Green Fix
Welcome to the Green Fix, the climate & sustainability podcast for Australian corporations and their ESG practitioners. We explore the top challenges and opportunities in the industry, how they are impacting your business and your work, so that you can keep your sanity.
Green Fix
What If Every Job Was a Climate Job? with Lucy Piper, Director at Work for Climate
What if every job could be a climate job? In this episode, we speak with Lucy Piper, Director of Work for Climate, a non-profit helping employees drive climate action from inside their workplaces. Lucy shares how professionals in any role — not just sustainability — can influence corporate climate policy, push for science-aligned net zero commitments, and hold companies accountable on lobbying and financed emissions. We explore employee activism, avoiding the "climate purity test," and why focusing on the movable middle matters. Whether you're in marketing, engineering, or finance, this conversation will change how you think about your role in the climate crisis.
To learn more, please visit:
https://www.workforclimate.org/
Lucy's Recommendation:
The Great Simplification Podcast with Nate Hagen:
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/
Your Hosts:
Dan Leverington
Loreto Gutierrez
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We had this theory that we could harness the energy of employees in order to create pressure on the inside of a company to get that company to make decisions that are progressive when it comes to climate. It was born out of that thought, that same thought that I had. What if I could take my skills and use them on thinking about solving the climate crisis? What if we could get everybody in every job in every industry thinking about turning their role into a climate job?
Dan Leverington:Welcome to the Green Fix, the climate and sustainability podcast for Australian corporations and their ESG practitioners. We explore the top challenges and opportunities in the industry and how it impacts your business and your work so that you can keep your sanity. I'm your host, Dan Leverington.
Loreto Gutierrez:And I'm Loretta Gutierrez, and today we are in conversation with Lucy Piper. Lucy Piper is the director of Work for Climate, a non-profit organization that equips climate-concerned professionals with education, resources, and community to make impactful change in their workplace. After a decade in the corporate sector, Lucy redirected her skills towards climate solutions, helping businesses decarbonize faster and more effectively. Lucy, welcome to the Green Fix.
Lucy Piper:Thank you so much for having me. I am super excited for this conversation today.
Loreto Gutierrez:Well, we are very excited to have you. And we wanted to start today's conversation with um learning a little bit more about you and how you first moved into the corporate climate space.
Lucy Piper:Sure. Well, I guess the starting point for my story is to let everyone know that I didn't have any kind of background in climate whatsoever. I'm not a sustainability professional. I don't have any former technical training or anything like that. I worked a corporate job in Creative and Brand. I worked for an amazing travel company called Intrepid Travel, and I'd been there for about 10 years and was feeling increasingly fearful about the future as we were starting to see climate impacts unfolding in real time. And this was sort of 2019, and a lot of people talk about this, particularly in Australia. We had that bushfire season that was utterly devastating. The bushfire smoke was all around us. And I was someone that was born in the 80s and growing up in the 90s, being green became a theme. We knew about looking after the planet, and we were starting to become aware of the greenhouse effect. When those bushfires were making it hard to breathe, like you couldn't go out for a run during the day. That was the moment that I realized this is it. It's here, it's happening, it's real. I had also become a parent, and that's a catalyst or a trigger point for a lot of people, where you take this existential thing that's happening around us in the world, and it becomes a very personal issue. I remember being on the tram home from work and I was thinking about the stuff that I was doing professionally, and it was about brand building and how do you get people to make a certain purchase decision? How do they, how do they click on an ad and that kind of thing. And I just thought, imagine if all of the people in the world whose job it is, is to get people to click on an ad or make a purchase decision. Imagine if all of those people could put their thinking and their professional skills towards solving the climate crisis. I must have planted a seed in my own mind at that point because towards the end of 2019 and the start of 2020, I decided, okay, I want to use my skills to work on the climate crisis. I didn't know where or how, but I knew it's something that I wanted to do. And that kind of took me down this path of joining the founding team at Work for Climate and leaving behind a career that I absolutely adored to move into this space. It's been a really thrilling journey so far.
Dan Leverington:Can you tell us about Work for Climate and what your current role there is and how you have brought those experiences that you just mentioned into that position?
