About this episode
How can creative storytelling become a powerful force for climate action and sustainability? Birgitte Rasine is a writer, documentary filmmaker, and founder of LUCITÀ, a marketing and communications agency focused on sustainability. Having escaped Communist Czechoslovakia with her parents at age 10, Birgitte’s journey has been one of constant reinvention—from Hollywood filmmaker holding sticks for Dennis Quaid to journalist to sustainability communicator. Her unique perspective on how stories can drive behavior change offers a refreshing alternative to doom-and-gloom climate messaging. Drawing on her experience with clients ranging from electric vehicle companies to nonprofits focused on sustainable forestry, Birgitte makes a compelling case for why effective climate communication requires understanding human psychology and embracing authenticity.
Notes and resources
Full transcript
Michael Gold (00:01)
Birgitte Rasine, welcome to Climate Swings. It’s great to have you here.
Birgitte (00:06)
Thank you so much, Michael. It’s great to be here.
Michael Gold (00:09)
So I would just like to start with a little bit of background on you, your professional evolution, and what brought you to your current role at LUCITÀ.
Birgitte (00:22)
So I am a writer by birth, and I have known that since I was about six years old. I composed a poem for my little baby sister, and that night I realized, I’m a writer. You it was just one of those aha moments, and I had mine pretty early. But I didn’t take the usual or the typical journey of that of a writer. In other words, you know writing novels and becoming someone like Margaret Atwood or Neil Gaiman. I am also a traveler. And so when my family emigrated from the Czech Republic to America, that kind of pulled my roots up. It’s like weeding your garden. literally rip up that fruit tree and you move it to some other garden. And that’s what happened with my family. And so I began a journey of discovery that took me literally all around the world, both in terms of physical places and the different types of sectors that I worked in. So just to give you the TLDR, the nutshell story, I started out in Hollywood because I wanted to be a film director and that has everything to do with being a storyteller, being a writer. So I went down to Hollywood, worked in several movies, then decided that I really am a writer. I don’t, I just, want to write, you know, I don’t necessarily want to deal with all the trench warfare that goes on behind the camera, even though I had a really good time. And so then I became, I transitioned to journalism for the Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety, then moved back up to the Bay Area where I had gone to school to university.
And Journalism for Hollywood wasn’t really a thing that you do up here in the Bay Area. So then I transitioned again, this time into high tech PR. And that’s when I had my, what I call my midlife crisis a little early. I was in my mid twenties and I was sitting there, you know, on the phone, pitching a story of one of our clients to a reporter. I think it was PC Week. And I thought, what am I doing here? This isn’t, this is like, how did I end up here? This is kind of not what I had in mind. And it was at that moment that I decided I really want to leave an impact on the world. want to do something that doesn’t just tell stories like Hollywood does, fictional stories, but can leave a real mark on the world. And so started getting involved, I did get involved with a gentleman, a researcher down in LA, Dr. Arnold Newman, and he had done, he was working on a book about the tropical rainforest and the Amazon. And he took me on as a volunteer, researcher, editor. And so I started working with him. Also in that same time period, I applied to and got into a program in Spain in international relations. And because I, again, I love travel, I love living, experiencing different cultures, learning different languages.
I did move to Spain, did that year. inspired by the experience on the book, I tried to start a film company in Spain to do a series about the tropical rainforest and climate change, kind of like a larger context for that. Didn’t work. was difficult to start a company in Spain as an American, young American woman. I came back to the U.S., had a company set up in two days, and that company is LUCITÀ. And so that’s how LUCITÀ started.
Michael Gold (04:17)
And you seem like the kind of person who brings a lot of your personal background and experiences into your work and into your worldview, which is represented essentially through your work. I’d like to start with that very early formative experience of moving from the Czech Republic to the United States. As I understand, that was an extremely important part of your personal upbringing. were 10 at the time, and it wasn’t just normal move. Perhaps you can explain a little bit about that.
Birgitte (04:51)
Yeah, and I actually wrote a whole essay about that on my Substack on the Muse. maybe we could put a link in where people could read it. yeah, so you have to understand, back then, this is 1981. back then, in order for you to leave or go on a vacation, it’s not like here in the US where you just take your passport, you get on a plane. You go to Greece, you go to France, you go to Thailand, Africa, wherever you please, right? You can basically go. The world is your oyster. Our world was a really tiny pearl, maybe, inside an oyster. We had to ask permission every single time that we would cross the border. And the Czech Republic, or Czechoslovakia as it was back then, was a really, really small country. So we couldn’t quite do it that way.
