If most young people don't think their governments are doing enough for climate... they need a media platform. Like Earthrise Studios
Always excited to see networked media step up to the challenge of conveying climate urgency to wider audiences. We missed the birth of Earthrise Studio in 2020 (all their links on Linktree) - but glad to be alerted, and a delight to see its current vigour.
Earthrise is a creative media and narrative platform set up by two very successful travel YouTubers, Jack and Finn Harries, who have gradually shifted their young audiences (of millions) along the road to environmental activism. Joining them in Earthrise is the social justice photographer/film-maker Alice Aedy.
It’s notable they launched the project on Instagram, committing themselves both to a younger demographic, and a more visual and graphic style:
As you can see above, they’re expanding out into showcasing photographers and image-makers that are responding to the invasion of Ukraine. As reported by the Evening Standard in 2020:
We have always felt the larger our audience has grown the larger our responsibility is to talk about things that matter… With Earthrise, it is fundamentally not about us or our personal narratives…We are trying to amplify voices that are so often not able to participate in this conversation, incorporating broader social stories such as the inequality that has been revealed by Covid and Black Lives Matter.
And last year in the Guardian:
“In a way social media has transformed in the last year as not just a space for selfies and blogs but a space to organise and educate one another, which I think in the climate space is really exciting,” Finn Harries said.
He highlighted some of the work of others such as regenerative gardener Poppy Okotcha, Leah Thomas, who created Intersectional Environmentalist, and Jerome Foster, who is on the White House board for climate justice, as young people who are using their digital presence and “single-handedly changing the world”.
We also covered the Waterbear green content platform in these pages, who turn out to be content co-creators with Earthrise.