Then the children began to kill themselves. Children in their mid and early teens, even pre-teens. They did it for a variety of reasons, nothing was crystal clear or uncomplicated. Some commentators recorded that they did it as a protest, a despairing gesture to finally spur the adults to save the Earth. Others said that the suicides were altruistic: with their deaths the children believed that they reduced the burden on the planet’s ecosystem. Of course, these two motivations were not mutually exclusive, and indeed were often consciously conflated by the victims. Is that the correct term, victims? Perpetrators? Of altruistic protest?
Next came copy-cat syndrome. The children’s suicides went viral and they were revered as heroes by many of their peers, if not by their elders. The mainstream media christened the act ‘climacide’, though it was more popularly known on social media and popularly as ‘sixing’, a term somehow connected to the notion of a sixth extinction. And so killing yourself became way cool for young people: cooler than perpetrating a school-shooting, cooler than self-trafficking, cooler than 3D printed ice-cream.
Just the coolest.
Taking a step back, it began as a western phenomenon with arguably the first sixer being a thirteen-year-old boy from Madrid, Luis Garcia, the commonest of names indelibly inscribing itself in an extraordinary history. Luis self-immolated. Whoever came next is lost in a flurry of gathering social awe. Perhaps a couple of weeks passed as Luiz’s story did the rounds and his heart-broken parents wept out their story of his environmental conviction and desperation on screens across the globe. Then reports of more children killing themselves began to trickle in. The trickle became a torrent. Reports from around Europe, from the USA, Scandinavia, Canada, a scattering across all of Latin America. In gun cultures, shooting themselves was the children’s prime method of choice. Elsewhere, they hung themselves, slit their skinny wrists, popped pills or took poisons that were environmentally harmful – a double whammy, somehow. The most highly revered form of sixing, however, was always self-immolation.
After a year, statistics revealed that around three-quarters, almost seventy-five percent, of sixers were young girls. Around fifty percent of suicides were successful and ten of so percent of survivors were permanently damaged in some way physically. Irritated by the attention the sixers and, more especially, the issue of climate change received, one populist news channel headlined that the mental health of survivors had been researched and analysed “to death”. They entirely failed to note or apologise for their own quite tasteless pun. Meanwhile, some survey in Europe and the USA suggested that more than ninety-percent of teenagers between thirteen and sixteen had considered sixing themselves. The trend spread with Asian children in particular taking up the mantles of protest, self-sacrifice, generational solidarity, collective celebrity… Or as one Iranian sixer proclaimed the rationale on her online video as she drenched herself in a petrol from a plastic can that she’d labelled with a skull-and-crossbones: “Whatever”. When she set light to herself she stared unblinkingly into her phone camera as the flames took hold. After the video was taken down those who had seen it messaged that she died writhing in evident agony but also in astounding silence.
Experts were all over the climacide phenomenon. Psychologists, psychiatrists, social scientists of every stripe, all manner of perspectives and hypotheses. Clearly they had no real idea, certainly no prophylactic or cure. That, the children themselves opined in their suicide ‘notes’, was down to the politicians. And they, of course, the politicians did nothing. Not true. What they did do, virtually unanimously across the world, was to continue to pursue economic growth, spout empty rhetoric and make knowingly ineffective policies on climate change while, de facto, providing continued support to fossil fuel corporations. Same old, same old.
So, whether as a consequence or a coincidence, the children upped the ante.
The first group climacide took place in London, England. A whole school class of thirteen and fourteen-year-olds huddled together and set fire to themselves on the steps of Shell’s headquarters. Twenty children died, another twelve were horribly injured. Appalling though it was, theirs was a well targeted action. The petrochemical group had long been one of the world’s largest emitters of the greenhouse gases that had finally tipped climate change over the runaway edge. Ice was melting never to return, sea-levels were rising at unprecedented rates, whole populations were on the move, and refugees were being violently repulsed by unwelcoming states refusing sanctuary. Unpredictable droughts, wildfires and desertification in some locations were matched by floods, blizzards and sudden Arctic temperatures in others. Meanwhile, Shell continued to stoke the fires and fan the flames. They-were also notorious as the most preposterous of green-washers, claiming to be transforming their business to net zero by a continually receding date while in fact pursuing the exploitation of every last gramme and millilitre of fossil fuel. In this greenwashing endeavour, Shell set a new standard in mendacity, causing the term “implausible undeniability” to be coined in their “dis-honour”, as one climate pundit put it. Shell were, the London children’s farewell online video adjudged, “eco-paths” with no empathy for nature or care for its future existence whatsoever. The end-credits of the video scrolled through ninety-nine other eco-pathic companies that the children proposed as just targets.
