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Abstract
This paper examines how people concerned about anthropogenic climate change use TikTok to co-create motivation behind action and try to spur various collective actions by mobilizing individual-level actions. Over the course of three months, I conducted a digital ethnography on climate-conscious communities on the social media app TikTok through interacting with the platform to situate my account within their amorphous environmentalist communities. I supplemented my observations with six semi-structured interviews with community members who have gained an audience through different forms of environmental videos. By tracing different discursive formations around environmentalism, I found that the communities within these formations focus on using various emotions as the bases for environmental activism or action, despite expressing diverse belief systems around these bases. I argue that we can better understand these different strains of online environmentalism by identifying how they position the human in relation to the natural world and discuss the implications of how the messaging and mobilizing of these communities may influence our understanding of emotional foundations for modern environmentalism as a decentralized social movement.