Woo was in her third year at NUS when she started The Weird and Wild in 2018, after getting “sick” of seeing nothing but advertisements and posts with prescriptive messaging such as “don’t use plastic bags” and “sort out your waste”. There was also a lack of accessible information online then. “People were saying that all plastic can be recycled. There’s actually a list of items that can’t be recycled, but it’s so far down the Google search that you’ll never find it, and you’ll always see Western‑centric research coming up [first],” she explains. 

“If I, as an environmentalist, cannot understand these things, I can’t expect someone else without the knowledge to read the news and know what to do,” Woo says, underscoring the importance of breaking down complex issues in sustainability. “It’s about finding that connection point between yourself and an environmental cause,” she adds. Sustainable fashion and plant‑based eating, for instance, are just some entry points into the discourse.

Her aim, she shares, is simply to approach this “very scary issue” with a lot of “curiosity and to see it for what it is”, and ask, “What can we do about it?” Woo hopes to empower people to decide what to do on their own. She recognises, though, that the climate crisis affects everyone in different ways, depending on their identities and access to resources. She remembers, for instance, a bout of haze in 2017 that got her thinking about how the elderly, the immunocompromised, and those without the means to afford air purifiers or air conditioning were dealing with the heat and pollution. 

“It hit home for me because I can’t talk about climate change without recognising that there are going to be people who are worse off, or that there are barriers preventing them from engaging with the climate issue,” she says. Her goal, then, is to advocate for a “better way for these issues to intertwine” to create “a green and just future” 

The mantle of a youth activist is not one that rests easily on Woo’s shoulders. “I can’t possibly represent every single voice in the environmental community in Singapore,” she says. Today, she works around this by sharing the spotlight with other voices, particularly Asian and Southeast Asian ones. “There’s no point spotlighting one person in environmental work,” she states. 

Woo remains steadfast in her own corner of the conversation. “You have to look at it, tackle it head‑on and say, ‘We need to be stronger about what we’re pushing for.’ We need to phase out fossil fuels, we need more people to understand what that means, and help everybody adapt to that reality.” 

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