We needed a genuine reason to leave the country for a little bit. And that was a medical reason because my sister had bronchitis. She was three at the time. And my dad had a skin issue that he was dealing with. So the doctor said, you know, instead of giving them antibiotics, they said, go to the seashore. You need to spend some time at the sea. So that I guess that you could say that’s the plus side of living in a country like that, right? No antibiotics, go to the sea. So we got permission. We went to the Adriatic Sea, which was amazing. And that’s what I thought we were doing. I had no idea. We had five suitcases with us and we went down there. And that’s when I found out we’re actually not going back. We’re applying for asylum and we’re leaving the country. We didn’t know where. Would it be the US? Would it be Western Europe? Would it be the—you know, I had no idea. And so my parents were, they were worried that as a nine, you know, nine, 10 year old, I would be upset. I would be missing my friends, my school. I would be nervous. My immediate reaction was, let’s go America, you know? And so they were like, wow, okay, she’s pretty adventurous. Sure, I mean, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one, you know, but also because when you grow up,
Michael Gold (06:43)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, typical 10 year olds reaction.
Birgitte (07:13)
young in a system like that, that’s not a democratic country, you learn very early on the place that your country plays on the geopolitical level. So for example, I remember when I was just eight years old, the teacher would come in and all the children had to stand up really straight, put your hand behind your back and stand up and say, good morning, comrade, so and so, whatever her last name was. We literally had to salute her like that.
Michael Gold (07:37)
Wow. Mm-hmm. Mm.
Birgitte (07:42)
And one day she was explaining to us the difference between communism and capitalism. And she said, communism is a good system because everybody shares. Sharing is good. And capitalism is evil because nobody shares anything. Everything is about, oh, it’s just mine. And I’m sitting there thinking, I’m onto you. Because I had liberal parents and I grew up with a different sort of mentality. But that’s how they do it. And so.
Michael Gold (07:58)
Wow.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (08:12)
you know, eventually the application came back. We had been accepted by the United States and I think also Canada and Australia, but it was kind of like Goldilocks for us. Canada is too cold. Australia is too far. The United States is just right, right? And so when we came, that was my first big plane trip.
Michael Gold (08:24)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (08:36)
And remember being very upset with myself because I ended up falling asleep on the whole ride over. So I kind of missed that big plane ride. then when we got here, I was actually shocked at how not wealthy the country was. You have this idea when you’re living behind the Iron Curtain that behind that curtain, everybody’s wealthy and everybody has a house and everybody’s really rich.
Michael Gold (09:04)
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (09:05)
And that, of course, is not the case at all. So it was shocking to end up in the place that we did, which was a, it was basically a tenement house in Connecticut. We didn’t even have a refrigerator. My mom would have to put milk out on the steps because in the wintertime to keep it cold because we didn’t have a fridge. It was hard.
Michael Gold (09:08)
Mm-hmm.
wow.
Wow.
Wow. From that experience, you took away the fact that storytelling was your stock and trade essentially and what you wanted to make your life. From that, you went to Hollywood. You are basically the first Hollywood persona, Hollywood director writer that I’ve ever had on this show. I’m really curious to get a sense of what that was like and to what extent that it kind of cohered with your sort of emerging sense of self and your values and to what extent it sort of rubbed against that.
Birgitte (10:09)
Yeah, so, and you know, to be sure, I didn’t actually direct movies in Hollywood. I directed a few things outside, like on the indie circuit, but I did get a taste of that. I did, I was a production coordinator on Ants. Dragon Heart is another one. Truman was another one. It’s not tru—
Michael Gold (10:18)
Mm-hmm.
You worked on Ants, isn’t that right?
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
The Truman Show?
Birgitte (10:36)
No, not the Truman Show. It’s just called Truman. It’s basically about President Truman and the war times. So I mean, you know, I think part of it was that, and I think all immigrants will attest to this. When you come to a country that gives you social mobility, economic mobility, gives you this dream of you can be literally anything that you want to be if you apply yourself.
Michael Gold (10:39)
Gotcha.