Lucy Piper:Sure. So I'm the director of Work for Climate, and we are a not-for-profit that is designed to help employees channel their energy and their professional skills into solving the climate crisis through their workplace. So we believe that corporations are critical to solving the climate crisis. They have the power, the influence, the ability to move resources rapidly. Corporations can shift the needle on climate, but right now they are not making the decisions that we need them to make in order to rapidly reduce emissions, to change the trajectory that we're on. They also have the power to lobby and influence governments around the world in order to get the policies and the regulations that we need to move the system faster. When we started Work for Climate, we had this theory that we could harness the energy of employees in order to create pressure on the inside of a company to get that company to make decisions that are progressive when it comes to climate. It was worn out of that thought, that same thought that I had. What if I could take my skills and use them on thinking about solving the climate crisis? What if we could get everybody in every job in every industry thinking about turning their role into a climate job? What if every job was a climate job? And so what we did was we built a platform that's designed for everyone in any type of role, and we teach them a range of things. But I think of work for climate as this kind of a Venn diagram of three circles. The first circle is science-aligned action. So what is required of a company to be science aligned in order to achieve net zero? And there's two buckets. One is energy, so renewable energy and emissions reduction. And the other bucket is influence. How is a company using its corporate power and its influence to lobby governments and to advocate to its audiences and consumers? So we have this science-aligned program that we teach employees, no matter what their job is, whether they're in a sustainability role or not, we teach them what is required and we call that the work for climate blueprint. The second circle of that Venn diagram is systems change. A lot of people come to Work for Climate because, similar to where I was at, they're thinking about the climate crisis and they go, okay, how do I, how do I have an impact? How can I have an impact through work? How can I get my company to reduce its emissions? Great. That's that's the way into this work. But it's easy for people to get what has been termed as a carbon tunnel vision, just to think about emissions reduction and nothing else. But when you've been in this world for a little while, you can see that climate change is a symptom of a systemic problem. So we like to think about systems change and how can we rebuild a new and better system that is equitable, that is not going to replicate the imperialist colonialist systems of the past that got us to where we are now. So we teach systems change theory, things like the three horizons framework, donut economics, the thinking of Kate Raworth. We talk about the stuff that Nate Hagens brings into his thinking, and he's a thought leader on degrowth. So we have science-aligned theories that we teach employees, then we have systems change. And then the third part of that Venn diagram is about social movements and how change actually happens, what it really takes to not just shift a company on how it thinks about climate, but how to shift that entire political system that we are a part of. And we try to inspire and motivate employees based on previous stories and examples of social movements that they may be aware of, stuff that's happened both in our lifetimes and previously. We'll talk about the suffragette movement and how women got the vote. We talk about the civil rights movement and we talk about things that are happening in the world right now. The fact that many of the participants in the Work for Climate Academy will be out marching on the streets on a Sunday, and they'll go into work on a Monday and want to make that connection between that feeling of activism and being able to stand in solidarity as an ally or in resistance as part of a movement. And what does it mean to bring that into your work? So, work for climate is really bringing together social movement theory, systems change theory, and science aligned, what is actually required. That's the high-level version of what we're doing at Work for Climate.
Loreto Gutierrez:It's a wonderful organization, and I guess I should also mention that I was part of the second cohort of Work for Climate, and it was such an impactful time for me professionally. I really enjoyed meeting some wonderful people. And one of the things that I always took away from Work for Climate was this focus on the power of the individual and the scalability that that can bring. So, Lucy, why have you made this conscious decision to focus on employees rather than employers?
