How Environmental Writing Led to Radicalization

After writing 99 columns on personal sustainability efforts for The Irish Times, journalist Una Mullally found herself fundamentally changed—not just in habit, but in worldview—leading her to describe the experience as a form of radicalization driven by the growing urgency of climate action.

Mullally began the weekly column in 2021 as a personal experiment to live more sustainably, documenting small changes like reducing plastic use, switching to renewable energy providers, and altering her diet. Over nearly two years, the cumulative effect of researching and writing about environmental responsibility reshaped her understanding of individual agency within systemic challenges.

She described the process as transformative, saying that repeatedly confronting the scale of ecological degradation while advocating for personal accountability created a cognitive dissonance that pushed her toward deeper engagement with climate justice movements and structural critiques of economic systems.

“Writing about becoming more environmentally friendly didn’t just change what I bought or how I travelled—it changed how I saw the world,” Mullally wrote in her final column. “It radicalised me, not in the sense of advocating violence, but in the sense of making me unable to unsee the connections between everyday choices and global harm.”

The more I wrote, the angrier I became—not at individuals failing to recycle, but at a system that presents personal virtue as the solution to collective collapse.

Una Mullally, The Irish Times

Her reflections highlight a growing tension in public discourse around sustainability: whether individual behavioural change constitutes meaningful progress or serves as a distraction from corporate and governmental accountability. Mullally’s journey illustrates how sustained engagement with environmental reporting can shift personal perspective from lifestyle adjustment to systemic critique.

The Irish Times weekend review column, which ran from 2021 to late 2023, became one of the paper’s most discussed features, prompting reader responses ranging from inspiration to frustration over the perceived burden placed on consumers to solve planetary crises.

While Mullally does not prescribe specific policy solutions in her columns, she consistently emphasized that true sustainability requires reimagining economic models, energy infrastructure, and consumption patterns beyond individual action—a viewpoint increasingly echoed in climate science and environmental policy circles.

Her experience underscores a broader phenomenon observed by psychologists and sociologists: repeated exposure to climate information can lead to emotional transformation, sometimes termed “eco-anxiety” or “ecological grief,” which in turn may motivate advocacy or lifestyle shifts.

As of April 2026, Mullally continues to write on social and cultural issues for The Irish Times, though she has not resumed the sustainability column. Her 99-part series remains archived online as a documented personal journey through one of the defining debates of the era: the role of the individual in confronting climate change.