This article was published with support from the Solution Journalism Network's H.E.A.L. Fellowship and the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources.
During the sweltering first week of her freshman year at the University of Arkansas in 2022, Helana Alexander walked the three minutes from her dorm room to the campus's imposing, colonnade-covered library. The sun blazed overhead, casting sharp reflections off the building's white stone. By the time she found the correct room, she was already late. She lingered in the doorway, embarrassed, until she was waved in by the facilitator, Amelia Southern-Uribe.
Alexander had arrived at one of Zero Hour Arkansas' weekly "climate anxiety processing sessions," a space where young people could voice their grief, fear, and rage about the climate crisis. The group is one of dozens that have emerged across the country as young people grapple with ecological and political catastrophes escalating around them. That day, five young people discussed the debilitating grief they felt about corporate pollution, vanishing landscapes, and devastating tornadoes in their state. The conversation was raw and unfiltered. For Alexander, it felt like a dam was breaking.
She had started experiencing climate anxiety — or intense worry about the current state and future of the planet — in high school. While growing up in Arkansas, she spent summers visiting her grandparents in Alaska. After missing a few trips, she returned to find that once enormous glaciers seemed to have completely melted. At her conservative high school, no one understood her grief, but in the University of Arkansas library, it became clear she was far from alone.
A fall 2024 survey of 15- to 25-year-olds in The Lancet found that 60% of respondents are "extremely worried" about the climate crisis. More than 40% say climate anxiety affects their mental health. For young people in climate-vulnerable states, those emotions can be especially intense. Arkansas ranks as the second most at-risk state after Florida due to extreme heat, tornadoes, and minimal investment in climate adaptation projects from its Republican-led legislature.
When Southern-Uribe, the facilitator Alexander met that day, founded Zero Hour Arkansas — first as a high school student and later at the University of Arkansas — they knew that confronting this sense of despair in their community would be essential to sparking action. Online the refrain "We're already doomed" was common among people their age. It made sense: Gen Z has grown up watching oil companies, Wall Street banks, and politicians collude to destroy the planet and its future for personal profit.
Southern-Uribe sees Arkansas as a microcosm of a national pattern of greed. The Walton family, heirs to the Walmart fortune, wield enormous political influence in the state. They've spent billions of dollars on cosmetic projects like bike trails and art museums while supporting conservative candidates who have destroyed environmental regulations. Meanwhile, state lawmakers have cheered on the Trump administration's rollbacks of environmental protections and even reopened coal plants.
Perhaps equally demoralizing is the lack of support from national climate groups. While organizations like the Sierra Club receive millions of dollars each year, red states like Arkansas are often written off as electorally unwinnable and therefore unworthy of investment. This erases — and devalues — the work of organizers like Southern-Uribe.
But they didn't want young people to minimize their expression of anger and anxiety, whether it's directed at national organizations, state lawmakers, or billionaires hijacking their state. Southern-Uribe wanted them to alchemize those emotions into action. "You can't create a movement if you're debilitated by anxiety and grief," they tell Teen Vogue.
That's how the idea for the first climate anxiety processing sessions emerged. After continuing to attend the sessions, Alexander decided that she had to be "all in." In 2023, she became co-president with Southern-Uribe.
Together they wanted young Arkansans to tap into their own power — and on the University of Arkansas campus, those efforts have paid off. In just three years, Zero Hour Arkansas has become the largest chapter of Zero Hour, a national, youth-led climate justice movement with groups nationwide. On the University of Arkansas campus, where many believed such grassroots organizing was impossible, they've built a 250-person movement that demands action and systemic change.
While federal, state, and university governments continue to abandon them, these students have turned toward each other for support. Zero Hour Arkansas has built deep alliances with groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and the the immigrant workers' rights organization Venceremos to create an intersectional environmental justice movement. And for Amelia Southern-Uribe and Helana Alexander, who once walked nervously into a library room full of strangers, that collective action has led to something neither of them expected: hope.
Southern-Uribe couldn't have imagined the impact Zero Hour Arkansas would have when they first envisioned the group. During their sophomore year of high school, they visited their father in Miami, a city on the frontlines of the climate crisis. While there, they were overwhelmed with thoughts of dread as they considered Miami's vulnerability to sea-level rise. It reminded them of being seven years old, watching thick black oil choke the Gulf of Mexico during the Deepwater Horizon Oil spill.
