After a squirrely career path, Solitaire Townsend found her role in the sustainability movement by filling a big communication gap: she’s persuasive, an excellent storyteller, and loves talking to people. Today, she lives and breathes public relations for good as co-founder and Chief Solutionist at her company Futerra.There, she’s led sustainability planning with name-brand organizations from the United Nations to Formula 1. But she’s also in a fight with her own industry. Solitaire is working hard to get her colleagues in PR, marketing, and advertising to stop using their talents for the objectives of fossil fuel clients. In this episode, you’ll hear about a crisis we rarely hear about: how, using the powers of storytelling and persuasion, the fossil fuel industry has been outsmarting the climate movement. And you’ll learn how Solitaire and her team began applying sophisticated storytelling strategies to sustainability before it was cool; ways you can use your talents to get a climate-fighting job in the creative services industry; or create a career in sustainability at the job you have right now.
Solitaire is a renowned sustainability expert who works with some of the world’s most influential organizations. She is co-founder and Chief Solutionist at Futerra and trustee of the Solutions Union. In 2023 she was named ‘Agency Lead of the Year’ at Adweek’s Sustainability Awards. Her popular TED Talk, Forbes column and most recent book – The Solutionists: How Businesses Can Fix the Future – are available online.
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Who makes Degrees?
Degrees: Real talk about planet-saving careers is presented by Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). Yesh Pavlik Slenk is our host. Amy Morse is EDF’s producer. Podcast Allies is our production company. Tressa Versteeg produced this episode. Mia Lobel is our story editor. Ayo Oti is our researcher. Engineering by Kevin Kline. Editing assistance from executive producer Elaine Appleton Grant. Our music is Shame, Shame, Shame from Yesh’s favorite band, Lake Street Dive. Other music in this episode is from Epidemic Sound.
YESH PAVLIK SLENK:
This past summer, the Senate heard testimony about how fossil fuel companies are using public relations firms to prevent action on climate change. One of the people who testified at that meeting was former PR exec Christine Arena who’s former company worked for some of those oil giants.
CHRISTINE ARENA [FROM BUDGET HEARING]:
How fossil fuel money is linked to the deployment of hundreds of front groups across the country, as well as sophisticated bot networks, fake social media accounts, and hacking operations targeting climate activists.
PAVLIK SLENK:
In her written testimony, Arena notes that in 2021, more than half of the public communications from major oil companies included green claims. But, only a fraction of their expenses were dedicated to “low carbon” activities.
As today’s guest will tell you, it’s high time everyone in PR and advertising, “divest their talent from destruction.” And if you’re a professional creative - or want to be - There’s a job in it for you, too.
THEME MUSIC
Change is coming, oh yeah
Ain’t no holding it back
Ain't no running
Change is coming, oh yeah!
PAVLIK SLENK:
This is Degrees: Real talk about planet-saving careers from Environmental Defense Fund. I’m your host, Yesh Pavlik Slenk.
Today’s guest, Solitaire Townsend,has been living and breathing PR for more than twenty years - long before green jobs were really even a thing. With her company Futerra, she’s led sustainability planning with everyone from the United Nations to Formula 1.
But she’s also fighting to get her own industry to be more accountable. This is how she put it in her 2021 Ted Talk.
SOLITAIRE TOWNSEND [FROM 2021 TED TALK]:
When you think of the industries most responsible for climate change, you probably summon up an image of an oil rig, right? Maybe even a coal mine? Or a megafarm? But there’s one industry that’s never mentioned in that list, even though every other industry depends upon it:The professional services of advertising and PR firms, the big management consultancies, the corporate lawyers and lobbyists. Together this sector is worth over 2 trillion dollars a year.
PAVLIK SLENK:
That’s a lot of influence. But not everyone in creative professional services agrees that they need to make a change.
TOWNSEND:
So this is a fight that's going on right now at the heart of this whole industry: PR, marketing, advertising, communications - Are we neutral? ‘Cause many, many PR agencies, large and small, play both sides. They work with the fossil fuel industry. And then they also try to do pro bono work with nonprofits, et cetera. And actually, sometimes I ask nonprofits: have you asked your agencies, the ones who work for you for free, whether they also work for oil and gas? And you see sort of like this, like, side-eyeing from some nonprofits, going, we don't want to ask them 'cause we need them to work for us for free. And I go - yeah, but that, as well as working for you, doing this great work, they also, in that same office, those same people are working for the fossil fuel industry and getting paid a great deal of money in order to do so.
