Selling Sustainability - Ep150: Solitaire Townsend

Transcript

Bryony Worthington

Hello, I'm Bryony Worthington and this is Cleaning Up. My guest this week is Solitaire Townsend, co-founder and chief solutionist at Futerra. Soli and her team have been helping clients be more sustainable long before it became mainstream. She's a self made business leader and entrepreneur, author, problem solver and brilliant communicator — though be warned sometimes at warp speed. Naturally upbeat and energetic, I knew speaking to Solly would be an energising and thought provoking start to the year. Please join me in welcoming Solitaire Townsend to Cleaning Up.

Michael Liebreich

Before we start, if you're enjoying Cleaning Up, please make sure that you like, subscribe and leave a review. That really helps other people to find us. To make sure you never miss an episode, subscribe to us on YouTube or your favourite podcast platform. And follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram to participate in the discussion. Also, you can visit Cleaningup.live to access over 160 hours of conversations with extraordinary climate leaders. And you can subscribe there to our free newsletter that's cleaningup.live, cleaningup.live. And if you particularly enjoy an episode, please spread the word, tell your friends and colleagues about it. Cleaning Up is brought to you by our lead supporter, Capricorn Investment Group, the Liebreich Foundation and the Gilardini Foundation.

Soli, it's so good to have you here. And I just wanted to kick off this conversation with the obvious question, which is, in your own words, could you introduce yourself, tell us what you do and why?

Solitaire Townsend

Lovely, thank you so much, Bryony. And it's lovely to be here. So my name is Solitaire, I always have to say that first. Because it's an unusual name, you call me Soli, they'll think Sally. And I am the co-founder and chief solutionist at an organisation called Futerra. And Futerra is about making the Anthropocene awesome. And we might want to dig into that a little bit more. I'm also the author of a couple of books, the most recent one of which is called The Solutionists, which is all about basically becoming the leader that the world needs, which feels pretty relevant to this wonderful podcast.

Well, thank you so much. So Soli, you've had an incredible life that's led you to this point. And yeah, I mean, perhaps we could just start with Futerra. So 2001, this is something you launched. And kind of tell us a little bit more about what led you to that moment where you broke out and started your own company.

So it's actually a bit of a story about luck and timing as of course these things always tend to be. So I have an arts background, and I have masters degrees in Shakespeare and in sustainable development, which tells you that I have wide ranging interests and was a very boring young woman, who wanted to do a lot of study. And after doing a masters in sustainable development, I was really struck by how everybody that I worked with in the arts, everybody that I work with in marketing, everybody that I grew up with, hadn't heard of this incredibly important thing of sustainable development. And I was like, sort of, you know, blow tide with, you know, as if I was a recent convert. And I just wanted to tell everybody about it. And I started working in sustainability and I was so passionate about it, and I boring everybody at parties. They would say, "Hey, what do you do?" It's like "I work in sustainable development," and then their eyes would glaze over. And so with some colleagues, we received some funding. the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts in the UK gave some funding to us when we were sort of in our mid 20s, to look into this issue around communicating sustainability. And actually what there was in it. And when we started a project, so Futerra. And within a couple of months of that project, people started coming and saying, "Oh, actually, could you come in and do some sessions for us about what you found?" or "Could you come to facilitate this thing?" And so we started to do some paid work through a previous company that that I'd set up. And then, within about a year and a half, we realised 'Ah, I've fallen into a niche." People spent hours, weeks, months, years trying to find a business niche, I literally tripped and fell into one, and realised that Futerra wasn't a project, it was a calling. It was what I wanted to do with my life. And so started building a business around what was already quite a successful and moving idea. And over the years, it's sort of changed and developed and evolved as of course it must, if you want to keep doing the work that's going to make a difference. But that core, at the centre of being: there is an answer to all these big, awful, challenging, scary problems. And there's this amazing set of answers out there, and I just want to tell the world about them. That has remained the heart of what we do.

And so just to help us understand then a sort of day in the life of Futerra, you have clients who come to you with a range of challenges, but they're nearly always in the sort of communications and narrative space. Is that correct?

Not just. So over the years, what we've developed into is what we call a change agency, which does logic and magic. So the logic, the solutions work that we do, is actually pretty kind of hardcore sustainability. So doing carbon footprinting, doing human rights strategies. We helped work through Formula One committing to go net zero. And in fact, no longer use petrol in Formula One cars. We've done a lot of work on Google's sustainability strategies. And that's what we call the logic. And one of the reasons why we do that is because often people come to us to do comms, and then they haven't got anything to communicate. And so actually, we got drawn into doing some very, very depth work. And we tend to do quite a lot of work on the edge. So on the what's next, a lot of what we call futurescaping, and getting strategies ready for the future. And then the other side is the magic. And the magic is the storytelling and the communications, the human truths and engagement. Now, that used to be a lot of work for corporates, on things like cause comms and purpose. But actually, we're moving much more now into storytelling industries, working with entertainment industries, working with social media creators, in actually trying to get sustainability, sustainable solutions, climate justice, into what you see on your screens. Be they on your little screen, where you're engaging with social media creators and influencers, or on your big screens where you're watching broadcast media.

And one of your insights in this journey through Futerra has been that people respond to stories, right? That the logic part is only, as you say, a part of it. The magic is what kind of gets you out to an audience. And one of the things I've always found, in times that I've spent talking to you, is that you speak like a human, you understand human human motivations. And what do you think in your background gives you that... It's like, it's a kind of super skill of being able to take some, it's quite technical, but then make it relatable. Would you say, that's what you do?