After several more group suicides across the world and a continuing flood of individuals taking their lives, politicians in several countries became concerned enough to commission an international inquiry through the agency still known as UNICEF, despite the suspension of the UN itself. In this, the politicians succumbed to a furore from frantic parents, voters or potential dissidents depending on a regime’s character. In truth, there were few democracies left in the bloody chaos that world politics had by then become. Ironically, the same politicians also called upon leading voices in the environmental movements that they so despised to beg children everywhere to come to their senses. In a memorable moment, the doyenne of climate activism, Greta Thunberg, speaking from house-arrest in a top-secret location, managed to convey without her censors quite getting it that the children were acting in the most sensible manner imaginable given the apocalyptic global situation. While she did as her captors bid and asked the children not to take their lives, in the spaces between her words Thunberg conveyed that the moral imperative was to take whatever action necessary to stop the polluters who were killing the world. She did not rule out violence against either the property of the person. By omission, indeed, she ruled such actions beyond just, in truth hallowed.
While the politicians’ initiatives failed most comprehensively and the world still waited with unbated breath for the international inquiry to report, eventually the trend for sixing ran out of steam. While children committing climacide continued, entrenching itself as a cultural phenomenon, it became as unremarkable as death from a drug overdose, a drive-by shooting or detention by police: it became a norm. Birth rates, which had momentarily dipped, picked up once more and surged. Once again, the experts, academics and journalists, were divided on the reason or reasons that sixing had peaked. Amid the clamour of fatuous analysis, in one interview not widely seen, ten years on a terribly scarred survivor of the Shell Sixing in London offered an explanation that transcended cynicism.
“Well, said the young woman with a face like melted wax, “it was as ineffective as every other form of environmental action before and since, wasn’t it.”
Next came copy-cat syndrome. The children’s suicides went viral and they were revered as heroes by many of their peers, if not by their elders. The mainstream media christened the act ‘climacide’, though it was more popularly known on social media and popularly as ‘sixing’, a term somehow connected to the notion of a sixth extinction. And so killing yourself became way cool for young people: cooler than perpetrating a school-shooting, cooler than self-trafficking, cooler than 3D printed ice-cream.
Just the coolest.
Taking a step back, it began as a western phenomenon with arguably the first sixer being a thirteen-year-old boy from Madrid, Luis Garcia, the commonest of names indelibly inscribing itself in an extraordinary history. Luis self-immolated. Whoever came next is lost in a flurry of gathering social awe. Perhaps a couple of weeks passed as Luiz’s story did the rounds and his heart-broken parents wept out their story of his environmental conviction and desperation on screens across the globe. Then reports of more children killing themselves began to trickle in. The trickle became a torrent. Reports from around Europe, from the USA, Scandinavia, Canada, a scattering across all of Latin America. In gun cultures, shooting themselves was the children’s prime method of choice. Elsewhere, they hung themselves, slit their skinny wrists, popped pills or took poisons that were environmentally harmful – a double whammy, somehow. The most highly revered form of sixing, however, was always self-immolation.
After a year, statistics revealed that around three-quarters, almost seventy-five percent, of sixers were young girls. Around fifty percent of suicides were successful and ten of so percent of survivors were permanently damaged in some way physically. Irritated by the attention the sixers and, more especially, the issue of climate change received, one populist news channel headlined that the mental health of survivors had been researched and analysed “to death”. They entirely failed to note or apologise for their own quite tasteless pun. Meanwhile, some survey in Europe and the USA suggested that more than ninety-percent of teenagers between thirteen and sixteen had considered sixing themselves. The trend spread with Asian children in particular taking up the mantles of protest, self-sacrifice, generational solidarity, collective celebrity… Or as one Iranian sixer proclaimed the rationale on her online video as she drenched herself in a petrol from a plastic can that she’d labelled with a skull-and-crossbones: “Whatever”. When she set light to herself she stared unblinkingly into her phone camera as the flames took hold. After the video was taken down those who had seen it messaged that she died writhing in evident agony but also in astounding silence.