PAVLIK SLENK:
Before we go on, I need to back up a little. because to understand how Solitaire ended up at the heart of this fight as a, quote, Chief Solutionist at Futerra, I needed to understand where she comes from. So I asked her if she’s always been a problem solver… Her answer? Absolutely not.
TOWNSEND:
I think I actually was a problem quite a lot of the time for my parents.
PAVLIK SLENK:
[laughs]
TOWNSEND:
When you go back, I think, I think I was the problem-causer.
PAVLIK SLENK:
She grew up in the 80s in the United Kingdom. Raised in social housing.
TOWNSEND:
There was people who would like, dump their old mattresses like in my garden. And like, you've got a lot of burnt out vehicles, and it wasn't the most fantastic environment.
MUSIC
PAVLIK SLENK:
When Solitaire was twelve, a major environmental threat landed basically right on her front door.
TOWNSEND:
In the area near where I lived, a nuclear energy company called Nirex, wanted to bury some nuclear waste. And I'd kind of had enough.
PAVLIK SLENK:
So she joined the local movement to stop it.
TOWNSEND:
Now, I was no Greta, I was not a leader. I was the one who made the cups of tea and like, painted the signs, et cetera. But after a couple of years of campaigning, about two years of campaigning, we won. We actually won. And the company wasn't allowed to bury their nuclear waste there.
PAVLIK SLENK:
Wow.
TOWNSEND:
Or indeed anywhere else in the UK. And that's a really dangerous thing to do to a 14-year-old, is to teach her that if you think that there's something wrong in the world, if you work hard enough and really sort of put your mind to it, you can solve it. And that really stayed with me - that stayed with me ever since.
PAVLIK SLENK:
It might seem like a direct line from Solitaire's anti-nuclear waste campaigning as an early teen, to the sustainability expert she is today, but that was not the case.
TOWNSEND:
It's really important that people know where they are in their careers - it's gonna look linear when you look back down it, but when you're in it, it's gonna feel really squirrely. So I did a degree in English literature.// I did repertory theater. I did a bit of teaching. // I did some human rights consulting. I worked in a pub.
PAVLIK SLENK:
She also got a master’s degree in Shakespeare, and eventually in Sustainable Development. Through all of the squirreliness, she knew she wanted to change the world…but the question was, how?
TOWNSEND:
After many years of sort of going to parties and people asking me what I did, and me saying, “Sustainability,” and then just sort of eyes glazing over - like, it's really, really not a great way to try to make friends at a party back then in the nineties. [Yesh laughs] Um, I realized that, you know, if I - if I really, really wanted to contribute to this area, I wasn't gonna be doing so in terms of the science, I likely wasn't gonna be doing so in terms of activism. But I really saw that there was a gap in terms of communication.
PAVLIK SLENK:
Solitaire knew she could fill that gap - she loved talking to people. She was persuasive and could tell stories. She says, at the time, these tools were not being used by the environmental movement. Rather it was hyper-focused on hard science.
TOWNSEND:
In fact, our movement was very good at green splaining - bit like, uh, mansplaining, but for the environment. Basically just telling people the science and assuming that people would act. And coming from a background of comms, I knew that wasn't the truth.
PAVLIK SLENK:
So Solitaire and some friends decided to do something about this communication gap between the environmental movement and the people who had the power to change things. In 2001, they started Futerra.
TOWNSEND:
We were all in our early twenties. We were all sort of living in shared accommodation or sleeping on people's sofa and sort of eating tins of beans. Um, and -
PAVLIK SLENK:
I've been there. [laughter]
TOWNSEND:
Yeah, exactly, exactly. But yeah, it's um - started Futerra on this vision of basically just trying to reach people in a different way. - started out trying to change the sustainability movement, actually. It was much less about bringing sustainability to PR and much more about bringing great quality comms to sustainability.
PAVLIK SLENK:
What Solitaire and her friends figured out is that people are more influenced by stories, NOT by facts and figures.
TOWNSEND:
I think that a lot of environmentalists wish that humans weren't like that - that we were more like AI. And the fact that we are sort of so squishily emotional and so story-led and not science-led and not particularly empirical in terms of how we take collective decisions, sort of grates against them. And I often ask people, it's like, well, are you trying to change the world or are you trying to change who people are? And I think a lot of people are trying to change who people are. I'm not. Human beings are human beings. I love all of it.
And in order to be a great storyteller, you have to accept all of it. And you have to be able to talk to who people are, not who you want them to be. And that's why stories, I think, have been so difficult for our movement to pick up because they are deeply imperfect and they talk to things which people care about that our movement don't think people should care about. And also why that's so exciting, because it means there's a tool left on the shelf - and when it comes to climate, there ain't many tools left on the shelf.