That's enormously kind of you to say, and thank you, because I can wheel out the geekoid if I have to, you know, I can throw my pee ppms around, and my albedo effects and all of this technical scientific jargon, but I tend to find it not very useful unless speaking to fellow geekoids. And, you know, a little bit about my background, and this very plumb, British accent is fake. I actually grew up in social housing in the UK, with an accent that very much tagged me — in what is still to this day a very class-based system — as somebody from a very poor background. And the people that I grew up with, my family, my friends, my contemporaries as I was growing up, there was a certain distrust of elites and of education, etc. And so as I became one of those, and I could not be more sort of plummy, elite educated now than I am, I always have retained this desire to still be able to talk in a way that people around me would understand. And the people who are around me are not always people who have got master's degrees coming out of there ears and you know, the kind of background where you just sort of naturally learn about this stuff. And I'm a real proponent of the fact that to change everything is going to take everyone. Really, genuinely is going to take everyone. And these solutions, these answers these exciting things, which we're working on in sustainability, everybody deserves to be part of that. And the best way to do that is to communicate well. Now there's communicating well, in a really kind of open, inclusive, normal way, talking like a normal human being. It's also inclusive in terms of language, and it's shocking how few of the most important scientific documents are translated into anything other than English, for example. So it's also about making sure that our stories are authentic and real, but also accessible by the most number of people.

And do you think this has gotten even more critical now? Because when I started out, perhaps round about the same time as you maybe, there was a lot that could be done by elites in a way. You could sort of tinker with the electricity system and put in some good policies and then suddenly, the power coming out of your wall was no longer brown, it was green, and that was sort of an invisible transition for many. I mean, we had problems with acceptability, wind farms, etc. So it still needed good comps, right? But now we're getting to the phase certainly in the UK, where we're asking people to adopt new technologies into their lives. Technologies they're actually quite fond of, like their car or their boiler or their way they cook their food for dinner. So do you think this has become ever more critical? You know, we need to talk to everyone, as opposed to just an elite?

I believe it always has been. I actually think that it's a mistake to think that we can create a sustainable future only by working with experts. The experts are necessary, of course, we have to have people who have expertise, and this stuff is really complicated. I don't want to try to replumb an energy system or workout how to build a wind farm or think about how we're going to change our tax system. I really want people who know that stuff in depth, to be able to do it. But one of the things which is often forgotten in our movement, is that we tend to be working within permission economies, where actually you require that permission, that mandate for change, not just in what you're asking people to do within their own homes, but within the politics of the countries within which we live. And we've all lived through the last several years of upsets and unexpected changes in politics that showed us that the ways we thought things happened might not be the case. And that our nice, solid expectations of how things are going to work totally turn out to be wrong. So if you think about powerful people, the corridors of power, the CEOs, the political leaders... Of course they need to be engaged and to understand this. But they're not going to move without people power at the other end. So if we've got the powerful people, we need the people power in order to create that durable majority for change, that durable majority for change over time. And that's hard. And it's difficult, but it is not impossible. And I think if we could get our story right, and actually tell the whole story of what we're trying to do with sustainability rather than just part of it, which is what tends to happen is one part of sustainability tends to get told a lot. And there's other parts of it that didn't get told at all. And one of the reasons why we use the word story a lot — story, story, story — is because of the shocking thing about human nature is that human beings believe stories more than we believe facts. We believe evidence over anecdotes. And you know this Bryony, I once stood on the stage with the wonderful Johan Rockström, one of our leading global scientists, a dear friend, and I said this, the science tells us that people believe stories over facts. And he was like "Oh, no, I can't believe that." And I was like "Johan, don't be a story denier." This man is being intolerant tonight. This is just how we're programmed. And when you think about it, so imagine you want to buy a new car, and you do all your research, you've spent hours online Googling, miles per hour and effectiveness and safety stats, and reviews, etc. And you've really made a very informed decision that you're going to buy a particular EV. And it's something that you really feel confident in, then the next day you're in work, and you're surrounded by the water cooler, and a colleague who don't even like very much, you tell them about this, and they say, "Oh no, you don't want to buy that car, my brother's cousin... oh, the maintenance costs on it, oh you wouldn't want to, they don't tell you that." All the evidence would show you won't buy the car. Just because one anecdote from someone you don't even like, will actually affect your confidence about your own executive functioning, your own logic decision making. And that's why it's so important for us to tell real stories, true stories, authentic stories, but we have to start doing that rather than beating people over the head with facts. Because, we've been doing that for 20 years, and it's not got us where we need to be.

Yeah, and so one of the things I think is wonderful is that you've got this very positive solution-oriented mindset. You've written a book called The Solutionists, and we'll come on to that, but sometimes the thing that I find hard is that, whilst we're all trying to do this, get to this win, win, win, and this Nirvana that we can just see is over the horizon, there are quite a lot of people who are telling stories on the other side, right? It's not a level playing field, there's quite a lot of stories being seeded, being placed, misinformation is a big thing. And I just wondered— I know you are usually a very optimistic person, and therefore I'm sure you've thought this through and come up with a positive spin on it, but how do we acknowledge the fact that it's not a blank sheet of paper, there is an active set of narratives being seeded that are probably better resourced and a bit more disciplined than we are? What's your thinking around that?

Much better resourced and much more disciplined to be the fossil fuel industry, you know, what was the recent one? $100 million and that was one from Shell, one brief that shell gave. Ramp that up and ramp that up. We are literally fighting billions of dollars being spent on some of the best communicators in the world. And one of the big things which I do is do a lot of work with social media creators on Tik Tok and YouTube and Instagram, etc. There's a huge amount of money being poured into that sector to get those creators to talk positively about the fossil fuel companies. So absolutely, I'm an optimist but I'm not blind. There is a huge amount of work going on. I find that encouraging in one way, because it shows how very, very scared they are of us, in terms of the fact that they know we have a better story. Our story is better because it's true. So just automatically, we have a much, much, much better story. And that's one of the things which makes me optimistic. I'm also really optimistic because we've been telling that story so badly. Telling it so badly. And yet we've managed to get to where we are in terms of public understanding, in terms of political action, in terms of there having been some really big movements, in terms of where we are on renewables. We have managed to get so far in terms of this change this flip we've gotta do do in our economies, with really terrible storytelling in the main. There's wonderful, fantastic pockets of excellence in terms of engaging people but overall it's not been brilliant. So just imagine what we could do if we actually started to tell a better story. And we don't need the billions. If anyone wants to cut a check for several billion for me to do proper climate communications, I'm not going to say no, but we will win that story war because our story is true. And because our story is better, we just actually have to start fighting it.