That sense of alarm led them to a webinar hosted by Zero Hour, where they heard the organization’s founder, Jamie Margolin, speak. Southern-Uribe immediately recognized their own story. Like them, Margolin was a queer child of Colombian immigrants. She encouraged other young people to draw from their lived experiences to fuel climate action where they lived.
Back in Arkansas, Southern-Uribe began reckoning with the environmental injustices that had shaped their community. They considered classmates who developed asthma due to air pollution. They thought of immigrant poultry workers in Springdale, home to Tyson Foods, who were forced to process chicken without basic protections. And looming largest was Walmart, loudly touting its climate pledges while fueling greenhouse gas emissions and generating staggering amounts of waste. Fueled by grief and fury, Southern-Uribe decided to launch the first Zero Hour chapter in their home state.
From the very beginning, they understood that the best way to build a movement was to respond to people's immediate needs. After brainstorming different ways to get started, Zero Hour Arkansas partnered with Campus Cup to pass out free menstrual cups to students. They played music and handed out the cups in sleek, climate-friendly packaging. Students started to associate Zero Hour with forward-thinking, helpful solutions. Based on the number of cups that were distributed, the group believes it diverted more than 200,000 pounds of waste from cotton pads and tampons, showing how concentrated action on college campuses can have an outsized impact.
They also wanted to share their ideas with a broader audience, and tell a new story about climate justice in the Ozarks. Southern-Uribe and their roommate launched ROOTS Magazine with their friend and roommate, Grace Holley. The zine features dozens of drawings, poems, essays, and stories from artists dedicated to climate justice and Southern ecologies.
As the group’s campus profile began to grow, members of Zero Hour Arkansas started to think about ways they could take action while continuing to address the grief that came up during the climate anxiety processing sessions. Slowly, an idea developed: What if they did the opposite of what their grief encouraged them to do? What if instead of sitting together in a quiet library, simmering in their frustration, they threw a raucous, strobe-light filled college party?
The result was Party Like It's 2050, a fundraiser that encouraged students to "Party like the world is on fire — because it is." The event was a way to raise money while showing other students that climate action could be rebellious and even fun. Multiple bands from the University of Arkansas headlined. Students sold sustainable products at a night market that overflowed with upcycled fashion, glittering vintage jewelry, and heaping plates of food. All proceeds from the $5 door fee supported Venceremos and the Northwest Arkansas Land Trust, a community-driven organization that pools resources to protect critical land for people and wildlife.
Soon students who had attended the event were clamoring to get involved. Rather than viewing climate action as pointless, people wanted to know how they could help. At a university largely dominated by Christian organizations and Greek life, Zero Hour Arkansas had catalyzed a new kind of culture. The group wanted to seize this attention and develop a campus-wide campaign.
In 2024, Southern-Uribe and Alexander decided to attend a weeklong training with the Campus Climate Network (CCN), a coalition of more than 50 college organizations working to advance climate justice. The training was a flurry of activity. CCN taught students how to build coalitions, recruit new members, and develop campaigns. Southern-Uribe notes that after years of pouring energy into their community, it was the first time they received practical resources about how to organize, as well as financial support to do so.
In February, their group launched its largest campus campaign: Students for an Equitable and Livable Future, or SELF. Framed as a "Green New Deal for Campus," the campaign is putting pressure on the University of Arkansas to disassociate from fossil fuels while expanding access to affordable transportation and housing. The university has a severe housing shortage, leaving more than 80% of students to secure an apartment on their own. Amid worsening floods and extreme heat, this has contributed to a surge in unhoused students and community members alike.
Even with their success, the students admit that the work comes with limits, since sustaining momentum without significant funding or institutional backing can feel precarious. Still, in order to build their base for the campaign, they've met with dozens of campus organizations, including agriculture students concerned about soil health and Students for Justice in Palestine. They’ve already joined a coalition that protects unhoused people from sweeps, helping them find shelter and providing food and water in the sweltering heat.
Southern-Uribe will soon move to Washington, DC, to serve as director of global organizing for Zero Hour, but they’re committed to returning regularly to Arkansas. For them, the work at state, national, and international levels is inseparable: “The blood money that goes into wars and oppression is the same money funding the systems that make our planet unlivable.”
If there's one lesson Southern-Uribe and Alexander hope others take from their work, it's the importance of building coalitions rooted in shared humanity. Don't turn away from the grief of this moment, they say; treat it as a tether, binding you to others committed to change. Find those people, be honest about what you're feeling, and organize from there.
“From the early climate anxiety sessions to now, it’s always been the same principle,” Alexander says. "We want you to be heard. We want you to be real and come together to make a difference about it."
