In Conversation with Mitzi Jonelle Tan

Mitzi Jonelle Tan (she/they) is a 24-year old climate justice activist based in the Philippines. She is an organizer with Fridays for Future Philippines and MAPA.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The EJP How did you become involved in activism?

Mitzi Growing up, I was always very intrigued by the environment. We lived in a place that wasn’t very urbanized and wasn’t very developed, so it had lots of trees and big green spaces. I just connected with nature for some reason. I also grew up around typhoons and experienced the impacts of climate change first-hand, but I didn’t even know that it was climate change at first because it was taught in such a technical and foreign way in school. It was alienating, and not empowering at all. In school, though, I did latch onto the idea of climate change because my teacher said that climate change was caused by people smoking — and we obviously know that this isn’t true — but because I had a lung problem and I knew that smoking was bad for me, I held onto that. 

When I eventually learned that it wasn’t actually because of smoking, it was difficult for me to commit to climate activism because I still couldn’t figure out a clear solution to the crisis at hand. It didn’t all click for me until 2017 when I spoke to Indigenous leaders of our land and they explained that they were being harassed and displaced and militarized and killed, all for protecting the climate and the land. And so simply, he kind of shrugged and chuckled and said, “that’s why we have no choice but to fight back” and it was the simplicity of how he said it, especially knowing that it’s so dangerous to be an environmental defender in the Philippines, that made me realize that I had the privilege to choose to be an activist and that there are people that are so pushed into activism, that to not be an activist is even worse.

The EJP How did you begin connecting dots to environmental justice?

Mitzi I actually started as a human rights activist. I know most start with the environmental aspect before adding the social justice part to focus on environmental justice. But when I decided to be an activist after that conversation with the Indigenous leader, it really was all about social justice for me at first, and then I stumbled upon the climate crisis.

The EJP What makes the Philippines such a hostile place for activists?

Mitzi There is a civil war happening in the rural areas. There is a communist party in the Philippines and the government now is so obsessed with ending the communist insurgency and says that any activist that’s demanding justice, demanding human rights, is a communist and therefore a terrorist. So it’s this rampant what we call “red-tagging” or “terror tagging”. 

The EJP How does being Filipino influence your climate activism?

Mitzi In a lot of ways. First it's seeing the climate crisis first hand with the Philippines being such a vulnerable country to climate change, despite contributing so little. The typhoons have had such an influence on my work and on my life, especially the climate trauma and anxiety and I can speak about my experience to show people that the climate crisis is already here. It’s a present problem and not a problem of the future, that’s something that’s really shaped by being a Filipino. It also pushes me to demand reparations for loss and damages. 

There’s also the concept of bayanihan that we have in the Philippines, which is all about coming together for the common good. I’m able to bring that forward into the international scene because I’m always pushing for an interconnected society. I say, “we can’t just be with our other climate activists, we can’t just be with other young people, of our class, or race or gender”. We have to come together with all sorts of different people.

The EJP What’s your activist philosophy?

Mitzi Definitely love is something that I think is so important because it’s what prevents you from burning out. I don’t mean love for everyone — I don't love the multinational companies, the fossil fuel industry, or the richest one percent of course. But love for the movement I think is so important because it’s how you call each other in and hold each other accountable. It’s how you don't give up on your fellow activists. It’s how you don’t give up when things are so exhausting already, especially with something like the climate crisis that’s such a big issue and it feels like the world isn’t responding fast enough. It can get so overwhelming, and for me, I like to have my source as something that’s more sustainable. Not to say that anger and sadness aren’t important but rather that I’m angry and sad, and I’m afraid because of my love for life, and my love for the movement and the people.

The EJP How did you get involved with Friday For Future Philippines and MAPA?

Mitzi Me and a few friends actually started Fridays For Future Philippines. Here, it’s called Youth Advocates for Climate Action Philippines, because people here in the Philippines didn’t know what Fridays for Future was. Then in early 2020, right before the pandemic hit, I was introduced to the Fridays for Future international network. This was one of the first moments where Fridays for Future started to do things together globally because suddenly everything was online. Fridays for Future MAPA (Most Affected People and Areas) came about because we realized that Friday for Future was very eurocentric and that there weren’t very many Global South countries. We realized that we needed the space.

The EJP What’s your method of organizing and role in the movement?