And so you recently gave a TED talk, which I thought was awesome. I think it's had lots of views, like over a million views, so you've tapped into something. And you describe the role of this kind of group of companies, right? They're the marketers, the advertisers, the PR people who... Well, you tell the story. What can that industry do? What you want the industry to do?

So the professional services industry and the advertising industry, and marketing industry, within it, we're talking about a $2 trillion industry. This is a massive, massive part of our economy. It's also the part of the economy, which many of the most creative and insightful people go and work for. Because some of the best storytellers in the world find out that they can't make a living being a writer or an artist — not everyone can be a novelist or a creative. And so they go to the only place where you can make a living if you're a creative person, which is the advertising and marketing industry. So these are people with really great skills, but also deep gifts in terms of very gifted people in terms of storytelling. And one of the biggest industries that use those gifts, so the people who pay for it the most, is the fossil fuel industries. And so what we've got is we've got this situation of the people who we need most to be working on solutions, the people who have absolutely got that storytelling ability, the ability to influence, the ability to excite, what I call the industry of influence: a huge industry of advertising agencies, marketing companies, research companies, media buyers, a huge, huge, huge industry. And their skills are being used to prop up the current status quo. Now we're in a position at the moment where a lot of people who work in that industry are increasingly unhappy about that. They actually didn't go into advertising to flog more crap to more people or to help burnish an oil company's reputation. They went into it because they love creativity, and they want to tell great stories. And so we're beginning to find a pushback within that industry. We're also beginning to find a pushback on that industry. So you've got some fantastic work that's been done to try to ban fossil fuel advertising. People go "Oh, you know, you can't ban fossil fuel advertising." And you know, we banned cigarette advertising. We don't allow fast food to be advertised to children. We don't advertise pornography. There's lots of legal industries that we haven't banned as industries, but which we don't think there's any reason for them to advertise. And one of the reasons why that's working, one of the reasons why there's actually likely to be a whole set of ad bans that come out over the next few years, is because of the bad practice. It's because the greenwash, it's because of the case after case after case. So know that industry is a really important industry. And there's some very bad practice that happens within it. There's a great deal of greenwash. It's a very murky industry in terms of knowing who works for who and who pays who, but there is beginning to be a little bit of light shone in a few corners. There's wonderful projects, such the work done by Purpose Disruptors, looking into advertised emissions and if you're helping a company to sell products, how much carbon is that? How much extra carbon are those extra products going to be? That's advertised emissions. And Clean Creatives, I'm working with Clean Creatives, basically some of these amazing creative people just promising that they're not going to work on fossil fuel advertising. Agencies even making those promises. So there really is some progress.

I had a weird little intersection with this when I was working in philanthropy and around COP26, we were trying to work out how to advertise. Almost partly to block anyone else taking the space. We worked with a group creators, and we had ads placed with NGOs. And what was fascinating for me was, it's so multi-layered, and there's so many kind of sacred cows and norms that are a little bit offline, right, a little bit misaligned. So we tried to get some ads placed to airports. And they were very, very strict that we couldn't put any advertising up, that caused distress. So we couldn't make any of the customers passing through, feel any kind of anxiety, right? And then I think well, I always feel anxious, walking through airports, because you're bombarded with luxury items and affordability and things that people can't really afford, right? But you're being sold this very glamorous, aspirational, high-consumption lifestyle as you walk through. And I just thoughts, that's causing me anxiety and discomfort. So what's your definition of what's acceptable and what messages can be told to people at certain times? And I just thought the whole thing is geared towards a certain assumption that as long as you're just getting people to conform and buy stuff, it's fine. But anything that deviates off that is somehow not allowed,

Oh very, very much so and I get it, lots of people are anxious flyers, they don't want people to have have their anxiety raised before they go through. There's even actual mainstream ads — perfume ads and lipstick ads — you can't show in airports because they show people looking anxious. But you're absolutely right, the horrible anxiety of having to walk through duty free before we get to fly. Plus the anxiety of going, "have I made the right decision? Can I make a carbon case for this flight? Should I be doing this at all?" I think long and hard every time that I fly and I'm never entirely sure whether I've made the right decision or not made the right decision. And I tend to get — literally as I'm walking onto the plane — tend to get this deep sense of anxiety, not least because I'm very, very scared of flying. Really scared of flying. So actually, I have a carbon case but also a self-preservation case of going, "Why am I doing this." So yeah, I think the definitions around advertising are very out of date. But that is changing, the EU have got a whole load of new rules which are coming out about greenwash with really genuine, serious consequences — not just slaps on the wrist — but sort of 5% of operating profit have been bandied around as being (the consequence.) Next year, the FTC in the US are going to come up with a new green claims code with again, much tighter rules around greenwash. So it is catching up. The rules, the definitions, the boundaries around what you can advertise. And this sense that actually there is some types of advertising that isn't appropriate, such as fossil fuel advertising. Now, people will say, "But they've got the right to talk about their product." And it's like, think about the adverts that you've seen from the fossil fuel industry. How often were they saying, "Hey, come on to our forecourt because our gas is cheaper?" Almost never. Almost all of the advertising you've seen is actually what I would call lobby-tising, rather than advertising. It's lobbying for the fact that it's a valuable, important contributive industry. It's basically talking about themselves as a company or talking about their industry, not talking about their product. I actually would be relatively fine with adverts from oil companies saying our gas is $5 cheaper, or 4-5% cheaper than it was. That is advertising. I'm not okay with them touting everything they're doing on renewable energy, when overall the industry worldwide is only investing 2% of its capital expenditure on renewables.