Lucy Piper:First of all, Loreto, I just want to acknowledge what an amazing kind of case study you are of someone that came through the Work for Climate program. Uh it's it's beautiful to see the ripple effect. Oh, thanks, Lucy. The reason that we focus our time and energy on employees as opposed to employers is because we work as part of a directed network. I talked about social movements. We didn't start Work for Climate thinking, oh, we're gonna do this work on our own and we're gonna we're gonna solve the whole thing on our own. We are part of the climate movement and we're looking at what is a really complex system. Like when it comes to solving the climate crisis, it's a it's a wicked problem. And identifying the critical intervention points where you can have an outsized impact is really important to this work. Corporations are what we see as part of our theory of change, they are a critical intervention point. And we need corporations to make different decisions about how they operate in the world. But corporations don't make decisions. People make decisions. And people start companies, people run companies, people work in companies, people can be moved. It is people who make decisions, not companies. The reason we focus on employees is because they are people and they have agency and they have influence. And if we're trying to get a CEO or an executive leadership team or a board of individuals to make different decisions, we know that they are susceptible to the influence of the people around them. And what we're ultimately trying to do is find a handful of employees inside of a company. Probably they've run initiatives before internally. Maybe they've got up a new product or a new system or they are really experienced in change management. They know how to get buy-in. They know how to shift people's thinking, they know how to take people on a journey. And with Work for Climate, it's no different. We just find those people and we give them a science-aligned curriculum and the systems change thinking. Here's how you map it together in order to come up with the most ambitious climate roadmap for your company. And then we help them find the people inside their company who are the decision makers. We help them find the people who are going to be their most senior allies whilst they're driving these changes. And the goal is ultimately to change the minds of anyone that is trying to prevent climate action in the workplace. And so we focus on individual employees, but we know that our work sits alongside the other work that is happening out in the world that is trying to shift companies from different pressure points. For example, I think of groups in the climate movement like market forces or like Greenpeace or the Australian Center for Corporate Responsibility. There are dozens of groups out there who are adding pressure into that corporate system to try and shift the behavior of corporations. Some perhaps are doing it through shareholder resolutions at AGMs, where they are showing up as shareholders and saying, your climate policy is not good enough. It is not good enough for the future that we need to build. And they are pushing the company as shareholders or as investors. We also acknowledge and see there are campaigns out in the world being thought through and run by grassroots organizations who are pressuring companies to behave in more responsible and reasonable ways that are not going to destroy the planet. So there's that pressure from the outside. There's pressure from competition. If you're running a household name brand, maybe you run a big supermarket, and you see the other supermarket is doing something incredibly ambitious with their net zero policy or with their corporate lobbying, then that applies pressure to you as one of the duopoly to then lift your game, because otherwise consumers are going to start choosing better. So we speak to individuals, to individual employees, because we recognize that there was a gap. And if we could harness that energy and build on the power of employees, we can we can add pressure on the inside of that corporate system in order to shift companies faster.
Loreto Gutierrez:I love the perspective and the way that you look to bring people and inspire people. Part of your work is, of course, as you said, inspiring and motivating, empowering, giving the tools to individuals. But one thing that has become quite evident, and I know when I did work for climate um a few years ago, this was a part of the discussion, and I would say today even more so, which is how do we provide a politically safe way for people to live their values at work with changing environments, with changing perspectives, you know, obviously politics. How do you, or how does work for climate provide that politically safe way for them to live their values at work?
Lucy Piper:Such a good question, particularly now. When we started work for climate, was it was the end of 2019, 2020. It was a very different political time. And the moment that we are in right now, especially if you're someone based in the USA, like we have friends and colleagues over there who are seeing their rights taken away from them rapidly. That has a really chilling effect on people who work in movement spaces and who are progressives. Here in Australia, that exists right now. That sense of, is my job safe if I speak out on an issue? I think there was a time, maybe five or six years ago, where you could show up as your whole self at work and you could really feel like you could advocate for your values and talk about the things that you cared about, particularly when it comes to justice, equity, diversity, inclusion. Now, talking about climate and climate solutions at work has become safe cover for people to express their values in the workplace. Whereas five or six years ago, when there was a different government in Australia, talking about climate was probably politically not very safe at work. But now I see climate as a great way for people to come to work who are feeling hopeless, helpless rage towards where we are at in this moment in time. Especially when I speak to younger professionals, people in their mid-twenties, who are experiencing this very real threat to their future because of the climate crisis, and they are experiencing what it feels like to protest for the first time. I remember when I was at university protesting in London against the Iraq war, and that was the first time in my life I had that feeling that the system is rigged, this is wrong, innocent people are gonna die. And I went out and marched on the streets, on the streets. And as you get older, the edges of that get um softened, and you just glide into day-to-day life. Coming into work, it's jarring to go from I can go to a protest at the weekend, and then on a Monday, I have to go into my workplace and pretend everything's okay. Pretend that my future is safe. It's not okay for the younger generation. So talking about climate and pushing for progressive climate policy at work is a way that they can express what they're feeling in a much safer way than I think five or even ten years ago they could.
