Sexy Climate Change: On the sesh

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Issey and I run Sexy Climate Change. It’s a podcast and meme page focused around “serving cunt in a time of ecological crisis” – it’s fun, playful, hedonistic and a little depressing (much like your last situationship), using humour to hold space for the darkness that we encounter when facing up to the climate crisis. 

For a long time, I didn’t think I was into “nature” and “climate” because everyone I saw in this field was giving Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall, middle-aged hippy mum (no hate, these women tend to be icons)/sanctimonious white vegan men (conversely, not icons). While I’ve since discovered incredible, cool people in this field, I still think it could do with a bit more cuntiness.

I can practically hear you all yawning now – “She’s writing a column about sustainability during the festive season. It’s going to be full of everything we’ve heard a million times before; don’t buy useless presents people don’t want, wrap your presents in reusable or recyclable paper and maybe skip the meat on Christmas Day,” – and while you should be doing these things, I’m actually here to write about my favourite part of the festive season… PARTYING. 

Maybe it’s because I’m a child of divorce or maybe I’m just a Scrooge but I don’t like Christmas day. It’s stressful. Everyone is performing a veneer of fun, someone inevitably forces me into a card game I don’t understand, and by the time all the food is ready it’s 10pm and I’m both starving and too nauseous from all the Christmas chocolate I’ve eaten to enjoy the meal. For me, this season is all about the Christmas parties in the lead-up to the Big Day and my favourite festivity of the year – New Year’s Eve.

BRICKS is for the girls, the gays and theys, so I’m guessing you’ve all exhausted yourselves with a brat summer and then attempted a sober October to recover until the remix album dropped approximately 11 days into the month and your sobriety went down the drain too. Now perhaps you’ve had a small hibernation and you’re ready to re-emerge like Charles Jeffrey in his Club Kid era, so let’s talk about how we can do this in a way that’s a little lighter on the planet (so we still have a planet to party on when we’re as wrinkly as our grandparents). 

As Jane Austen would say if she was in our generation: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that one wants to look excessively gorgeous on a night out.”

I don’t know about you, but the first thing I’m thinking about when I go out is my outfit. As Jane Austen would say if she was in our generation: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that one wants to look excessively gorgeous on a night out.” However, this, like other unchecked desires, can take us to dark places. By that I mean the likes of Shein, PLT and the myriad of other fast fashion brands that capitalise on our desire for newness for each and every event. 

Other sustainable voices fall down when they demonise this desire for newness, seeing it as inherently linked to consumerism, but I disagree. I think this desire for newness is actually rooted in a desire to be creative, to pique interest and, in our current society, we’ve been taught that this comes from following trends or purchasing something new. So perhaps what we really want is to pique interest through our appearance and this desire can easily be disentangled from consumerist understandings of newness.

I think the best way that you can create interest and newness sustainably is through a strong sense of personal style and by seeing your wardrobe as a set of tools rather than something to be constantly regenerated. I’m completely addicted to TikTok styling videos because seeing how other girls put things together makes me look at my tools in an entirely different light and through that, I get my ‘newness’ fix. 

My favouuurite styling video I’ve seen this year was Rachelle Cox making themselves a pirate hat from items they already own for LFW! But if you’re still gagging for a new outfit to wear to events this Christmas then it’s worth considering rental options, such as  ByRotation or HURR. These allow you to get your newness fix without also driving rampant consumption. 

I think the best way that you can create interest and newness sustainably is through a strong sense of personal style and by seeing your wardrobe as a set of tools rather than something to be constantly regenerated.

This is especially important when it comes to sequinned pieces. An Oxfam survey found that 50% of women aged 18-55 said they would buy a piece of sequinned clothing for the festive season, with only 25% saying they would wear the piece again and 5% saying they would put their clothes in the bin once they’d finished with them. Sequins are like polyester items and are made from plastic, but the reason I’m highlighting them here is it’s much harder (again, depending on your personal style) to rewear a sequinned garment enough times to justify its environmental impact, so if you do want to sparkle this holiday season, I recommend you rent or buy your items second hand. But seeing as the most sustainable clothes are ones you already own, why don’t you try styling something differently?

Now onto the question that creates meltdowns in the group chat – where to go out. Again bear with me, I’m not about to tell you to go to a mushroom-filled forest rave where you’ll encounter men in their late twenties having basic revelations about empathy that you’ve known since you were fifteen. All I’m saying is that given clubs emit 20 times the average CO2 emissions of homes, I think it’s time we factor sustainability into our decision making about venues. These emissions come from the energy it takes to power lights, DJ decks and speakers – not to mention the amount of plastic waste that venues produce. 

While this might feel like one thing too many to consider in an era of societal collapse, luckily for us, there are actually some great nights popping up across London that are trying to tackle this. Club Sol runs nights using a solar powered sound system and offers edible cups, recycled ocean plastic earbuds and virtual gift bags giving out discount codes to sustainable brands. Melting Lights are another organisation striving to make clubbing more sustainable and even produce sustainability reports tracking the emissions of their events. Even though sustainable clubbing events are still in their infancy, attending these types of events and showing other venues and promoters that there is a desire for this information and approach could lead to a real change in nightlife in general. 

There’s an anarchist feminist quote that I love, “It’s not my revolution if I can’t dance to it” and while it is actually a misattributed paraphrase, the sentiment remains. As well as considering the sustainability practices of the venues, there’s also the option to dance in aid of the climate. One of my favourite organisations who do this in the climate space are Climate Controlla, an international collective that organise “fund-ravers” and describe themselves as a “community of dance music lovers who care for people and planet” where “culture and activism” are united. All profit raised goes directly to climate action groups in the global South who are directly affected by the climate crisis and intersecting issues. With an offering like this, I think the group chat might not actually fight for once about where to go!

Finally, if we’re talking nights out then we probably need to talk about drugs. First things first, test your drugs, be safe and follow other harm reduction principles. When discussing drugs and climate, cocaine has really taken the spotlight in recent years. It’s estimated that the total carbon emissions of global cocaine manufacture amounts to 8.9 million tons of CO₂e per year, which is equivalent to the average emissions of more than 1.9 million petrol cars driven in the course of one year, but there are other things to think about beyond carbon emissions. 

Cocaine production is also a driver of deforestation with 43-58% of deforestation in two regions in Colombia being caused by coca cultivation, but the damage doesn’t stop here. When the coca is processed into cocaine and when synthetic drugs like MDMA are created, these processes rely on harsh chemicals and produce additional toxic waste that ends up in the water systems of remote areas where this production occurs and disrupts the ecosystems in these communities. So if you’re a vegetarian to “protect the Amazon”, it might be time to consider being a cocaine vegetarian too! 

This festive – or should I say party season – remember to hold back on buying new outfits for each night out, ask the nights you’re going to about their sustainability credentials and maybe hold off on the bag. 

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