Yeah, I mean, you've touched on something pretty huge there, which is that it's not really a market, right? That it's an oligopoly of players who really don't compete on price at the forecourt. And most of their profit is made way upstream, and they run everything. And it's unregulated, right. So whereas most essential services, we've realised that we need some sort of regulation — price regulation — the whole of the oil and gas supply network, oil particularly, is unregulated, there's no price controls. So we're left with this kind of, you know... we're price takers and there's no benefit to them of really advertising their product because it's an essential service. And then the irony is, if it is an essential service, then should there be some price regulation?

But this is what's so interesting, because this is an intensely powerful industry. Very, very powerful industry. And it's not even an industry. It's also literally countries, whole nations. We have the the IOCs, the international oil companies, but we've got the NOCs, the national oil companies, which are based in the Middle East and South America, etc. So very, very, very powerful industry. Which is why we have this legacy of them not being regulated, But they're not as powerful as they used to be. So if you go back 30-35 years and you look at the most valuable companies in the world, almost all of them are either oil and gas or completely dependent upon oil and gas. They were oil and gas, or they were plastics, or they were commodities, based on oil and gas. Like the most valuable industries in the world. They don't even break the top 10 now. The most most valuable companies in the world are all tech companies. And you know, tech has a very, very, very big carbon footprint. But it's a really easy to decarbonize footprint. When I think about a datacenter and you think about a massive data centre, which has a huge energy suck, in a very small geographical space that doesn't move around. It could not be easier to plug renewables into. If you wanted something to decarbonize a big energy user, that geographical space is perfect. So actually, the most valuable companies in the world are some of the most easy to decarbonize, which many of them are doing. So actually, I think we're going to find over time that the omnipresence and the absolute influence and power of that oil and gas industry is going to wane in comparison to others. And it does put an obligation on other companies, the ones who are now the holders of the power and the influence to step up. To actually sort of stand up?

Well you know, you've touched on something there, which is yes, there's been a changing of the guard at the top. But those companies are now mostly driven by advertising, and ads. So they are part of your influence sector. And they have a kind of, apart from carbon footprint, they have a kind of brainprint. You've used that... I think you've used that phrase. There's a sort of... They have so much power now over how people consume news, how people consume information, that had we used that more effectively to wake people up to climate change, would would that not have been a more important thing to do than worrying about data centres?

So this is where I can get super geeky, I love this conversation. So absolutely. Kind of web one, web two, web three, I'm sure you might have heard this terminologies of web one, web two, web three. We're currently in web two, which is where most of the value generated by the new technologies, particularly the communications and information technologies, are based on advertising, not all of them. Take, for example, the gaming industry, a huge industry. The gaming industry is far, far, far larger than the coal industry in the US, for example. That isn't based on advertising, there's a product there that people feel is valuable to them, and they are prepared to pay for access to games. So that is a huge part. Huge parts of the entertainment industry are no longer based advertising. Almost all of the entertainment industry was based on advertising or on government funding. Now you've got streaming services where we're beginning to pay. So you're beginning to see almost a sort of deadvertising model that's coming across a lot of the tech companies. But what do you think about things like Amazon? Amazon basically is a retailer, it's a mechanism for us to buy more stuff. And many of the other platforms are based on... we don't pay to use them, we are the product as people say, our data and our communications. But web three, which is a new format for the internet that's coming within the next five years. It's not imminent but it is soon. Web three, the programmers who are working on that, it's all about creating value within the internet within the virtual world creating value that doesn't have a material impact. And it's fascinating to talk to them and they're all super, super excited about dematerialising value. And the fact that actually, very inspired by the gaming industry, the value will be within the system and won't have a footprint. And none of us have really clocked the fact that that has a huge sustainability impact. And so having really fun conversations with people in web three now about the fact that you do realise that what you're proposing is a massive, mass decarbonisation of our economies? And that web three could be absolutely transformational, and you just see them go "Huh?! I just thought it was cool."

Yeah, but just to be a bit cynical about this. This is, I guess, likely though, to be subject to the same economic actors and forces. Like for example, Shell just realised that they could promote cars and driving of cars through ortnight, right? So yes, everyone's living a new life in Fortnight and merrily entertained and that's the attention economy. But it's always those with the most money who can exploit that the first. So I worry that it will, yeah, I'm a little bit less utopian possibly about this. But am I misinterpreting what you're saying?

