Unapologetically green. Two essays: Plate to Planet & Feminism.

By Tatjana Ucci

Tatjana Ucci is a green activist with a passion for writing. She contacted the Ecosprinter Editorial Board with two very political yet personal essays. They are a great illustration of how our political values intersect with our personal beliefs and experiences. The following article contains both essays. - Elise Gosselin (25/26 EEB member)

The first is “From Plate to Planet: The Moment I Felt the Life Behind My Meal”, a more intimate, first-person piece connecting animal suffering and the climate crisis, written to resonate especially with younger generations.

The second is “Feminism, Eco-Activism and Youth Power”, which focuses on feminist and intersectional perspectives in youth-led environmental movements and the green transition. “ - Tatjana Ucci, author.

From plate to planet

The moment I felt the life behind my meal

I love animals.

I always have.

I stop to pet dogs I don’t know. I feel a physical ache when I see an injured bird, a frightened cow, a stray cat. I donate. I sign petitions. I say, honestly, that I care.

And yet, for years, I ate them.

That truth is uncomfortable because it’s ordinary. Loving animals while participating in their suffering has become one of the quiet contradictions of our time, one we’re taught to live with, not to question.

Until one day, it breaks.

For me, it happened during an ordinary meal. Nothing dramatic. No images. No accusations. Just a sudden, unbearable awareness: what I was eating had once been alive, not symbolically, but fully. A body that wanted to keep breathing. A life that resisted ending.

I remember pausing mid-bite. The food was still warm. My appetite wasn’t.

And I realised something that still hurts to admit: my affection for animals had never reached my plate.

The kindness that stops at convenience

We tell ourselves stories to survive this contradiction.

They’re raised for this.

It’s natural.

One person doesn’t matter.

But none of these stories change the truth: an animal is killed so I can enjoy a few minutes of taste. That animal did not consent, understand, get to finish its life.

Once I stopped arguing with that, stopped softening it, the pleasure felt unbearably small.

The discomfort came from recognising myself.

That moment opened my eyes to something larger. The system that makes animal suffering invisible is the same one pushing the planet toward collapse.

Industrial animal agriculture clears forests, poisons water, accelerates climate change, and drives mass extinction, all to preserve habits we barely pause to examine. Animals are treated as units. Land as expendable. The future as someone else’s responsibility.

And yet, younger generations are told we must fix the climate crisis. Change how we travel. How we consume. How we live.

Everything: except what’s on our plate.

Animal suffering and environmental destruction are the same mind-set playing out at different scales: convenience over care, comfort over consequence.

Letting the truth hurt

Most people who eat meat are disconnected, they are not inherently cruel.

Distance is what makes the system work. Clean packaging. Friendly words.

Silence.

But love that avoids truth isn’t love: it’s comfort. 

And once the truth is seen, it doesn’t disappear. Even if habits take time to change, something shifts. A pause. A heaviness. A quiet grief.

Awareness.

I don’t believe change begins with guilt. I believe it begins with honesty, the kind that makes us stop and admit: this doesn’t align with who I think I am. 

For me, choosing plant-based food became a way to close that gap. To let my care for animals and the planet finally reach my daily actions. Consciously.

From plate to planet, the question that now follows me is simple, and impossible to ignore:

If I truly love animals, and truly care about the Earth, how much harm am I willing to accept for my comfort?

Once you ask it honestly, you don’t walk away unchanged.

Feminism, Eco-Activism and Youth Power

Why climate justice without feminism is a lie

Let’s stop pretending the climate crisis is neutral.

It isn’t neutral in who suffers first.

It isn’t neutral in who adapts.

And it definitely isn’t neutral in who is asked to care, cope, and carry on while the world heats up.

I didn’t come to environmental activism through graphs or policy papers but through lived experience, through watching who absorbs the damage when systems fail.

Climate collapse moves through inequality.

Feminism is a lens for understanding it.

Women and marginalised genders are disproportionately affected by environmental crises, through food insecurity, unpaid care work, precarious labour, and political exclusion. Yet they remain underrepresented in the spaces where “solutions” are designed.

A feminist perspective is a necessity.

It asks who pays the price of transition, who is protected, and who is sacrificed in the name of progress.

For younger generations, this connection is instinctive. Climate justice, gender justice, racial justice, they show up together, in the same bodies, in the same communities, in the same emergencies.

Youth feminism is already changing eco-activism

Across Europe, young feminists are not waiting to be invited into environmental movements. They are building their own, movements that refuse to separate care from resistance or justice from sustainability.

They are organising strikes, creating community networks, and challenging extractive systems not only in how we treat the Earth, but in how we treat people.

Their message is clear: a green transition that reproduces inequality is not a transition. It’s a continuation.

Who speaks defines what matters. Who leads defines what is possible.

When environmental leadership excludes women and marginalised voices, entire realities vanish. Feminist activism demands representation not as a gesture, but as a condition for effective climate action.

It’s about being able to breathe in the future being built.

Care is political, and disruptive

Feminist eco-activism centres care in a world obsessed with extraction. Care for bodies, communities, animals, and ecosystems as a strategy.

It asks a question that makes systems uncomfortable: what if the goal of the green transition isn’t speed or profit, but dignity?

The climate crisis will not be solved by technology; it will be shaped by whose voices we choose to believe.

And if feminism is excluded from that process, climate justice will remain partial, fragile, and unjust.

The future of eco-activism must not be neutral.

It cannot be optional.

It is Feminist… or it will fail.