Experts were all over the climacide phenomenon. Psychologists, psychiatrists, social scientists of every stripe, all manner of perspectives and hypotheses. Clearly they had no real idea, certainly no prophylactic or cure. That, the children themselves opined in their suicide ‘notes’, was down to the politicians. And they, of course, the politicians did nothing. Not true. What they did do, virtually unanimously across the world, was to continue to pursue economic growth, spout empty rhetoric and make knowingly ineffective policies on climate change while, de facto, providing continued support to fossil fuel corporations. Same old, same old.
So, whether as a consequence or a coincidence, the children upped the ante.
The first group climacide took place in London, England. A whole school class of thirteen and fourteen-year-olds huddled together and set fire to themselves on the steps of Shell’s headquarters. Twenty children died, another twelve were horribly injured. Appalling though it was, theirs was a well targeted action. The petrochemical group had long been one of the world’s largest emitters of the greenhouse gases that had finally tipped climate change over the runaway edge. Ice was melting never to return, sea-levels were rising at unprecedented rates, whole populations were on the move, and refugees were being violently repulsed by unwelcoming states refusing sanctuary. Unpredictable droughts, wildfires and desertification in some locations were matched by floods, blizzards and sudden Arctic temperatures in others. Meanwhile, Shell continued to stoke the fires and fan the flames. They-were also notorious as the most preposterous of green-washers, claiming to be transforming their business to net zero by a continually receding date while in fact pursuing the exploitation of every last gramme and millilitre of fossil fuel. In this greenwashing endeavour, Shell set a new standard in mendacity, causing the term “implausible undeniability” to be coined in their “dis-honour”, as one climate pundit put it. Shell were, the London children’s farewell online video adjudged, “eco-paths” with no empathy for nature or care for its future existence whatsoever. The end-credits of the video scrolled through ninety-nine other eco-pathic companies that the children proposed as just targets.
After several more group suicides across the world and a continuing flood of individuals taking their lives, politicians in several countries became concerned enough to commission an international inquiry through the agency still known as UNICEF, despite the suspension of the UN itself. In this, the politicians succumbed to a furore from frantic parents, voters or potential dissidents depending on a regime’s character. In truth, there were few democracies left in the bloody chaos that world politics had by then become. Ironically, the same politicians also called upon leading voices in the environmental movements that they so despised to beg children everywhere to come to their senses. In a memorable moment, the doyenne of climate activism, Greta Thunberg, speaking from house-arrest in a top-secret location, managed to convey without her censors quite getting it that the children were acting in the most sensible manner imaginable given the apocalyptic global situation. While she did as her captors bid and asked the children not to take their lives, in the spaces between her words Thunberg conveyed that the moral imperative was to take whatever action necessary to stop the polluters who were killing the world. She did not rule out violence against either the property of the person. By omission, indeed, she ruled such actions beyond just, in truth hallowed.
While the politicians’ initiatives failed most comprehensively and the world still waited with unbated breath for the international inquiry to report, eventually the trend for sixing ran out of steam. While children committing climacide continued, entrenching itself as a cultural phenomenon, it became as unremarkable as death from a drug overdose, a drive-by shooting or detention by police: it became a norm. Birth rates, which had momentarily dipped, picked up once more and surged. Once again, the experts, academics and journalists, were divided on the reason or reasons that sixing had peaked. Amid the clamour of fatuous analysis, in one interview not widely seen, ten years on a terribly scarred survivor of the Shell Sixing in London offered an explanation that transcended cynicism.
“Well, said the young woman with a face like melted wax, “it was as ineffective as every other form of environmental action before and since, wasn’t it.”