I'm a singer and model, and my job is to look beautiful, sound beautiful and make people's hearts beat faster. I am also a climate change activist.
You might think that my work as an activist would be really different from my work as a singer and model. That as an activist, I would need to be earnest, worthy and wholesome.
You would be wrong. The activism I'm involved in is trying to be just as hot, just as gorgeous and just as thrilling as a catwalk show or mind-blowing gig. I am this kind of an activist because I think we need to make the fight for the future an emotional one. That we need to be as excited about it as we are about an image of a hot model or our favorite song. That fighting to stop climate change needs to feel like the best party we've ever been to.
My generation is going to have its future destroyed by the melting icecaps, the weird weather, the crops that will fail and the millions of people who will get pushed across borders in the hunt for shelter, water and food. But we don't feel that yet. The threat feels distant. It feels like just another one of those earnest, worthy issues we read about and feel sad or mad about for an instant on whatever our favorite social media feed of the moment happens to be. It feels like a meme on Instagram, a scary post on Tumblr. It doesn't feel like a threat to everything. And it doesn't feel like something our friends are excited about or something we need to rise up and fight together.
I think we need to change this. And if we are going to change it, emotion and beauty need to be right at the heart of our work. That is why there is really no difference between my work as a model, singer or activist. I want to make hearts beat faster to make people feel something deep about what is happening to their planet as greenhouse gases build up in the atmosphere and change the way everything works.
Last week thousands of young people joined the People's Climate March in New York and other cities across the planet. I really hope that this is the beginning of something even bigger -- of a movement that will see my generation rising up and using our creativity and energy and lust for life -- and our amazing, unprecedented connectedness -- to come together and force the politicians to do what we need them to if they are going to save our future.
I think our crazy obsession with social media should be at the heart of this movement. Because Instagram isn't just for photos of your lunch, Tinder isn't just for hooking up, Snapchat isn't just for making your friends laugh, YouTube isn't just entertainment. If you think about it -- at their core these are all amazing new ways of connecting with other people -- people we know and people we haven't ever met. And if we can find ways of using these virtual places that we spend so much of our time hanging out in to connect around an uprising to save the future then I think we could be onto something. But if that's going to work then there's no question - the uprising needs to look hot and it needs to feel like something that everyone is going to get kudos for getting involved with.
In London, I recently made this video in a beat up old studio with my friends from The Future. It is our attempt -- using no words, just my body and a baseball cap made of ice -- to capture what we think our generation is feeling about climate change: vulnerable, confused, dismayed and helpless. But it is also an attempt to capture people's attention by moving them, turning them on and getting them to feel something about this terrifying, thrilling challenge to us all.
We hope you like it, and that it makes your heart beat faster. If it does, I'll know that having an ice headache for a few days was totally worth it.
This post is part of a month-long series produced by The Huffington Post in conjunction with a variety of events being held in September recognizing the threats posed by climate change. Those events include the UN's Climate Summit 2014 (that was held Sept. 23, 2014, at UN headquarters in New York) and Climate Week NYC (Sept. 22-28, 2014, throughout New York City). To see all the posts in the series, read here.