About this episode
What is Climate Swings? Hosted by Michael Gold, it focuses on the professional evolution of individuals in the climate sector. In this intro episode, I share my personal journey from journalism to climate advocacy, inspired by the concept of Tarzan Economics, which emphasizes the need for individuals to “swing” their careers in response to the climate crisis. The podcast aims to inspire listeners to make their own climate swings and provides insights into the challenges and opportunities within the climate field. It is promoted through a partnership with climate learning and action platform Terra.do.
Notes and resources
Full Transcript
Hello everyone, and welcome to Climate Swings, the show for people reaching for the next vine of climate and sustainability in their professional lives, produced in partnership with climate education and action platform, Terra.do. I’m your host, Michael Gold.
So what is Climate Swings? Climate Swings is an interview-based podcast that tracks the professional evolution of people who work in climate. Each episode will feature a different guest and delve into their personal biographies, career ups and downs, lessons they’ve learned, and advice for others. The show will feature a wide range of voices from seasoned climate practitioners to people just getting started on their climate journeys.
The aim is to inspire people to pivot their careers in a climate-focused direction—and give them the tools to do so—by hearing from those working at the front lines of this massive global problem. The title was inspired by Tarzan Economics, a 2021 book by Will Page, a British author who served as the chief economist of Spotify. His thesis is that navigating disruption requires swinging to a new vine much as Tarzan does as he navigates the jungle.
The old vine represents the old way of doing things while the new vine represents change and opportunity. His framing of Tarzan Economics is meant to apply to companies or even entire industries. In Will’s case, the music industry is a prime example of a sector that was hit hard by disruption in the form of digitalization and the all-you-can-eat subscription model pioneered by Spotify embodied the new vine that the Tarzans of music in the form of the record labels needed to grasp onto.
After I read his book, I decided to tweak the concept to focus on individuals rather than companies or industries and on arguably the biggest source of disruption in human history, the climate crisis. In this sense, the vines that people swing between represent their professional world before and after climate became their main concern. I was inspired to make this podcast by my own swing into climate in my professional life.
It all started in the late summer of 2020 amid the topsy-turvy world of covid lockdowns. At the time, I was working as a San Francisco-based editor at The Economist Intelligence Unit, sister organization to The Economist magazine, doing research, content, and thought leadership on behalf of clients. I had touched on some climate and sustainability themes in my work, but it wasn’t the overriding focus.
Most of my projects centered around digital disruption, economic and social trends, and the like. I’d always prided myself on being something of a generalist. Prior to The Economist, I worked as a correspondent at Reuters. I’d also spent much of my early career in greater China.
My first job was as a reporter and editor at the Global Times, a Chinese state-run newspaper. And while there were always plenty of interesting sustainability stories in that part of the world, English language media was barely scratching the surface. At the time, climate was just not high on the list of news priorities for big Western outlets like Reuters.
At the same time, deep down, I was always a bit of a sustainability geek.
My first major in college was environmental science before I later shifted to anthropology. And when I was 20, I interned at a renewable energy research facility in Thailand and made a video about it. But during my China sojourn, it kind of faded out.
Fast forward, though, to 2020, and my partner and I are riding out the pandemic in a houseboat in Sausalito, a small waterfront community just north of San Francisco, right across the Golden Gate Bridge. Couldn’t be a more beautiful place to spend a summer. As a Bay Area native, I’ve always felt like our natural scenery and especially our moderate climate are major points of pride.
In fact, one of the reasons I wanted to move back to San Francisco in 2019 from Hong Kong, which was my last port of call in Asia, was the weather. But for those of you who remember either because you were here or you saw the photos, 2020 was the year of the “orange sky day” in the Bay Area. Smoke from wildfires burning nearby was so thick, it essentially blotted out the sun for an entire day.
I remember working from the houseboat that we were staying on, looking out over the calm waters of the San Francisco Bay and across to the peak of Mount Tamalpais, begging the sky to clear up, begging the winds to come in and just thinking, this cannot be the world that we’re entering. It was to me, a kind of a rerun of some of the worst memories I recall from the early 2010s when I was living in Beijing, when we endured days of choking pollution and smog, this time mostly from factories, but the effect was basically the same. And the question just continued repeating in my head. Are we really resigning ourselves to a world in which even the air we breathe is dangerous? I made up my mind that day to, as Michelle Obama says, do something: to pivot my career to focus on this issue. The following year, I left my full-time job and I started freelancing.
Today, I am a climate communications specialist and I run Word Clouds Consulting. You can find me online at wordclouds—that’s w-o-r-d-c-l-o-u-d-s.consulting—yes, that’s the URL, wordclouds.consulting. And I do writing, content, and other communication services for clients. During my swing into climate, I needed to absorb as much information as I could about climate change. I read voraciously and importantly, I listened to a lot of podcasts, and ultimately I got inspired to make my own.
I have a lot of people to thank for this, starting with my ex-Economist colleague, Marina Haydn, now of sustainability consultancy Quantis. She introduced me to Tarzan Economics and inspired the idea of layering climate on top of it. I would also like to thank the folks at Terra.do, especially its co-founder, Kamal Kapadia, for supporting the podcast and helping me grow my audience.
Terra was one of the first places I turned to when I was making my own climate swing. And I owe Terra a lot for bringing out the climate warrior within. Now I hope this podcast can be that push for you to make your own climate swing.
Let me know if you have any thoughts, comments, suggestions for guests or episode themes. You can reach me at michael@wordclouds.consulting.
Thank you for listening and enjoy the show.