Birgitte (11:05)
And I’m very aware that that’s not necessarily the case for certain cultures and colors in this country either, right? So, because I’m a white European, so I was given certain opportunities in terms of education, of course, and I took them and studied hard in high school, was able to get accepted into Stanford, which by the way, I didn’t even know Stanford existed.
because this was the age before the internet. This was 1989. So, you know, let’s just remember what that was like. No smartphones, really no internet. I was going to apply to Yale, but it just so happened that we had a neighbor from a professor from Stanford who had gotten transferred to Yale. He was our next door neighbor. And it was only because of him that I even discovered that there was something like
Michael Gold (11:38)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (12:02)
this university on the West Coast, no idea, had no idea. Applied, figured why not, know, ended up getting in, you know, another journey, another five hour plane ride to California. And that once again changed my life. And that was when my California life started. That’s when I went down to Hollywood, went to film school after Stanford. So, you know, it’s just, there’s all these stepping stones.
Michael Gold (12:05)
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (12:33)
because I think part of it was because I didn’t fit into the American high school, culturally speaking. I still felt very much like an outsider. So I just, I ended up studying most of the time instead of going to parties, you know, and that paid off.
Michael Gold (12:45)
Mm-hmm.
And so in Hollywood, again, like what did that experience teach you about yourself? How did you come to kind of realize what you wanted to do and how you wanted to sort of craft your career and what you cared about?
Birgitte (13:05)
Yeah, I think what it did for me was it certainly peeled away a lot of the layers of the onion of this mythology of Hollywood and what is movie making? How do you make a movie? Because I had the good luck to be hired right out of film school. I just did one year of film school in cinematography because I wanted to learn how to handle lights and camera angles. You know, I could have applied to what would have been very obvious, which is screenwriting, but I figured, okay, I know how to write. But what I don’t know enough of is how, how to put, how it’s put together on the screen so I can write to that. And that’s why I applied to cinematography. And then when I got out of school, I was hired on this film called Dragon Heart. And it was one of these serendipitous things where
Michael Gold (13:50)
you
Birgitte (14:01)
it was to be shot in Slovakia, which is my next door neighbor country. And so I kind of lied in the interview. said, they asked me, do you speak Slovak? And I go, yeah, which is half true because I understand it. I can’t really speak it fluently, but I completely understand it because we’re sister countries, sister languages. And then the interview was really funny too because the first assistant director kept talking about
Michael Gold (14:05)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (14:31)
visual effects, and I kept talking about camera because, I had come from film school having learned cinematography and I wanted to be a camera assistant on the film. And at one point I realized, I’m like, Birgitte, he’s trying to hire you on visual effects, so can you please talk about that? You know, so I switched, finally clicked in my brain, and I talked about my computer graphics experience that I had in Stanford and everything.
and ended up getting hired. So I was hired to work on the ILM team, Industrial Light and Magic. And this was the first, I think the first or second movie in the history of filmmaking that had as the lead character, a CGI character. So it was the dragon that was the lead. And Dennis Quaid was the knight who played kind of second fiddle to the dragon. And I remember he did have kind of a, you know,
Michael Gold (15:16)
Mm-hmm. Right.
Birgitte (15:28)
an ego issue with it. He’s like, I’m the, you know, I’m the star that he basically had to play second fiddle to a stick. And that stick was this 18 foot tall pole with a crossbar at a certain height for the dragon’s eyes. And he had to speak to that, right? Because that was the placeholder for the CGI dragon to be later placed into the scene. Guess who held that stick?
Michael Gold (15:30)
Mm-hmm.
It was you, right?
Birgitte (15:54)
That was me. So I’m there with
my military fatigues, my tool belt, and I’m standing there not looking at, because you’re not supposed to look at the sight line. You’re not supposed to look into the eyes of the actors when they’re doing their scene. Yeah, because it can take them out of the, it can distract them. Yeah, so I’m going like this and I’m holding the stick and he’s saying his lines. I mean, was just very, it was very strange for everybody.
Michael Gold (16:09)
Okay. Distract them.
Yeah, but you of course decided that you didn’t want to hold sticks or even really work on productions as your career essentially, right? So you moved into journalism and you’ve discussed stories about being asked what kind of car you drive and living on a houseboat and how that sort of shaped your perceptions of Hollywood and kind of helped you set you on your path. So if you could talk about that a little bit more perhaps.
Birgitte (16:33)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, and I did have a moment of epiphany to that led exactly to what you said. And that was on another film. It was a Disney film. God, I think it was the. I can’t even remember the name of it now. Rocket Man. was Rocket Man. We were in Houston and there was a second unit DP, director of photography, who was a woman. And it was literally.