Loreto Gutierrez:Um Lucy, with such an overwhelming amount of considerations and challenges, I want to pivot to something that you've said a lot in the past, which is um the idea of the climate purity test um and the idea of feeling good while I wanted you to elaborate on these concepts and and how you are helping people move beyond the guilt um into more effective action without having to completely change or transition your career.
Lucy Piper:Two things the purity test and the idea of feeling good while losing. So with the purity test, I am not a perfect climate activist or advocate. I live a somewhat normal life, but I try to be reasonable and I try to do as much as I can that is feasible for me. I still go on aeroplanes. My family lives in the UK. If I didn't fly home to see them, I would have to say goodbye to my family forever. I'm gonna fly on an aeroplane. I um I'm not perfect, and I think that sometimes in the climate movement, we can kind of give off this hostile vibe that is really off-putting and it's not helpful to grow a movement where we need every single person on this planet moving in the same direction. A purity test puts one set of people on one side of a line and another set of people on the other side of the line. So I try to model being reasonable and living a life that is not chasing hyper consumption. I'm not perfect. And I'm okay with that. I'm really comfortable in that this is the work that I do, this is how I live my life, and we can all do enough. The second idea, the idea of feeling good while losing, is to do with those critical intervention points that we talked about before. There is a lot of stuff that you can do as an individual or even as a company or even as a government that is not actually having an impact, but it's making you feel good. It's making you feel like we're winning whilst we ultimately lose. There's different examples of that. AI and how the conversation is evolving at this point in time. There's obviously really devastating climate impacts and environmental impacts due to data centers and emissions. If we're to go back to purity tests, if we're puritanical about AI, then we are going to lose the race against the bad actors who are already using AI in every possible direction. So, how can we practically leverage a tool in order to accelerate us on the path to solving the climate crisis?
Loreto Gutierrez:And to think about a few areas where we can feel good while doing good. One thing that your framework focuses a lot on is addressing lobbying and addressing financed emissions. Why do you think these are often overlooked? And why do you think these are areas that can have such an impact in a company's overall climate impact?
Lucy Piper:I think they're overlooked because that concept of carbon tunnel vision, net zero pledges have taken us down this path of if a company can account for its carbon emissions and zero them out, whether it be through carbon offsets or whatever, then everything will be fine. But that's creative accounting. It's not doing anything to physically reduce the amount of carbon that is going up into the atmosphere. So the idea of lobbying is really important because companies have the power, they use this power all the time to get governments to create or to block the kind of policies that create the regulatory environment that is needed in order to change a system. And companies lobby. The reason that we talk about this in Work for Climate is because at an individual level, unless you work in corporate affairs, you're not really familiar with the concept of lobbying or what it is. People have no idea. We think that if you educate and empower employees to understand it, then they can engage internally and ask questions about what their company is supporting, either through its direct lobbying of the government or through its trade association membership. A great example of this is right now there are dozens of companies that are members of the Business Council of Australia. Its role is to advocate for its corporate members at a government level. So it's advocating for all kinds of policies at any one moment in time. Sometimes a trade association group, like the Business Council of Australia, will advocate or lobby the government on things that are not pro-climate, that are actually going to be climate destructive. And a lot of the businesses that are members of a trade association don't know what the trade association is lobbying for. They are complicit as bystanders. So we help employees understand what is happening in terms of climate politics and lobbying and help their company to speak up and use their voice within that trade association group. There is another great example of some corporate lobbying that has been enabled by employees on the inside of companies just recently was the Business for 75 campaign that was led by the Future Group and companies like my former employer, Intrepid Travel, Nina Lever, Ben and Jerry's, a handful of those progressive businesses got together and really rallied on the business community to lobby the government for an ambitious and science-aligned NDC target, our nationally determined contributions. So our emissions reductions that take us through to 2035. Employees within the Work for Climate Network got together. We sent them out an employee brief. There's going to be a review of the safeguard mechanism. There's going to be a review of the EPBC, the Environmental Protection Biodiversity Act, because we need a climate trigger there. There's a bunch of political moments coming up. And the business community has