That's a very web two So obviously that's advertising again. And I would be very, very interested to know, whether them promoting driving through Fortnight has increased the likelihood that people who use Fortnight will drive more. So you may find that that was also lobby-tising. And it was more about talking about Shell as an in industry. One of the things which we are increasingly aware of is that driving... driving is a perfect example of something that's changed in our lifetimes. So for my generation, driving was freedom. Having access to a car was how you got your friends, how you got to entertainment, how you got to fun. It was how you actually have a life. If you couldn't drive, if you couldn't access the world, then you were stuck in your little village or your hometown and couldn't get out. A mobile phone, my phone, is a better car. It's much better than a car at doing that. I get entertainment, I get friendship, I get connection. I get dating all through the phone, rather than through the car. And it's one of the reasons why we're seeing a significant drop in the number of 17 year olds in the US who get their driving licences. Now, that's terrifying for a certain number of industries, because having a car and getting a driving licence used to be literally the rite of passage to adulthood. And now young people are going "Nope, driving is like being trapped. I can't be online whilst I drive, there's literally laws that say I can't use my phone while I drive." And so you're beginning to see not just less driving from young people, but a disinclination to even learn to drive, because their online life gives them access. Now, let's be clear, I am not utopian, I'm optimistic, there's a difference. Utopian would be, wouldn't this be a wonderful world to live in? I actually don't think it would be. I think there would be stresses, anxieties, the online life can be very atomizing. You can get very lonely in the online life. There's lots of concerns about how do we try to make that web three equitable, accessible, something where there's value shared between value creators, etc. All I'm saying is it would be dematerialized. And so there is a big opportunity and potential there. There's also massive, massive, massive threats. What I sometimes worry about our movement is that we can be a bit luddite, sort of going, "Oh, that all sounds awful," and just talk about it or something awful. I'm going, well get in there then. How are we going to work with web three, this is coming. Like we don't get interest about it. This is literally... there's about 10 different programmes that are currently competing with each other for which one's going to be web three, it's unquestionably happening. So how can we get in there now and say, this is gonna happen, how can we build in some sustainability principles to it before it launches? Rather than what tends to happen is that about 10 years after something becomes a reality, we suddenly go, "Oh, that's not very sustainable, let's see if we can retrofit some sustainability into it."

Yeah, I mean, I guess. Yeah, I mean, then that brings us back, though, to the sort of real challenge of decarbonizing the electricity system, right? Because, one of the things we've seen through humanity is we've gone through these epochs of using of energy to improve our lives. And we've make break through through fire and then into largely a wood and wood-based economy into a fossil economy. And now we're entering into this age of electricity and hopefully abundant electricity. But for that to work, we need to see actual projects, physical things happen, people need to get jobs in engineering, pour money into concrete, and basically build out an energy system, which will require a lot of capital. And I suppose the storytelling about how we sustain our lives is a little bit hidden. And we've taken a lot of things for granted. And I kind of agree with you about the slight luddism in our movement, because it's sort of takes for granted what we have and then moans about the bad aspects. But then when it comes to the actual change that's needed, like we're gonna have to put a lot more stuff in a lot more places. You know, you find green groups who've gone on one hand will be anti-fossil, and on the other hand, they'll be anti windfarms or anti anything that's not what we exactly have today. So I find that quite challenging.

The story is quite challenging. Our hobs — cooking hobs — are a good example. You know, I grew up thinking that... I grew up with electric hobs, because that's what people poor people had. And then as I did well and I sort of got my first gas hob, I was super, super excited. And you know, this was gonna make all my cooking so much better. It turned out it didn't make my cooking any better. Basically you're a good cook or you're a bad cook and the hob has nothing to do with it. I'm just a bad cook. But then of course the more I learned about it, and as I got into to climate change more, I started feeling like I had this open exhaust in my home. Literally setting fire to a fossil fuel in my home. Oh my God, actually when you think about it, you know it started to feel like I was choking in my house every time that I turned it on. And so now I'm back to an electric hob. And it's a very glamarous, gorgeous one and what have you, and my cooking isn't improved or unproved, it's very much the same. In terms of a story, we actually spend quite a lot of our time telling the story of technology or telling the story of finance or telling the story of infrastructure. None of those are stories. Stories are always about people. They're always about people. Stories are always about emotion. Even if people say "oh, wait, there's lots of stories about animals" It's like, "yes, they're always stories about anthropomorphised animals, and we tell the story of their emotional journey." That's what humanbeings' stories are about. And actually stories are deeply programmed into us. We teach our children through stories, before we even start to teach them any formal education. Some fairy stories and parables before they can talk. It's so, so programmed into them. There's a term Homo narrativa, the storytelling ape, that actually stories are so innate to what it is to be a human that it's one of the defining characteristics of us versus other animals. And so the story we have to tell is actually a story about emotions. So when people ask me what's my vision of a sustainable future, I don't say wind turbines or sort of small houses or local community gardens. My vision of sustainable future, is that you know, I can sleep better at night, my vision of sustainable future is that I've lost a couple of pounds and that I feel a bit healthier. My vision of sustainable future is that I get more time in my day and I'm not so rushed off my feet, and I'm not having to sit in a commute. All of my vision of a sustainable future is how it will be emotionally better to be in that sustainable future: how I will get more sleep be less stressed, less anxious all the time, have more time to myself, feel more connected, feel a sense of belonging, be less isolated. All those things that people actually want. And what you find when you tell that story is you get very little pushback on it, you get pushback when you tell the technology or the infrastructure story; you don't get pushback when you tell the emotional story. And then of course, you talk about how do we get those things. And then you talk about the fact that actually have a sort of 15-minutes cities and having services close by mean that I won't have to sit on my ass on a bus or a car for hours. So I get more time in my day. And then people will believe you and agree with the infrastructure or the finance or the technology you're selling because you've sold the emotion first. That's what we get. That's what we want, we want the emotional benefits, not the technical ones. And yet, I find so much anxiety in our movement for talking about that, because we've sort of been backed into this corner of sort of going, "We must be always fact based." It's like actually emotions are true. It's a truth. People feel them. That's not somehow a soft sell, that is actually one of the most important and accurate sells, is how people are gonna feel. And so when we think about these changes that we want to make, when we think about this overhaul that we need to make quite significantly to our economies, to our buildings, to how our systems work, how our economies work. Talking about the emotional benefits, how you're going to feel when that's done, it's much, much, much more likely to generate support then talking about the technologies or the policies.