Michael Gold (17:07)
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (17:15)
you know, her eyes and my eyes locked. And it was literally just one second because she was moving from having just spoken to someone and she was, you know, in the process of looking over to wherever else she would go. But she took a beat because I think she had to just collect her thoughts. And I looked at her, I was in the visual effects department again, and she looked at me and, and this is, I think what writers do. I don’t know if you, if your other writer friends tell you, you when I walk down the street, can imagine everybody’s life who’s just walking by me, and I could write a story about every single person. And so when I looked at her, I suddenly saw her entire life or what I imagined to be her entire life. How long did it take her to get to this position? She’s in her 40s. She’s only a second unit DP. She doesn’t look tremendously happy. I mean, again, could be all projection, right? But then I saw myself
Michael Gold (17:48)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Mm. Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (18:13)
thinking, am I going to have to take the same journey? And do I want that? You know, because I don’t, I want to write, I want to tell stories. I don’t want to haul cable and run generators. Although, like I said, great times, amazing people. It taught me a lot. Adventures, yes. And so that’s when, that’s when the spark flew and I said, all right, I really have to transition into writing. And so then I
Michael Gold (18:19)
Mm-hmm.
Mmm.
Adventures, yes.
Birgitte (18:43)
contacted the Hollywood Reporter, Daily Variety, they took me on. And this was again, early on, right? Where they really valued writers, there weren’t that many of us. I was, because I had been on set and I understood the technology that was already back then changing, I was one of the people who reported on the first digital cameras, the Sony PD-150s that came in and…
Michael Gold (18:54)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (19:08)
was a really good researcher. My editors always told me, you bring in the best numbers. Like, how did you get this information? And so that told me that it reinforced the sense that, yes, I can tell stories. I can do research. I can back it up with proof. I can interview people. I’ve interviewed all these kinds of people that they had me talk to, whether they’re DPs, like Darius Kanji, who shot Evita.
Michael Gold (19:14)
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (19:37)
Back then I remember speaking to him. In fact, I woke him up in his hotel room because I got the time wrong. Yeah, you know. And then after that, coming back to the Bay Area, then started the journey of, okay, you’re a writer, but what kind of writer? Right. So I started being a journalist. I’ve also done translation. I’ve done, like I said, high tech PR, marketing, technical writing.
Michael Gold (19:41)
Typical journalist story.
Birgitte (20:06)
And then when my daughter was born in 2010, that’s when I realized, all of this fiction writing that I had been doing in the background, right? I had like so many writers, drawers full of manuscripts. So I had screenplays. I had the screenplays I did when I was still living in Hollywood. And yes, I did live on a sailboat. So it was.
Michael Gold (20:30)
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (20:34)
It was just one of those things where you live on a sailboat and you write screenplays and in between you go work on movies to make some money. That was the life. That’s how it was. And so I had all of these short stories, beginnings of novels, various stages of completion. And when my daughter was born, I thought, wait, I’m mortal.
Michael Gold (20:42)
Right, right, right, right. Typical Hollywood story, yes.
Birgitte (21:03)
That’s when I first really thought about being mortal and having X number of years left, because what happens is you become a mom and then so your child’s life starts at year zero, whereas you’re 30 something, right? And so you say, when my child is 20, I’m gonna be, what? I’m gonna be this, know, 50 what? And so it kind of, you know, makes you realize that
Michael Gold (21:07)
Mmm.
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (21:32)
you’re not immortal like you thought when you were in your 20s. And that’s when I started publishing all the books.
Michael Gold (21:39)
Mm-hmm. And we’ve been talking now for like over 20 minutes and we haven’t even really discussed like climate or sustainability and how that imbued itself into your professional direction and into kind of the big picture of your career and what you care about and how you try to affect change in the world. So can you talk about those early formative experiences working with climate or about climate in climate and how that kind of entered your skill set?
Birgitte (22:10)
Yeah,
yeah, sure. So you remember that midlife crisis that I had, the early one that I mentioned? So after that, when I went to Spain, because I realized, well, my entire resume has nothing but Hollywood stuff on it, right? Whether it’s as a journalist or as a filmmaker, documentary filmmaker. So I felt like I should have under my belt something, I don’t want to say like more serious or more academic, but just
Michael Gold (22:16)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (22:38)
you know, something that touches the grass a little deeper, which is the International Relations Master’s program that I did in Spain, in Spanish. And so when I started LUCITÀ, that’s when it really began. So the way that I began my sustainability journey was as a documentary filmmaker. The very first project that LUCITÀ did, this was back in 2000, because I started the company in 1999.
