actors to ask for more climate-sensitive contracts. And the industry has listened, with support from high-profile names including Benedict Cumberbatch, Paapa Essiedu and Ben Whishaw. ‘If the famous star that the whole movie hangs on says they want the production to be entirely run by green energy, that will happen very quickly,’ says Samal.
As the movement gathers pace, Samal hopes to replicate the way in which the industry dealt with intimacy, but with climate and nature. ‘The whole thing with intimacy directors on set went from zero to a hundred, and it’s transformed the industry in a really positive way. So that’s the model we’re hoping for,’ she says. An important focus for this year will be continuing to develop the contractual work, helping actors to ask for greener productions, and building on their community, ‘from the jobbing actors like me, Will and Fehinti, through to the Benedicts of the world, and really making it a mass movement so nobody feels alone in it’.
Growing up between London and the Middle East, Samal has ‘activism in her blood’, having had lively discussions at home with her mother, who worked with refugee groups, and her father, who was involved in the Kurdish Freedom Movement. ‘I’ve always felt if I choose a career, I should be trying to use that career in some way to do something positive,’ she says. ‘I went from thinking, “I’ll just go to loads of marches” to “What’s a more focused thing I could do to bring about habitual change?”’ Her work with Green Rider has done just that. ‘It’s very empowering in an industry that can feel quite disempowering… when you’re waiting for your next job or it’s been hit hard by Covid and the SAG strikes. It’s the reason I get up in the morning.’
The work Samal does is, she says, inherently hopeful: ‘We’re working towards a change that is going to happen, but we’re helping to make it happen faster and fairly.’ And to escape the admin that her career path has brought, she sings jazz and goes to the theatre: ‘I’m always, like, if music is as powerful as it is, and theatre is as powerful as it is, there’s something worth saving.’
Andrea Cheong
Content creator and author
Last year, after a particularly busy period working as the host for Kering’s sustainability podcast Fashion Our Future, Andrea Cheong felt she needed a break. So she barely left her London flat for a month, and taught herself how to sew clothes from scratch. ‘There’s something so mindful and therapeutic about using your hands, and I’ve now been in a knit club for a couple of months,’ says the former fashion influencer, who is more comfortable with the term ‘de-influencer’ these days, as she helps her hundreds of thousands of followers to shop less and shop better.
Cheong, 33, is the founder of The Mindful Monday Method, a step-by-step guide to enjoying fashion in a way that can benefit both the planet and people’s mental wellbeing. The idea came after Cheong, who had worked for years as a ‘typical fashion influencer’, suffered a mental-health crisis and was at an all-time low: ‘I was very jaded [with the industry], I didn’t know what I was doing with my career, but I also had no sense of identity… I hated everything about [being an influencer].’
In 2019, Cheong began to focus her content on how to shop for quality clothes: ‘In the beginning it had nothing to do with sustainability but... I realised that learning to shop better for myself passively helps the environment.’ That message resonated with her following, and she began laying out The Mindful Monday Method’s steps with snappy, insightful videos about auditing your wardrobe, assessing your budget, reading a care label properly and deciding on your individual fashion goals. ‘I found that if I just focused on helping people heal their relationship with their wardrobes and also address why they feel they need to chase fashion… then that’s one way to bridge that [sustainability] gap.’
A book deal followed, and 2023 saw the publication of Why Don’t I Have Anything to Wear? One of the most satisfying outcomes, Cheong says, has been hearing from people who have been able to curb their shopping addiction, and ‘the second thing is how much money I’ve saved them’. This year, her focus is in on getting her online community (currently almost half a million strong) offline: ‘I started these mending clubs and at first five people showed up,’ she says. ‘Then we started selling out immediately.’ For Cheong, these meet-ups could be an answer to one of the biggest issues facing the fashion industry: ‘I think, when we talk about clothes and the lack of human connection and how to solve that… [it’s] communities, like social clubs, and learning together.’
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