And do you think the emotion towards something positive is more powerful than the avoidance of fearor trying to not feel negative? Because let's just take food, for example. This is gonna be one of those massively controversial areas where we're gonna need all of our storytelling powers to try and make the shift into more sustainable food, right. But if we get it wrong, the risk of backlash is so huge. People don't generally want to be told what to do by the government. Trusted actors are at a premium but there's not so many of them around as they used to be. What's our way into a conversation about sustainable food when the perception, I imagine, at the moment is that you know, rich people can afford to be organic and eat all these lovely pulses and whatever else that's good for the planet. Whereas I can literally only afford to go to KFC and get that thing. Or you know actually KFC is not as bad, it's the beef burgers really isn't it? But how do we broach this? Is it through more positively you'll be healthier and hopefully finding ways of making it more affordable? Or is it by saying, actually we're doing a great harm. You know, animal welfare is a touch point for lots of people; perhaps just as a bigger consciousness, we could move to a point where we're doing less harm to sentient animals? Is that valid?

I think it's valid for some people. And I think almost everybody that's valid for has been reached with that message. And when we think over the period of time, because that information is widely available, when we think over the previous — and I go into this in my book and The Solutionists — I actually look very much at what has turned the dial on plant based. There's been outrageous movies that go into the horrors of what mass farming looks like, and what's in these megafarms, and what happens to the animals within these megafarms — standing up to their knees in their own waste — just awful, awful stuff. And that did turn the dial, it did turn the dial, but it didn't reach velocity in terms of change. What reached velocity, the most important piece of communication about changing food that there has been in the last 10 years was the Game Changers programme. The Game Changers programme is about plant based eating, and was almost entirely about the benefits to you as an individual and not the health benefits in terms of some sort of wonderful, wishy-washy, I want to be healthier, I want to have lower cholesterol — like you know the number one thing I should be worried about is cholesterol — health in terms of looking bigger muscley, or looking thin and attractive. Which when most people say health, that's actually what we mean. When we say want to be healthier, we tend to mean to actually I want to be thin and fitter, rather than healthier. If we want to stay healthy, what we'd say is, "I want lower cholesterol." Whereas actually what we says is we want to look healthier. So Game Changers went into cage fighters and bodybuilders and how they used plant based foods because there was more calorie availability, and that you're able to, you know, manage all the science of why it's going to actually help you bulk up. It really changed the dial. And you started to see— a whole load of different demographics and different interest areas started to see this being a real kind of conversation based in gym culture. In wellbeing culture, in fitness and in thiness culture, as well. And that's what really accelerated the whole plant based movement that we're part of right now. Sustainability didn't, and animal welfare didn't. Neither of those things were fundamental in forwarding the plant based movement, which has grown so big, and you know is currently having a bit of flat, because we haven't had a Game Changes. What we need is another programme like that.

Because that's the thing, it's gotta be sustained, right?

It's got to be sustained and it's got to be about what's in it for you. Most people are collectivist at heart and do wish the very, very best for everybody else. But most people are struggling. One of the things which I think is sometimes forgotten by those of us who are in extremely privileged positions, where we're lucky that so many of our basic needs, and so many of our anxieties — you know most of my anxieties about big things like climate change rather than am I gonna make rent — and we forget that the vast majority people, far, far, far more people, far more people who are in personal concerning circumstances. Where, although they might wish well to the whole rest of humanity and the planet and other animals, they'll get to that when they've made rent, they'll get to that when they've dealt with their current illness, they'll get to that when their immediate concerns and worries about themselves and their families are met. And so when we sit down and look at these big changes that need to be made for societies, big architectural changes that need to be made for life on Earth to continue. Almost all of them come with major personal benefits. Really, really big benefits for you. For you personally, not anybody else, not the rest of life on Earth, but for you. But most of the sustainability movement don't like telling that story, because they don't think we should be that selfish. They think we should take action and care and agree and vote and eat and change for the sake of the rest of life on Earth, with very little understanding of the monumental privilege that perception comes from. The privilege of being collectivist in your mindset is huge. And for most of the rest of the world, they need to have something in it for them because their needs are met. And again, we could be asking for something, we could be trying to change things that actually wareere worse for people, that'd be really problematic. It's not! We're in this wonderful situation where almost every single major infrastructure change, major economic change, major lifestyle change we need to ask of people comes with major individual benefits, major things which are in it for them. And yet, very, very rarely is that ever communicated? Do it for the planet, do it for your kids, do it for future generations, do it for everybody else, do it for the poor people, why not do it for you? Again, I am more than happy to communicate on that basis. Because I know that that's what would have convinced me when I was living in lifestyle when I didn't have the bandwidth to try to save the world because I was literally trying to save myself and my family. That kind of message would have convinced me so I have no problem telling that story.

Excellent. And just talking about you again and your agency and the fact that you do things, like you're extraordinary at seeing a problem, not just thinking of a solution but then committing to try and bring that solution to life and I wanted to ask you about your experiences in actually bringing a product from your mind out into the market. So tell us about Lovebug and how that happened.

