As the sun dipped below the smoky haze of the Pacific Palisades, 21-year-old Isabella Brahmst watched from her Los Angeles apartment. Flames raced down the mountainside and turned into ash falling like snow while chaotic evacuations surrounded her and her friends. At that moment, the climate crisis she had studied for years became a terrifying, real-life ordeal. 

A junior at the University of Los Angeles California (UCLA), Brahmst is majoring in Climate Science and Political Science. The pivotal moment that jump-started her activism, however, came long before university.

“I attended the 2019 Climate March when I was 15, and I just had this profound realization that I had to do something about the climate issue,” Brahmst said. “Ever since, I’ve been driven to learn everything I can to help prevent it from increasing.” 

Brahmst’s connection to the environment is profoundly rooted in her childhood. Growing up on a farm, Brahmst fell in love with nature at a young age. 

“It made sense why I cared for it so deeply,” Brahmst said.

The climate crisis has become increasingly personal for Brahmst. 

“I’m starting to see it unfold in so many layers of my life,” she said. 

From the devastating California wildfires to the growing number of hurricanes impacting her Jamaican family, the urgency of the climate situation has never felt more immediate. 

“Nothing is as important to me as [the climate crisis],” Brahmst said. 

The crisis hit her in full force this year, in her third year at UCLA, where she found herself caught in the middle of the Pacific Palisades Wildfire. 

The Pacific Palisades Wildfire ignited on Jan. 7 in the Santa Monica Mountains in Los Angeles. The fire was the tenth deadliest and third most destructive in California’s history. In total, it burned over 20,000 acres, killed 12 people and destroyed over 6,000 structures.

Living in proximity to the fire, Brahmst quickly felt its effects on her community. 

“We started school on Monday and it was Tuesday,” Brahmst said. “I walked out of my class at 10 a.m., and I’m from New York, so I don’t really know what wildfires look like. I pointed to the sky and I asked my friend, ‘what is that weird dirt cloud?’ She was like: ‘I don’t know.’ And then we found out it was a fire.” 

Almost immediately, Brahmst saw the consequences of wildfires in her circle. 

“One of my professors had to leave class early because his house was in danger,” Brahmst said. 

Not long after, the wildfires impacted her and her friends. 

“I start[ed] to see flames coming down the mountain,” Brahmst said. “Big flames coming down the mountain quickly. I run to my friend’s apartment and I’m like, ‘look out the window!’ We’re all like, ‘what do we do?’” 

Brahmst and her friends ended up evacuating an hour south, a challenging measure considering they were all out-of-state students without nearby homes to go to. 

After returning to her apartment three days later, Brahmst was once again forced to evacuate after a shift in the wind altered the direction of the fire and put her apartment in an evacuation zone. Her classes were then canceled for the next week and a half. 

Brahmst also witnessed the earth-shattering destruction the wildfires brought, such as seeing an elderly woman at the supermarket crying to her daughter on the phone saying that she lost everything, and emails from her professors about losing their homes. 

“It was a scary time where you couldn’t even be safe going outside because of the air quality,” Brahmst said.

This encounter was not only a personal ordeal, but also a surreal confrontation of everything Brahmst had learned and supported in her experience as a climate science major and advocate.  

“It was just a surreal thing to experience what I and everyone else had been warning about for so long,” she said. “It felt surreal but also like reality at the same time.”

As a climate activist, Brahmst has worked closely with other students to try and force legislators to enact laws protecting youth from the dangers of climate change and believes this action is even more pivotal than ever. 

“Legislators play a large role in supporting different companies, law firms and the youth, through their actions in terms of congressional support,” Brahmst said. “They can also make an impact with their voice by representing everyone in California [to Congress].”

In the face of governmental inaction, Brahmst and other students in Los Angeles have turned to grassroots efforts to help those impacted by ongoing wildfires. She has participated in multiple community-driven relief efforts, such as clothing drives and animal shelters. 

“There’s this constant sense of community that we need to do something to assist everyone that was impacted,” she said. 

Furthermore, Brahmst and other students have come together to support each other mentally in the face of this traumatic disaster. Since the fire has since been mostly contained, Los Angeles residents feel a lack of concern from other communities. 

“We talk it out with each other,” Brahmst said. “It feels like if you zoom out from LA, everybody else doesn’t care anymore.”

But Brahmst refuses to let her generation become complacent. 

“When these big moments happen, like the LA wildfires, we need to mobilize as a country and as a youth to take strides and show that we aren’t just going to let this keep happening,” she said. “It needs to change.”  

By Lucy Randall