power. It has influence. And we really need businesses to use their voice. So we send out employee briefs so that individual employees can understand what they can do inside their company to help their business advocate for climate policy at that government level. That other part of the question is this other dimension, finance emissions, scope X or enabled emissions is thinking about okay, what does your company actually do in the world? Maybe you've got your own house in order. Maybe you're able to get your own net zero policy. Maybe you're even lobbying progressively. But if you are an advertising agency and your biggest three clients are selling SUVs, that is enabling the emissions of a bunch of other companies to go up and up and up. Financed emissions, it's about where you invest your money. So is your bank, maybe it's ANZ or it's NAB, and they are investing in deforestation in Australia. They're investing in assets and they they don't even necessarily know inside that company that they are financing deforestation. All of this stuff is happening, and the people who are making the decisions don't even know that their decisions are causing these unintended consequences. So what we do is we educate employees on the inside of companies so that they can look beyond the basics of your scope one, scope two, even scope three emissions.
Loreto Gutierrez:Yeah, I love that. And you do it so well by listing out what are the specifics, which I always found really helpful. I guess one thing that would be really interesting is to explore a couple of case studies or examples of work that you've seen through your alumni base. Are there any examples of employee-led initiatives that have influenced a company's approach to climate risk in particular?
Lucy Piper:I would say that climate risk is not on the radar of the corporations that our employees are working on yet. That is a piece of work in progress. I genuinely believe that climate risk is the way that we will accelerate progress on these because now that companies have to report on climate risk, they are going to start waking up to the realities and what it means for their business. I do have dozens of case studies of employees who have driven a whole heap of different initiatives in their workplaces. I'll give two examples from the US of people that we were working alongside. There's Myron Costa, who she was a former Amazon employee. She co-created the Amazon employees for climate justice and went through this whole thing of pushing Amazon on their net zero policy. Um, and then ultimately moved on to Microsoft. And she was working with Work for Climate to get Microsoft to introduce a climate-safe retirement policy. That's shifting their retirement funds so that it reduces their financed emissions. And Maren still works with us as an advisor inside our Work for Climate community. So she was able to push a bunch of stuff inside Microsoft. And another coworker of hers, Drew Wilkinson, who is a part of the Work for Climate community, and we've done a bunch of work together. He was working with Maren on that same 401k Climate Safe Retirement Initiative. He, prior to being a part of the Work for Climate crew, he started a green team essentially that grew into over 10,000 Microsoft employees. And that group has subgroups, and they were working on a bunch of internal initiatives at Microsoft. That was a couple of years ago, and now Drew does heaps of advocacy inside corporations. Other stories, like one of the One of the people that when I talk about the work that she did, people's eyes really light up. Laura was in our academy, um, worked in the cycling industry, and was going through how do we shift our manufacturing? How do we reduce our emissions? What are our internal policies doing? How do we get our own house in order? As a result of being in the academy and in that cohort group, she was inspired to come up with this idea of replacing the sponsor of a national cycling event because it was sponsored by a fossil fuel company. And so she did a bunch of work at an industry level to initiate conversations about a new sponsor. She went out of her way to find an alternative sponsor. It wasn't about getting someone kicked out. It's like, okay, how can we find an alternative sponsor? There's other stories of people who have managed to shift their company to 100% renewable energy, which is what we see as the first step. Like this is the easiest step for a company to do. And we help employees figure out, okay, how are you going to purchase it? Are you creating your own renewable energy? Are you going into a power purchase agreement? And one engineer had done, and this was the very early days of work for climate. The way that he got his company to commit to 100% renewable energy was he built a SurveyMonkey survey and he sent it out to, I think there was about 500 employees, and he asked a set of questions. And one of the questions was, Do you think our company should be using 100% renewable energy? And everybody said yes. He took that stat to the exec leadership team and he said, This is what your employees want. And that created the space and the support for the company to then pursue it. I could go on and on with examples. We have the Work for Climate Framework, which is like, do this, do this, do this, do this. But then the employees in the program are adding them together. They're overlaying the systems change thinking. They're like, okay, now we're doing this. Now we're doing new products that are that are better in the world in X, Y, Z way. It's very, very inspiring and motivating.