Well this is a perfect example of... I really like cats, I'm such a cat person. I grew up with cats, absolutely love cats. And as I became more aware of sustainability, I did my research on how like they're an environmental disaster. All pets are, in terms of yes, pets might eat the offcuts or the scrapings of the main meat industry. But the main meat industry is far too large and is an unsustainable industry itself, which means pet food is an unsustainable offcut of an unsustainable industry. But I really like cats, and the sacrifice thing of going well, "having pets is unsustainable," I'm not sure I'm okay with that. And so I started looking into would there be a way to feed a cat sustainably. And you can actually have a perfectly healthy vegetarian dog, you're gonna put a lot of effort in, and you've got to really plan it, but you can have it because dogs are omnivores, they can get all of the nutrients that they need without animal products. You can't with a cat. They're one of the very small number of animals that are obligate carnivores like spiders and sharks, they have to eat other animals in order to get some basic amino acids that their bodies can't produce otherwise. And so I looked into insects and insect protein is very high quality protein, hypoallergenic for most cats. Actually, such a good quality protein, you have to mix it with some vegetables, because otherwise the cats actually get too much protein in too short period of time. And so I bought that to some friends at Mars Petcare, one of the biggest tech companies in the world. And then we spent years, literally a decade working together, in order to develop Lovebug — 100% insect based cat food, in terms of the in terms of the animal products within it, in 100% recyclable packaging, which it turned out a lot of consumers were more excited about than the insects, because it's the first 100% recyclable packaging on the market. And that took about three years. One of the people we worked with at Mars, bless her, she took home about 10 different bags of cat food over a long holiday period and left them around her house to check how much they smell if people stored them in different ways. So much dedication, I didn't do that, so much dedication to the job. And then we were able to bring it to market. Wonderful commitment from consumers. It was named the pet food launch of the year. And it's now actually going into dog food and kitten food, and all the rest of it. And again, I go into that in much more detail in The Solutionists. But that's my theory of change. I think too often we give up. We go "that's unsustainable." You need to go "well then what would be?" What would meet the same need in a sustainable way? If we want to have cats, how do we work out how to have sustainable cats? And the next thing I want to work on is how to get cats to stop killing birds. That's my next challenge. But if we want to have something in our life that matters to us, that comes with an emotional benefit, and I believe pets are really good for us, having pets in our home I think makes us better people. How do we find a way of making it sustainable rather than either ignoring it or dismissing it to something which can't be sustained? And yeah, that just takes a little bit of lateral thinking and enormous amount of work.

But what was the relationship with Mars Petcare? Like why is it your company not Mars doing it?

So what you tend to find with very large companies is they are extremely good at growing businesses. They go out and they acquire companies, they acquire companies that have gone from sort of like no consumers to 10-20,000 consumers, and they've worked out all the kinks., they've got everything sorted. And then the big company acquires them and then takes them global. What most large companies aren't very good at doing is like being really entrepreneurial. In the first kind of weeks of Lovebug I knew every consumer by name. We found the first three hundred of them said, "Hi, what do you think? Are you enjoying it?" Being really adaptable, being really quick. And so actually what we agreed with Mars, like Mars were basically waiting for somebody else to do that, so they could go and buy the company. What we said was, "Let's do it together." You manufacture the product, because you know how to make cat food and make sure it's safe and make sure it's good for cats, I don't know how to do that. We'll brand it, we'll market it, we'll sell it direct to consumers. And then when it goes over a certain size, it can go back in house, and then you can take it. We'll do all the messy, scary, quick, entrepreneurial stuff, where you literally sit there on Shopify watching every bag get sold, without having to go through all the socialisation and 1,000 meetings and up and down the chain and waiting for four weeks for somebody say yes to something, which is how things work in big companies. And so actually, Lovebug now, although we still do the marketing and the comms for it, Lovebug is actually inside Mars.

So it reached that critical mass?

It reached the critical mass, and it's now inside Mars, and it's now growing, and now they're adding new brands and what have you. And now we're beginning to think about what our next one is. So what's our next breakthrough product, which we can go into partnership with a big business about because they're not very good entrepreneurial, and we're not very good at managerial, and bring it through. And it's a really exciting time at the moment. I'm really excited about human ingenuity and our ability to start going. You know, I understand where I've been frozen in the headlights of some of these problems for a while. They're big, they're terrifying, they're like a movie. Climate change is literally like something somebody would come up with a sci-fi movie, it's literally a world ending problem. And so kind of staring, and going "aaaaah". Then all the scientists shouting "big problems, big problems, big problems." And then all the people going, "Oh, don't look at it. Don't look, don't look up. Just forget." But then what tends to happen is a whole load of people go "That's really interesting." Wow, I wonder if we could do this? Or we could do this? Or what about if we change this? Or swe have this? And then human ingenuity? And then the storytellers start going, "Oh, actually, maybe this is a better story than the one we've currently got. Maybe there's adventure and unexpected allies, maybe there's characters, maybe there's emotions, we can draw out?" Maybe this actually is a really exciting story to tell, rather than a scary story to tell. And that's when you begin to get change.

Absolutely. And what's interesting is that "Solutionists," which is your lovely phrase for people who see this problem and think, "Well, what can I do about it, I'm not just going to sit back and let this happen."They have been in action for decades, right? And it's whether or not we can broaden and get to critical mass. Because what I find sometimes quite frustrating is that the poor young kids of today, they're quite rightly, really not happy, right? Lots of things have conspired to make them unhappy, not least sitting in their rooms, consuming social media, but we can perhaps leave that for another time. But the the overall sense that my life is not going to be as good as my parents, that must be quite unique. And so they've got all of these stresses, but what I really want them to understand is that the adults haven't completely failed you, like there have been enough innovations and enough people who were stimulated into the solutionist mindset decades ago, that we are now just at the cusp of those kind of potential S curve technology take up curves, that will mean that we can get off this addiction that we have for our current energy system and move into the new one. And we've not done it fast enough, for sure. But it's not been completely ignored. Enough people have made made moves and are now spinning up.