Mitzi Strikes are definitely a big thing for Fridays for Future Philippines, although we don’t do weekly strikes here. Instead we go to schools and our universities and move from room to room asking the professor for a little bit of their time to speak to students about the climate crisis. Then we invite the students to talk more about it afterwards and we bring them to Indigenous people and small farmers and fisherfolk. We haven’t been able to do that since the pandemic started because the schools have been closed, but we still go to frontline communities to learn from them and support their campaigns. Also, when there are typhoons, we do relief operations: we collect donations and we bring them to communities. Whenever we can, we listen to the experiences of frontline communities and match what they already know with what we know about the climate crisis.

The EJP How has moving online changed your climate activism?

Mitzi It’s so weird because now that I think about it, I’ve been a climate activist online now for longer than I was in person, but it still feels like being online is weird and temporary. I like to think that because we went online we became more connected as a global community which is really cool. What used to be us going every day to students and to schools is now social media work. I find that social media work can be a lot harder because it’s a lot easier for you to get stuck in your echo chamber on social media compared to when we would literally stand outside of schools and go up to people individually. 

It’s also so easy to get burnt out with digital stuff right now. It’s a lot of trying to figure out how to still keep talking about the climate crisis, especially when the pandemic hit and everyone was just talking about COVID. Of course, talking about COVID is important and it’s not like COVID and the climate crisis are opposites of one another. We’re not trying to make them compete for attention, but we still want to make sure that the climate crisis is still on the agenda.

The EJP What is climate imperialism?

Mitzi Climate imperialism is how the Global North or the imperialist countries, which control the economy, political sphere, and cultural aspects of a lot of Global South countries, are also controlling a lot of the climate stuff. For example, the U.S. has such a big hold on our politics, culture, and economy here in the Philippines. Everything is in English, our Constitution is in English, our main language in school is English. If you speak Filipino during a non-Filipino class, you have to pay a fine in a lot of schools. It’s so ingrained in our culture to follow the U.S. in all examples, so that’s the imperialism part and then you also see how the US is also the same country that is blocking climate finance positions so that countries like the Philippines can’t get reparations. The U.S. is also just historically a huge CO2 emitter, so it’s about how all of these imperialist countries are the ones causing the climate crisis, as well.

The EJP What are your thoughts on how the media centers white activists like Greta Thunberg?

Mitzi I definitely think it’s so hard because — I don’t know the entire movement, of course — but in the circles that I’m in, there is such a big push to move away from that already but the media is usually the one that’s so stubborn and wants to focus so much on Greta, on white faces, on that white narrative. So it really has to be about just constantly calling out the media and I can never tell if things are starting to change or if I’m just talking to journalists who are looking for people of color. 

Changes are starting to happen already, and that comes from the push from the movement to continuously support and amplify Global South activists and people of color more, and really making sure that whenever we can, we pass the mic to someone who is less privileged than us.

The EJP How do you see white saviorism manifest itself in the climate movement today?

Mitzi In different forms! In the Philippines, we don’t really have races, we’re all kind of just Filipinos and we have our Indigenous peoples but they’re in the mountains and really far from society so you don't really interact with them unless you go to them. I never actually experienced first hand racism until I was in the international movement, and I didn’t even recognize it until a few days later. There was a lot of processing that had to be involved with it, and eventually it gets really tiring because you just start looking out for it everywhere like “is that it?” “is this what it was?” and you just kind of build this wall around you. Sometimes it’s something as simple as, if the person doesn’t speak English very well then they’re not heard or listened to as much or not amplified as much; their campaign isn’t supported as much. Sometimes it’s small words like I absolutely hate it when people are like “I’m fighting for the voiceless” and I’m like, we’re not voiceless… we have our own voices. 

It’s also when typhoons in the Philippines, for example, are used as a climate impact story, but you don’t talk about the resistance that’s happening here, so we’re reduced to scientific statistics and this sad story. Or this anecdote that’s like “oh they’re so sad, they need to be helped, we need to do something because look at them they’re so sad” instead of “we need to fight alongside them because they’re fighting so much more than we are because they’re actually experiencing it.”

The EJP Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Mitzi I would just say to my people that the impossible is possible as long as we come together and learn from each other, hold each other accountable, and remember that we’re not doing this alone.