Save This: Nature and Climate Tech Comms Inspo
When the world is burning and we're burning out.
The world is burning and two weeks ago, Big Oil announced profits of over $93bn.
Lately, the far-right narrative seems to have shifted from flat-out denial of climate change into a weird sort of despairing acceptance, shrugging its shoulders because the reality is now impossible to deny.
Climate change is at all our doorsteps.
Two weeks ago, the Telegraph’s editor, Allister Heath, ran the headline, “We’ve lost the war against climate change. Time to scrap net zero”, while American writer and activist Rebecca Solnit wrote for the Guardian – “We launched a war on nature. Now we are in a climate war zone”. Like Heath, she calls it a war but not one to quietly call in defeat; rather, to recommit to ending it.
This summer, in an attempt to lift my own pessimism and build up an inspiration bank, here’s a roundup of stories from the nature and climate space.
The goal is less doom-and-gloom and more stories that celebrate people, nature and all of the ways we’re connecting more and more to the land around us – all while acknowledging the complex feelings of grief, anxiety, despair, and uncertainty that come with it all.
If you’ve seen or worked on a story that’s got under your skin in all the best ways, please do share in the comments.
Scientific fascination
Some of my favourite nature and climate tech companies of all-time know that their audience grew up on David Attenborough and spending their school trips at The Natural History Museum.
They identify the places of enchantment in their writing and protect them.
The First Thirty – Where others may talk about gut health, soil health or planetary health separately, The First Thirty sees all of them as intrinsically connected. This newsletter, This Week in AgriHealth, beautifully unpacks the science behind our food system while continually connecting the health of our bodies to the health of our soils.
Community celebrations
This one’s a little biased. I’ve been working with Jon Conradi, the Founder of Wild Mosaic and author of the Diary of a rewilding entrepreneur, for a year and a half now.
Back in January, we launched a community series called Tile & Me, spotlighting the people supporting Jon to bring life back to a pasture in the Welsh hills, somewhere George Monbiot might call “sheep-wrecked”.
As we approach the tenth edition, it’s been a joy not just to interview the rewilders and hear their connection to the wild, but also see the content begin to reach new audiences organically by virtue of a human network.
“Wildness is how intuition is nurtured, how we stay connected, and how we come to honour our interconnection with all of life.” – Jannine Barron, Tile & Me
P.S. If you’re curious about Wild Mosaic, the concept is super simple: you adopt a 3x3m tile, choosing it by its placement in one of four locations on the main site, and watch as life returns over the years of rewilding and light human intervention. I’ve been a subscriber since May 2024.
Raw storytelling through essay and video
If you’re a founder, you’re most likely highly gifted in making people feel something. You prove that every time you win over an investor, your first customer, a new co-founder, a new hire, or a partner. Whether you share a thinkpiece or a video, you can get to the heart of an emotion in ways that brands or news channels rarely can.
Max Bray – On July 28th, Max Bray, Venture Partner at Kindred Capital, published an essay called “The year it got hot”; a piece that describes, in visceral, relatable detail, the reality of London in a heatwave: the sticky sheets, the fitful sleeps, and the very transparent laying out of fear at the future. Bray laid all the cards on the table then ended on a note of action.
Evan Hickey – Then, there was a creator called Evan Hickey. He shared a video on the 29th July here and went viral – to 45.2K likes and 4,600+ comments. Below are his words; you can watch the video here.
“I don’t want to sit here and talk about all of the organisms that are dying behind me right now, and across the world, due to these wildfires. I don’t need to talk about the rabbits and the foxes and the ground-nesting birds, and all of the ash that’s going to run into the streams, destroying the waterlife. I don’t want to talk about any of that.
This fire, to me, is reflecting back the disconnection that my species has to this planet, the disconnection that my species has to itself. And it hurts. It fucking hurts.
There’s no one coming to save us. If we want to heal this planet, if we want to heal our collective species, we need to heal ourselves. It starts within. It reflects back out. As above, so below; as within, so without.
– Evan Hickey, @symbioticvibration
Sometimes, the story can be as simple as that. Repetition, rawness, vulnerability, writing that makes the intangible tangible in the heavy air or rabbits, foxes, and ground-nesting birds, reference to other belief systems, a well-placed curse word, and a clear, unifying direction.
Undeniably hard to do as a startup but more than possible as a founder with skin-in-the-game.
On eclipses that end empires
Last night, when millions of people looked up at the sky and watched the eclipse, there was a moment when it felt like, for all the ways the world is changing, there are some very human things that haven’t changed at all.
Human nature, for all its gory, bloody, competitive nature, is the very same human nature that brings people together to look up when something extraordinary happens in the sky. It’s the same fascination that gets us poking pinholes in cereal boxes, whipping out colanders, and sharing eclipse glasses with strangers.
While the headlines may present people as the harbingers or losers of war, the media is also providing the framing for a window that’s wide open for nature and climate techs to step into. There’s a canvas to fill with stories that remind us of our humanity; of all the ways that people come together in the face of something phenomenal.
I like to think of these stories as the step-ladder to a better future.
So many of us are searching for the words to describe what we’re feeling. The people and companies that can do that - who can speak into a specific moment and provide people with a belief system, with hope for a liveable, joyful future - will be the best placed to bridge these two worlds we find ourselves in.
And if the far left and far right meet like a horseshoe – if, as Max Bray writes, “this is where the mass backlash begins” – maybe the climate emergency will bring forward the eclipse moment where all groups meet.
About Cantadora Field Notes
If you’re new here, welcome. I’m Emma – a fractional content strategist, product marketer, and founder of Cantadora: the product storytelling studio for nature and climate. If you’re a founder of an early-stage nature and climate tech startup and want to:
Sharpen your personal positioning
Bring a product, business, or initiative to market
Build an inbound storytelling system
Have fractional product marketing support without making a full-time hire
Please drop me a note here. I’d love to hear from you.
– Emma from Cantadora