Dan Leverington:I love that. And I think it ties in so nicely with uh your idea of influencing the movable middle or the companies that are doing just enough not to be evil. So, how does Work for Climate approach engaging with these businesses and what kind of success have you seen in shifting them to a more ambitious climate position than they otherwise would have taken?
Lucy Piper:The way that we engage with businesses is through individuals. We know that employees want to work at companies where their values are aligned. They want to work for companies that are doing the right thing. And we actually went down this pathway a few years ago where big companies were coming to us and saying, hey, we've heard about your academy program. How about we pay you to run it inside of our company? We made an intentional decision not to work with companies because what happens is the stuff that we teach employees is provocative. They think we're teaching employees how to reduce your individual carbon emissions or your individual footprint. But what we're teaching them is how to speak truth to power, how to shift the status quo, how to move your company from inertia. We are more aligned with the social movement space, with the activist groups who want to be slightly more antagonistic. We are not here to promote sustainability as usual. It is not enough. We are failing at solving the climate crisis. Emissions are going up and up and up. So we engage via employees. The movable middle, where we are now, we are going backwards. Companies are green hushing, which is to say they are walking back their climate commitments and doing the accounting and what it's going to cost them to live up to the commitments that they've made. Where we're at right now is that we need employees to maintain pressure on companies and refuse to accept green hushing. This is not good enough. That is what we need employees to be taking into their workplace. It's not good enough. We can do this and we will find a way. We need to push ahead with what we've committed to when it comes to our net zero policies.
Dan Leverington:It's got to be one of the only areas in business that the companies that are doing the best aren't necessarily using it to their commercial benefit. In any other area, when you think about it, companies want to be maximizing and realizing an ROI on the projects that they've enacted, whereas this seems to be one of the only ones where they don't necessarily want to show market leadership.
Lucy Piper:Totally. Although I think that purity test concept comes into it at a corporate level as well. Companies are scared of getting called out as being hypocrites or as greenwashing. So they would rather play it safe. I can think of a handful of examples where companies are doing really great things, but they don't want to talk about it for fear that a super progressive group is going to come out and say, Well, you've done this, but there's a gap here, blah, blah, blah. The purity test becomes problematic because there's so much greenwashing as well. The good companies don't ever want to get accused of greenwashing.
Dan Leverington:Before we get to our final four green fix questions, for our listener, what would be your call to action that they can take to work and how can they sign up for work for climate?
Lucy Piper:So the call to action is that there is a role for everybody in this work. We talk about different climate entrepreneur archetypes. So you don't have to be someone like me. You don't have to be someone like Loretto. You don't have to be someone like Dan. There is an archetype and a framework for every single person who cares. Maybe you are someone who has positional power, but you don't necessarily have the capacity or the space to be able to progress initiatives. But what you can do is you can create the space for someone else. You can create the safety. Perhaps you're someone really senior who can be an ally to a group or who can be a sponsor to a group who are doing this work. Maybe you are a technical specialist. You can provide the information that people need in order to build business cases. Maybe you are someone who is like the influencer. You know how to get everyone on board in your company with an initiative, but you don't know all the technical stuff. We help you find your people. That is the message. There is a role for everybody in this work. And Workfor Climate helps you navigate that, helps you learn about that.org is where you find us. We have the Workfor Climate Academy. We've got a bunch of free tools and content and ways into this work. But my number one takeaway is that this can be fun. Like you can have a good vibe and do this work. You don't have to, you don't have to let it bring you down. Like I go into some spaces and I think it can be off-putting for people. They're like, oh, but I just want to live my life. I want to have fun and I want to be in my world. And it feels like if I go into that world where I acknowledge how bad the climate situation is, that it's going to make me feel a particular way. You don't have to feel that way. This work is joyful. You get to connect with people, you get to share great fun. Yeah, it can just be like a great vibe doing this work. And that's what we're trying to do with Work for Climate.