PAVLIK SLENK:
More than twenty years later, Futerra has grown into a multi-national PR organization, working on projects from all over the sustainability movement using story as a tool…from an insect-based cat food, to helping Formula 1 to become a low carbon leader, to an advertising campaign with the United Nations that inspired 100 million climate actions across the globe.
But part of the learning curve was actually working for companies like, well, you guessed it - Shell and BP. That’s after the break.
AD MUSIC
AD BREAK
AD MUSIC
PAVLIK SLENK:
You’re listening to Degrees from Environmental Defense Fund. And I’m your host, Yesh Pavlik Slenk.
Solitaire Townsend has spent the better part of the last few decades using storytelling as a tool for good. It’s a tool that fossil fuel companies have used to control the narrative around climate through everything from children’s books to lobbying policy makers to social media advertising.
The thing is, Solitaire knows their strategies first-hand because in the early days of Futerra, they worked with these companies. Decades ago, she consulted for Shell and BP, and they were making some big promises, like, quote, “reinventing the energy business.”
2008 BP ADVERTISEMENT:
Beyond pain, joy…effort, reward… winter, summer…beyond darkness, light…Beyond Petroleum…BP.
TOWNSEND:
Their story was of absolute commitment to transition. BP changed its name from British Petroleum to Beyond Petroleum. And that was widely regarded as being a genuine movement. We, you know, we got in there. And then// working with 'em is a little bit like, you know, having a bad ex-boyfriend. They constantly promise to change and then they never do. And after a couple of times of going back the problem starts to be you, not them. And so after a few rounds of meeting incredible, wonderful, compelling individuals inside those organizations, being convinced to do a piece of work. And then realizing that it had zero resonance on what the organization was planning to do, that's when, as Futerra, we cut off completely. I’m like, we would never ever work with 'em again.
PAVLIK SLENK:
Solitaire had to learn that lesson the hard way. But the experience taught her a lot about how fossil fuel companies have been out-smarting the climate movement when it comes to persuasion.
They’ve spun tales to make it seem like environmentalists are denying citizens a better future, by taking away the American dream of a comfortable house, a nice car, a well-paying job Of course that couldn’t be further from the truth. But that’s a compelling story.
That’s where Solitaire’s approach comes in.
TOWNSEND:
The only thing that can beat a story is a story. A fact can't, an activist campaign can't, you know, a march can't. But a story around the fact that the oil and gas industry are trying to hold us back from an even better world, an even better story - not that they're destroying the world, but that there is a better world that they're not letting us get to. That's the story we've gotta change. We've got to move from them promising everybody something great and us threatening everybody with something awful; to us promising everybody something great and them being the ones in the way of it.
MUSIC
PAVLIK SLENK:
Hearing Solitaire say that makes me question so many of the things I do with my family and at work, the things I buy, the places I go. And how much of that is dependent on the fossil fuel industry. And it makes me wonder how things might be different if the stories all around me were focused on a different future.
The PR, marketing, and advertising industries have a huge opportunity to shift this narrative - to be on the winning side of the climate story. So for you, green job seekers, this is a great time to enter the creative services field.
For anyone looking to get a green job - or to make sure their talents are being used for good - Solitaire Townsend offers four pieces of advice.
First, something everyone should take to heart.
TOWNSEND:
Lots of people come to me going, how do I get a career in sustainability? I'm like, well, do you have a job? And if the answer is yes, then you have a career in sustainability. There you go. And your job is to turn that into a job that makes a difference.
You know, I call it being a solutionist. That's when you decide to put your career in service of the world that you wanna see. It's a big decision. It's quite challenging. You often have to have quite an intense conversation with your parents about why you're not going after the biggest, you know, fat pension pot plan and instead trying to do this thing that changes the world. But it will change you and who you are in ways you can't even anticipate.
I am a completely different person, and a much, much happier one, having followed the career path that I have, than having taken any of the jobs that were offered to me over the years with much larger salaries attached to them, but where I would've been doing something, which would've been a compromise.
PAVLIK SLENK:
To sum it up - Wherever you are, you are a solutionist.
Okay, the second piece of advice. If you’re already in the creative services field, you have leverage. Use it!
TOWNSEND:
The entire comm sector, marketing, PR, advertising, all of it - in a current absolute, full on complete outright panic about talent. Because for the last couple of years, a load of folks who would've gone into this industry instead have become social media influencers. So the massive war for talent is raised at every single one of the conferences that I go to. And that means you've got power. If you are working in this sector, that means you can say, I don't want to work on these projects and your organization are going to be anxious about losing you.
