Support networks aim to help kids through the polycrisis
Support networks aim to help kids through the polycrisis
摘要: Climate change and energy
Support networks aim to help kids through the polycrisis
Today’s world is a mess of troubling trends. Some groups are tryi
正文
Climate change and energy
Support networks aim to help kids through the polycrisis
Today’s world is a mess of troubling trends. Some groups are trying to help kids navigate their anxieties about it all.
Sarah Scoles
archive page
August 20, 2026
Ari Liloan
Sometime in the late 2000s, Pim Sullivan-Tailyour was sitting in the back of a car, headed toward her great-grandmother’s tiny town in the south of Thailand. She watched big mountains pass by out the window. She was just six years old but was about to be hit by an adult-size realization. “They were just quarried out,” she says. “Like half the mountain just dug out and disappeared, and so there was just this huge orange face.”
Although she probably didn’t know the word “quarry” back then, she sensed that what she was seeing was unnatural. She also knew, from family stories, that her mother had bathed in a nearby river when she was young, its water so glass-clear she could see fish swimming by. But the extraction had muddied the water. “We’re changing things,” Sullivan-Tailyour thought. “And it doesn’t seem right.”
It was the first time it occurred to her that humans could alter the world—and that they were. For the worse.
She carried that knowledge with her as she got older and her family moved to the UK. There, she joined teenagers from other schools in the Schools Sustainability Network, an umbrella organization for groups that work on environmental initiatives.
But even with those connections, Sullivan-Tailyour didn’t encounter anyone at her own school who was interested in environmental activism. She felt lonely in her desire to push for change—and burnt out on working solo. “I was pretty much the only person who wanted to do these things,” she says.
That was when she heard about another initiative, called Force of Nature. A UK-based organization, in 2021 it had spun up Becoming a Force of Nature, a kind of informal online group therapy program, for kids and young adults worried about climate. Th