One of my earliest memories of the climate crisis is from when I was around six years old. My family and I had been stuck indoors without electricity for days because of the raging storm outside. When the winds quieted down and we stepped outside, all the large trees I had grown up with had fallen. 

I started crying. My parents asked me if I was hurt. “The Earth is hurt,” I replied. I knew something was wrong, yet I did not have the words to describe and understand the pain happening around me. All I knew was that I was afraid that I would drown in my own bedroom; that a tree would fall on our house; that we would wait for days in the dark. 

Around 20 tropical cyclones, including super-typhoons, hit the Philippines and the surrounding region every year, with wind speeds reaching at least 240 kilometres per hour. It is likely to get worse. From an early age, I understood that the aftermath of climate disasters would last long after the storms passed. 

Communicating climate anxiety 

My friends and I speak in English to describe our climate anxiety. We find that we are better able to express our experiences in our coloniser’s tongue. But using the phrase “I have climate anxiety” falls short of explaining the heavy, aching pain I have in my heart. It doesn’t describe the trauma that Filipinos collectively experience. This language feels distant and diluted. 

Still, it is a struggle to figure out what the equivalent term is in Filipino. I think this reflects how we have been conditioned not to discuss our own physical and mental wellbeing. 

Nakakapagpabagabag, or “anxiety-inducing”, is a word so rarely used in daily conversations that children often playfully challenge each other to say it as a tongue-twister. The word is often only used seriously by those who bear the brunt of the crises we are experiencing. 

Make no mistake: those in power – nationally and globally – benefit from our language’s inability to describe what we are experiencing. The Philippines has a long history of colonisation – over 300 years under Spain, around 50 years under the US, and three years under Japan – and revolutionaries who resisted were always silenced. Our language is a product of this colonisation, the same way the climate crisis is. 

Our language is a product of colonisation, the same way the climate crisis is.

When you don’t have the words to talk about the climate and mental health crisis – and the rotting, fossil fuel-obsessed, profit-oriented system that caused it – it is harder to expose and change it. 

But Nakakapagpabagabag feels right to me – a word that is heavy, deep, and able to represent the climate anxiety and trauma, not just of individuals, but of entire countries and billions of people across the world. It represents the confusion and frustration we feel as we experience climate impacts and witness catastrophe while the world continues to invest in and expand fossil fuels. It represents the fears we have as activists in a country that does not want us to speak up. 

Activism branded as terrorism 

When I first started my activism in 2017, I thought I knew the risks that came along with it. But I couldn’t predict how difficult it would sometimes be to continue campaigns that felt like they were never enough to catch up to the climate crisis, or the toll that taking part in consecutive disaster relief operations would take. I didn’t realise how deep the grief would be. 

Those on the frontline of the fight for climate justice in the Philippines are tagged as terrorists under the Anti-Terror Law. Those who protest against environmentally destructive projects because their lives depend on it are harassed and even murdered by state forces. Global Witness reports that 270 environmental defenders were killed here between 2012 and 2021. 

There have been plenty of times when I have wanted to give up, but each time, the communities around me have encouraged me to keep going. I recall one of my last conversations with my friend Chad Booc, a volunteer teacher for the Lumad Indigenous schools. He encouraged me to keep going as a full-time activist, even if it wasn’t always easy. 

The seeds of the revolution are sown and planted. This is why I continue to fight. 

In February 2023, Chad was murdered along with four other volunteers after being tagged as a terrorist by the government. One of his Facebook posts before he was killed talked about how, when the Lumad die, “they are not buried, they are planted,” and that when he died, he wished to be planted as well. 

The seeds of the revolution are sown and planted. This is why I continue to fight. 

Climate education is crucial 

When you translate “climate change” into Filipino it becomes pagbabago ng klima or “changing of the climate”. Most Filipinos associate this with changing weather rather than the more complex phenomenon of climate change and the devastating damage it is causing in the Global South. 

Climate education in the Philippines isn’t good enough. When textbooks do describe climate change, it is often reduced to melting ice caps and carbon-dioxide emissions, with no discussion of the disasters we are already experiencing as frontline communities. 

There is no exploration of how those already marginalised by intersectional issues of class, gender, race, and disability are also the people most affected by the climate crisis. And the curriculum certainly does not extend to the role that the fossil fuel industry and imperialist countries have played (and continue to play) in causing climate destruction. Without access to information, people are made to believe either that nothing is wrong, or that nothing can be changed. 

With how much climate change is hurting the Philippines, we expect our leaders to do something about it. Yet they are doing the opposite. As inflation rises and the working-class wage depreciates, president Bongbong Marcos Jr. has approved the country’s first sovereign wealth fund instead of addressing the more urgent needs of people affected by the climate catastrophe. The president presents himself as a climate leader while at the same time greenlighting environmentally destructive projects and expanding fossil fuel infrastructure. 

Education around climate science, socio-economic injustice, and Filipino people’s historical resistance is crucial. Awakened, people can fight back. 

When super-typhoons batter our communities, I’m still afraid; I still cry. 

There are times when I want to give up, but I know that the sustainable, equitable future we are fighting for already exists, in small pockets. I have seen it in the communities I fight alongside, in international gatherings of climate justice activists, in small farming cooperatives, in the care that activists have for one another. It exists but it is being attacked, so we must defend it, and we cannot let it go. We must build our power. 

Thank you to my friends and community, Gabes Torres, Maria Veloso, Reef Liggayu, Whitney Bauck, Issa Barte, Chloe Chotrani, Tabitha Yong, Dear Meg, Lolo Amistad, Aizel Lim, Line Niedeggen, and Mitsuo Iwamoto for holding space for conversations that helped form a deeper understanding of anxiety, bagabag, and this point of view. 

This article was originally published by Shado Magazine. It is republished here with permission.