You can divest your talent from destruction. You can say that if you ask me to work on these briefs, I'm going to look for work elsewhere. Now people go, well, will that really make any difference? Because if I don't do it, somebody else will. It's like, yeah, but that other person might not be as talented as you are. They might not be as insightful as you are and they might not be as creative as you are. So you divesting your talent from those clients, you saying I won't work on them, is a huge, huge difference.
PAVLIK SLENK:
Divest your talent from destruction - I love that.
The third piece of advice, you don’t have to be an influencer to have influence.
TOWNSEND:
There's lots and lots and lots of spaces, where we talk and we influence others. We all influence our friends, our family, our colleagues, our kids, our parents, the folks around us. Um, we have our online communities, we have our LinkedIn, we've got our Instagram, we've got our TikTok. If you are online in any way, if you talk to people - even if it's just a large WhatsApp group or to your alumni association, or when you're on Twitch when you're playing computer games - you have a platform and an audience.
So if you wanna write about this, then write and post it under your own name. Start a podcast, start a blog, write about this on LinkedIn. Share memos with friends. Get your voice out there and test and trial and find out what works and what doesn't.
The other piece is to sort of, um, uh, not get downhearted if what you write and create doesn't change the world tomorrow. It's one of the biggest things, which I think is a challenge for young people in this movement, this sense of responsibility. What should I be doing that's gonna make the biggest possible difference? And I wish the world works like that, it doesn't. So make a bit of a difference. Do something. That's almost always the thing. Do something.
PAVLIK SLENK:
Start writing, start creating - now - wherever you are.
The last point, and this is, again, great advice for everyone… whatever you choose do, make you sure you love it.
TOWNSEND:
I absolutely fuckin’ love what I do. I really, really love it. It gives me an enormous buzz and immense sense of self-satisfaction. It really presses every single one of my pleasure buttons. And that's why I'm good at it.
And I spend a lot of my time with the youth climate movement, trying to work with people to go, don't do what needs to be done, do what you want to do that serves. And if what you wanna do that serves is slightly off kilter of what you think needs to be done, do it anyway. Because all the way around me, I've seen people doing what they think needs to be done, and they - I watch them go through martyr complex, to burnout and bitterness.
And many, many, many years ago, I created a mindset for myself around this work that has kept me on my feet, which is: the world owes me nothing. Climate change does not owe me just 'cause I've worked really hard.
I will not see the world I am trying to build - at all. And actually accepting that is incredibly freeing from burnout. And I learned that by looking at change makers of the past: at looking at the suffragettes. Almost all of the leading suffragettes died before women got the vote. Looking at the civil rights movement, none of the civil rights movement saw the first Black president. Thinking about the inventors of electricity who died by candlelight. All through history, people have put themselves in service of building a better world that they will not get to live in.
So stop beating yourself up about whether you've done enough. And work out what thing you could do that would make you the happiest - not the most impactful, not the most effective, not the thing that you think you should be doing, not what you've been told to do. Is it, actually doing some craftivism? Is it, talking to your book club? Is it, changing jobs and doing something massive? Is it, setting up your own business? Is it, doing that thing that you've always meant to do?// What is really, really going to make you happy whilst trying to make the world a better place? And then do that thing. If you do that thing, you will be effective. If you do that thing, you will keep doing this. If you do that thing, you won't burn out. Because that’s what a life well lived is. Live a life well lived.
OUTRO MUSIC
PAVLIK SLENK:
That's it for this episode!
For more problem-solver inspiration from Solitaire, get her book: The Solutionists: How Businesses Can Fix the Future.
Next time on Degrees…
AMBROSE CARROLL:
So we set out to wake up the sleeping giant that is the Black church on these issues of environmentalism and sustainability.
PAVLIK SLENK:
Be sure to check out the rest of S6 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you're listening now. Share this podcast with a friend.
Don’t forget, check out our Green Jobs Hub to find all the resources to jumpstart your green job career search.
Degrees is presented by Environmental Defense Fund. Amy Morse is our producer. Podcast Allies is our production company. Tressa Versteeg produced this episode. Mia Lobel is our story editor. Ayo Oti is our researcher. Engineering by Kevin Kline. Editing assistance on this episode from executive producer Elaine Appleton Grant.
Our music is Shame, Shame, Shame from Lake Street Dive. Additional music in this episode from Epidemic Sound. And I’m your host, Yesh Pavlik Slenk. Stay fired up y’all.
THEME MUSIC
Change is coming, oh yeah
Ain’t no holding it back
Ain't no running
Change is coming, oh yeah!
PAVLIK SLENK:
Ugh… Ugh…Okay, alright, then looming music.