I had to deal with my own ego... I got invited by a group of the young climate activists to come work with them as an elder — I'm not 50, but there you go — as one of these people who's been in sustainability for a long time, to learn about mental resilience, how to stay optimistic. They didn't want to know any of my solutions in terms of how society could change, or technology or what have you. They wanted to know, actually, how do you keep going? How do you keep going in this? We had a wonderful, wonderful conversation. And what we talked about was Solutionists — there's been solutions for centuries, not just for decades. There's been Solutionists in every single generation. There's been solutions in my generation Gen X. There's wonderful solution lists from the boomers. We hear a lot of things about boomers, but actually many of my teachers, many of the people who first inspired me into sustainability are boomer. And in the generations before... What we need is there to be more Solutionists in the coming generations than there have ever been. Or even better for being a Solutionist is just to be normal, to being part of the solution just being actually what you've got. And yes, we have got a really, really challenging couple of decades ahead, and the communities like the communities that I came from, are going to be some of the ones that that are in danger of struggling with the most. Unless we're smart, and actually realise that solutions can come from and be led by and owned by and benefited by within those communities. And I think you're beginning to see some of that happening. And again, it all comes down to changing the story. Like is this a Frankenstein story? Man makes monster and the monster destroys man. It's a very old story, it's actually sort of almost a morality play. There's almost satisfaction and narrative necessity, in the fact that we've done this terrible thing to the planet, because we're selfish, and bad and now we're all going to die because of it. And that's what you see most of the movies about climate change are. Almost this narrative satisfaction of we get what's coming to us. We have to interrupt that story, we've actually got to put it into being an adventure story. I always think of Lord of the Rings when Samwise says, nobody would choose to live in a story like this, but I love reading them. And so actually, we've been chosen, we are living in the most important era ever in human history. Horribly, sort of equivalent to that period, when human beings start first started using fire that you mentioned earlier. This is the most important period of time in human history. This is where we are going to get through this barrier or not. And I want to try to reframe that as something incredibly exciting, and something where there really is a major payback coming at the end of that road, if we can go down there. That's something I'd like to change the story to.

Yeah, and also, the other thing, I think perhaps... We haven't lost the last two decades, because the last few decades has built communications infrastructure that we can absolutely now use to tell the stories in ways that was not possible 20 years ago. So yeah, not to be too Pollyanna about it. I think the harder part for me, though, is that we are going to have to go through this divorce with the current energy system that sustains our life, right? And it's really hard. As was witnessed in COP, the resources are not on the side of change, the resources are on the side of holding onto the status quo. And that power and influence and money has been a drag, let's be honest. This could have appened in the 70s, but advertising actually... there is this correlation of this Merchants of Doubt narrative that I've talked about with Naomi Oreskes on a previous episode. The idea that this stasis — this staring at the headlights and not knowing what to do — isn't an accident, actually, that a lot of it has been seeded. So this role of communications in freeing us from those old stories, ushering in the new stories, I feel like is super critical to this destination that you've just described.

100%. But remember that control of the narrative happened during a period of time of very controlled communications. The Mad Men era, the fact that you could create a road block advert, where the same advert would go on every TV channel at the same time and on radio. The fact that actually what used to be sort of gossip networks and local communications, then became monumentally top-down, mainly controlled by about four blokes around the world. A couple of movie studio heads and a couple of newspaper heads controlled most of the communication, plus a few ad agencies. That has fractured fundamentally. Now a lot of people who are over 40 are actually still living within that frame. We still watch the news, we still watch a lot of mainstream media, we still are consuming controlled media. But a significant portion of the rest of the world, particularly the young, are not. And where sort of like a 15-year old in her bedroom can create a video that outcompetes every brands spend. It is much harder for them to succeed in that. Not least because their mindset is all about command and control, their mindset is all about owning the narrative. Their mindset is all about setting the agenda. And those things just don't work in this new narrative world. It's actually a mindset that is destined to fail within these new communication channels. So as you said, they did manage to own the narrative during a period of time of owned media. We're not in that now. And I'm not going to say that automatically means they're going to fail. It definitely definitely isn't. It just means that we actually have now got the chance for them to fail.

Yeah, I think I think you're right. I don't think we've quite got over the hill yet. Because that power, money and influence is now being used in much more elite targeting strategies. Making sure that the right elected officials get into the right place to make decisions, or stop certain things from happening. So I still think, we've got a lot of little skirmishes that we've got to get through. But you're absolutely right to point out that the breaking open of narrative and message control is in our favour. Because as you said, you know, physics and truth is on our side in terms of this is just the reality. And there is now enough knowledge and understanding of what the next phase should and will look like, that we can get there.

And it just means that we have to, when you get a chunk of opening like that, rather than going, "Oh the young people are going to get ir sorted out, they're all going to do the talking, they're going to be on social media. And so we'll be fine. No, it will only work because huge numbers of people get in there and decide to make it the truth. We've got this opportunity, we've got this window that's open to us of where they've lost control of the narrative, we've got to grab it. And that's what they're most afraid of, they're not most afraid of the policy changes. They're not most afraid of technology changes, they're definitely not afraid of the market. They are afraid of the story. And that's why so much of our left foot should be on the story going forward.

Well, listen, I'm going to say that this could go on for another hour, I'm sure. And we have talked about your book. So the Solutionists is available in all good bookstores and online and everywhere else. It's a wonderful book, even if you're deep into this topic, or if you're new to it, because it's introduces so many lovely ways of thinking about problems and harnessing your inner Solutionist. So thank you for taking the time to pen that for us. It's been a real pleasure, Soli, catching up. And I look forward to the next time when we meet in person.

Definitely. And Bryony, thank you so very much. It was a real pleasure and I hope everyone listening has enjoyed it too.

Great. Thank you, speak soon.

So that was Solitaire Townsend, cofounder and chief solutionist at Futerra. As always we'll put relevant links in the show notes, including Soli's recent book The Solutionists, her TED talk about the power and responsibilities of the persuasion industry, the Game Changers movie, and of course where you can buy Lovebug cat food. You'll also find a link to Episode 141 with Naomi Oreskes: Lifting the Curtain on Climate Change Denial.

If you've enjoyed today's conversation, please remember to like, share and subscribe to Cleaning Up, or leave us a review on your chosen podcast platform. And do please please spread the word on social media, or by telling your friends and colleagues. And if you want more from Cleaning Up, sign up for our free newsletter at cleaning.live where you'll find our archive of over 160 hours of conversations with extraordinary Climate Leaders. Cleaning Up is brought to you by our lead supporter, Capricorn Investment Group, the Liebreich Foundation and the Gilardini Foundation.

Selling Sustainability - Ep150: Solitaire Townsend

Listen On

Featured Episodes

Recent Episodes