Loreto Gutierrez:And I congratulate you for bringing that great vibe to the space because it's so needed, Lucy. So thank you for all the work that you do. Before we wrap up, we want to take you through the rapid fire. So, Lucy, couple questions for you. What would be one recommendation for our listeners? It can be a book, it can be a podcast, it can be a movie, it can be a song, an article that you've experienced recently that you think others could benefit from.
Lucy Piper:Okay, so in the Work for Climate team, we got introduced a few years ago to a thought leader who I mentioned previously, Nate Hagins. Once you start listening to Nate Hagen's podcast, The Great Simplification, you rethink everything about the system that we are a part of. And I have found his work and his talk about the moment in time that we are in, the concept of the carbon pulse where we have access to fossil fuels in order to power our civilization and what the future trajectory of that looks like. Some people find it uh dystopian. I actually find it so calming because I see the whole system and it makes me feel just super positive about the world that we're living in. And it's given me a bunch of tools and understanding, particularly about energy and that idea of energy awareness. Uh yeah. Nate Hagins, the Great Simplification Podcast.
Dan Leverington:Great recommendation. So we're very proud to present to you the Green Fix magic wand. With this magic wand, you can wish for anything you would like to occur by 2035. How would you like to use its power?
Lucy Piper:I mean, I've been thinking a lot about this. We've got a lot of magic wands in my house right now as well, because I have a seven-year-old son and he's Harry Potter obsessed. And so magic wands to get stuff done is part of my vernacular right now. For me, the way that I think about this situation that we're in and the system is so much comes down to the human ego and our desire for status and stuff. And so I would use the green fix magic wand to fix our individual relationship to our ego. I would heal whatever intergenerational trauma that is that makes us feel like we will be loved if we have more stuff. If we look a certain way, if we drive a certain car, if we have a bigger house. That's what I would fix with the magic wand.
Loreto Gutierrez:Wow, I think that's been my favorite magic wand use ever. Thank you for that, Lucy. We love ending this podcast on a positive note. So is there any piece of positive climate news that you want to share with us?
Lucy Piper:I don't have like a positive news stat or like a particularly positive climate impact story. I think for me, the positive story is human connection and community that is coming from this moment in history that we're in. We are so lucky to have been born into this moment. And I love that phrase that Barack Obama once said, which is we are the first generation to feel the impacts of climate change, and the last generation who have any power to change it. For me, what that means, what changing the world really looks like, it isn't getting back to community-based ways of being, connecting with our fellow humans. I think like we were born into an era where we were getting disconnected. And perhaps that is so for certain parts of society, but I can see I can see groups of people coming together in order to build a better future. And I think that that's a really beautiful thing.
Dan Leverington:That is wonderful. Um, and to round us out, Lucy, who is someone that has inspired you on your journey that you think we should have on the green fix?
Lucy Piper:I mean, I if I haven't made it super already, Nate Hagins, if you didn't already interview him, he's the person that I would be calling up.
Dan Leverington:I love it. Well, thank you for joining us today. It's been such a pleasure listening to your experience, listening to the insights that you're gathering by focusing on employees rather than uh necessarily at the corporate level. We share your optimism, but we also share your realism for the journey ahead. Um, and to have to have someone with your experience be able to walk our listener through where we're currently at, where we've been, and then where we need to get to is an absolute joy and uh and a privilege. So thanks for joining us today.
Lucy Piper:Thank you so much. Loved this conversation. Feel like I could chat to you both for hours about all this stuff.
Loreto Gutierrez:This was GreenFix with your hosts Loretta Gutierrez and Dan Leverington. We hope you enjoyed the episode. You can send us your questions or tell us who you'd like us to interview next at info at greenfixpodcast.com. You can get your GreenFix every two weeks on Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, and Pocketcasts.
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