10 Women Leaders in the Climate Crisis Trying to Turn the Tide

Jamie Margolin, a cofounder of Zero Hour, the founder of Pelea Animation, and the author of “Youth to Power”

Margolin is playing a burned-out young climate activist in her film for a college thesis project — so more or less herself, just exaggerated.

“It’s like a comedy-drama satire,” Margolin, a junior at New York University, told Insider of the film, called “Doomers.” It’s about a former youth climate activist and a former NASA climate scientist who go out for a night of hedonistic destruction to celebrate giving up on fighting the climate crisis.

“The lesson of the story is not to throw our hands up,” Margolin said. “It’s just exploring the psyche of people who are like, ‘Hope comes in action!’ but have taken action all their life and see how messed up things still are. What would that drive people to be like?”

Margolin, 21, isn’t giving up the fight. But she’s been an activist since she was 14 — cofounding the advocacy group Zero Hour, writing a guidebook with Greta Thunberg for other young organizers, leading marches across the country, meeting with politicians and celebrities — she needed a break.

Margolin started to worry that the youth climate movement had inadvertently created a capitalistic monster. Activists became social-media influencers and got brand deals. So many companies, even big polluters or those with sweatshops in their supply chains, talk about sustainability and climate justice. Meanwhile, politicians, including Biden, continue to approve fossil-fuel projects like the Willow Project in Alaska.

“Corporations and politicians have exploited the youth climate movement,” Margolin said. “I had to intentionally take a step back and recenter myself.”

These are the people who are fighting and putting themselves on the line that have been ignored and mistreated, or the opposite — targeted and murdered.

Attending NYU helped. She didn’t have enough hours in the day to take classes and lead a grassroots organization.

Now Margolin is focused on filmmaking as a form of activism. Margolin’s passion project is an animated film, “Pelea,” which means fight in Spanish, that centers on land defenders in a fictional country who go up against extractive industries. It isn’t finished, but Margolin has been collaborating with other artists around the world.

Margolin is Colombian American and grew up in Seattle. Her mom was raised in Bogotá.  Margolin said she recognizes her privilege compared with Indigenous peoples on the front lines in Latin America. But she also wants to understand her family heritage and the land defenders whom she admires and to whom she feels indebted.

“These are the people who are fighting and putting themselves on the line that have been ignored and mistreated, or the opposite — targeted and murdered,” Margolin said.

She wants to uplift those voices and stories in her films.