WTF is #StopWillow?
➕ We watched all of Daisy Jones & The Six and we have THOUGHTS 🎸
Angels!!! Coming at you in a hectic and exhausted way right before I’m about to jump on a flight to Sydney to drop Rubes off to her new home and see Liv off on her big travels (like a proud Mom 🥺) This is gonna be a short and sharp newsy (for the reasons stated above) but see you tomorrow in the Diary Edish for a FULL rundown of all the thoughts / feelings / emotions as well as all the cool shit we got up to this week (also I wanna show you the boots I wore to Harry Styles bc they’re EVERYTHING!!)
WTF is #StopWillow?
🌞 London Laura: Worn Out Women & Air Bed Cinemas🌞
🗺 Around the world🗺
What seat do you pick on a plane?
WTF is #StopWillow?
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been seeing #StopWillow or #TheWillowProject ALL over my TikTok feed, so I thought today we’d do a lil explainer.
“When Elise Joshi posted a TikTok video about the Alaska oil drilling project known as Willow in early February, she didn’t have high hopes it would go viral.
Joshi, 20, posts often about climate issues on TikTok for the account Gen-Z for Change, as well as her personal account. She’s well aware “climate doesn’t trend very often,” as she told CNN. But Joshi’s video about Willow was very different. It took just a few days to accumulate more than 100,000 views, eventually surpassing 300,000.”
First - what is the Willow Project or #Stop Willow?
It’s a campaign to stop the Biden administration from approving the “ConocoPhillips Willow Project” next week.
“If it goes through, the decadeslong oil drilling venture on the North Slope of Alaska would create thousands of jobs and establish a new source of revenue for the region.
But it would also generate enough oil to release 9.2 million metric tons of planet-warming carbon pollution a year, by the federal government’s estimate, about the same as adding 2 million cars to the roads.”
What are the perspectives on this?
As a Gen Z person who’s on the internet and operates within/ alongside the activism scene, I can see and feel that The Willow Project is BAD for the things we care about - like our planet! At the same time Willow’s supporters – including a coalition of Alaska Natives on the North Slope – do say “Willow could be a much-needed new source of revenue for the region and help fund schools, health care and other basic services.”
“Willow presents an opportunity to continue that investment in the communities,” Nagruk Harcharek, president of the advocacy group Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, told CNN. “Without that money and revenue stream, we’re reliant on the state and the feds.”
I’m putting in these perspectives because these things are nuanced (and that nuance is often stripped on social media), and I want to make that clear!
What happens when climate issues go viral?
I feel like this has been one of the most viral climate issues I’ve ever seen on TikTok and off the back of this activism, there’s been more than one million letters written to the White House protesting the project, as well as a Change.org petition with 2.8 million signatures and counting - which is an amazing show of the tangible things that can happen via social media.
BUT specific stories/ fights like this often grab our attention for a hot minute (which is great) but making sure that we carry this energy after a ✨viral moment✨ has passed, and VOTING is the best way we can actually change policy, so that’s the next step after an issue like this goes viral imo!!!
I talk about all of this in a bit more depth on this week’s Shit Show ep with Dunc, so sit tight for that tomorrow!!
🌞 London Laura: Worn Out Women & Air Bed Cinemas🌞
Laura is our resident ray of sunshine and co-host of Culture Vulture (our weekly pop culture podcast!) She’s a new London dweller, chief of romanticising literally everything, and will definitely ask you all what your love language is at some stage.
Helloooooo gorgy SYSCA whānau!!!! Coming to you truly as a Worn Out Woman (thanks Bel for coining that) which might be a March thing because Luce and I both came on the Culture Vulture mics this week as shells of ourselves (I also LOVE that this is a place where nobody has to pretend to be *peppy*?!) It’s been a week where work / life / fun / everything kind of just got dialled up and overlapped, and it probably didn't help that I then watched Daisy Jones and The Six screeners until 1am most nights to review it for this weeks ep of Culture Vulture (listen here!!!!)
To be totally honest I have also been SO homesick this last week and it’s really hit me out of nowhere! For the past few months I have been lovinggggg London, doing so much cool stuff with work and experiencing the city and meeting amazing people and have even built a bit of *community* here (which I want to go back and tell London Laura from 8 months ago who was desperate to befriend her barista to feel a shred of connection allll about). I don’t know if it’s because of everything Aotearoa has gone through recently and feeling so distant and unable to help, and maybe having been here a minute now and it no longer feeling like a weird break from *real life* but I am a puddle at the moment so thank you for still having me!!!
Very keen to hear if anyone else is feeling this way on this side of the world - are the March blues a thing??? I am also prone to indulging nostalgia, and across the past five years, I’ve been lucky enough to have put on some pretty gorg gatherings around this time of year for IWD including this one pre-pandemic with some dream women (incl crush and dear friend Golriz Gharaman) and not one but TWO consecutive air bed cinema’s?!
Creating spaces and bringing people together is I think my ongoing quest, and NZ really is a place where you could kind of throw out an idea and likely know enough people who are keen to jump in and pull it together with you, and I really miss that!! Which brings me to something that made me smile (which you can hear more about in this week’s CV ep) but my friend Pip showed me this adorable secret note left in the Barbican here by Haley from our fave Maybe Baby newsletter - and it started a secret note trail!! People were leaving notes for other readers and it was such a gorg example of the community IRL and I feel like we should do something like that?? Maybe not air bed cinema (or maybe it is - I think we still have some mattresses…) but let’s take the SYSCA community to the libraries / streets / world…. ideas welcome pls reply with them!!!!
Lots of love always, London Laura xxx
🗺Around the world🗺
Just links today coz I’ve got a plane to catch!
Protesters in Georgia hold more demonstrations over a ‘Kremlin-inspired’ law (The NY Times)
Survivors of deadly Mexico kidnapping being treated at Texas hospital (AP News)
Today’s mundane poll:
To get my Friday diary entry, a whole bunch of links and recommendations, and Bel’s Sunday morning newsy ‘No News Is Good News’ become a paying supporter 💌
London Laura, you can do it! This is the worst bit of the UK seasons - we KNOW nov-feb is winter but we hope for spring right about now and every year the cold drags on but when springs comes boy will she come and you will thrive 🌞 also so proud of you to have found a lil community!!! I remember your newsy entry about the barista and you have come so far 💕
Also YES to SYSCA letter/treasure hunt. Idk how but let’s do it.
London Laura - Hold on! April is coming and you will finally be able to see the sky again. When I was in London, everybody talked about December and January being so gloomy, but I thought February and March were the hardest to get through. Better times are coming bby. Find the lightness in your laughter and the rest will follow. 🥰