Michael Gold (22:41)
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (23:09)
So in 2000, we were hired by this nonprofit called Forest Trends in Washington, DC. And we worked with some experts from the World Bank in forestry. we basically co-wrote and co-produced this docudrama about sustainable forestry. We went to Belize. I took my crew down to Belize, interviewed some of the forest trends had a program there. So that was amazing. That was a great trip.
Michael Gold (23:35)
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (23:39)
And we shot a documentary called Green Carbon, which then went around the world. It was distributed to, think, 30 plus countries. And then after that, I wanted to make another documentary series about climate change. And it was going to be a four-part series on the negative aspects, the positive aspects, and then two other episodes, one of which we wanted to focus on what are people doing? Because I didn’t want it to be all about doom and gloom and fear. Even though even back then it was a lot less scary than it is now. I had people on board like Dr. Bob Watson, who was the head of the IPCC back then, Dr. Tom Lovejoy, who has unfortunately since passed on, know, people from the USGCRP. So I had a good solid advisory board.
Michael Gold (24:11)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (24:33)
And then the administration changed from Democratic to Republican. And the companies that I had been speaking to about funding this project just kind of said, well, we don’t need to pretend like we care about climate change anymore. it’s just, I won’t say who they are,
Michael Gold (24:47)
Wow. Feels like history repeats itself though, doesn’t it?
Birgitte (24:52)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And so that’s when I realized, well, you I can continue tearing my hair out trying to find money for documentary film projects, or I could pivot. And so I pivoted, again, you know, going back to the writing communications aspect of who I am. And we started working with nonprofits on sustainability communications and designing websites for them. So we did that for about, I would say 10 years or so. And then, like I said, when my daughter was born, and that was just after the crash of 2008, 2009, the great recession. And so because we lost some clients due to that, one of them was actually a Honduran magazine that I was the international editor of. And I had convinced them to start talking about sustainability as part of business, as a good business strategy. And unfortunately they went belly up because they still had the old, you know, ad print advertising model, and that didn’t hold water in, especially in central America. So, you know, all of these dominoes started falling. And that’s, that’s when I published my first novel, The Jaguar and the Cacao Tree. And that story is really how I, you know, having worked with the nonprofits and NGOs in the United Nations and having gone to the WTO Ministerial Conference back in December of 1999, all that experience just finally kind of like when you make fine wine, you plant the grapes and you wait for them to grow and then you crush them, right? So that was my winemaking moment is I was sitting in one of the United Nations conferences and I’m trying to remember what year it was, 2000 something. It was here in California and and I had been a little frustrated because I had been attending these conferences many times. I attended them in Europe when I was in Spain. I continued here. And, you know,
Michael Gold (27:01)
This was the conference on specifically what exactly?
Birgitte (27:03)
They’re different.
So it depends. Different NGOs have conferences on different topics. You have desertification, have human rights, water issues, climate change, forestry, right? So they’re just different topics. But we always get together. This was actually part of the UN Global Compact, which was started by Kofi Annan back in 2000, 2001. And my company was one of the early signatory companies. We were like one of the first ones to sign it.
Michael Gold (27:10)
Mm-hmm.
and
Mm.
Birgitte (27:32)
And there were bigger companies to sign it to, know, big pharmaceuticals, big media companies. So there was a small group of us who met on the East Coast and then on the West Coast periodically. And the idea was to work on these issues, but I felt that there was a lot of talk and not enough action, at least from my liking. It just moved too slowly for me. And so I stopped going to those and I had
Michael Gold (27:42)
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (28:01)
not a crisis, but an introspective moment where I said, you know, how am I going to affect change? I’m not going to do it by sitting in conferences because I don’t, as the owner of a small business, I don’t have enough leverage. I don’t have enough power. You know, I can’t just go and just hobnob with the trade ministers because they’re not going to respect me as they would the secretary of state or
Michael Gold (28:19)
and
Birgitte (28:30)
one of the trade ministers from the US.
Michael Gold (28:31)
or the CEO
of like a Fortune 500, yeah.
Birgitte (28:35)
Exactly. It’s just that’s just what it is. It’s the truth. And so again, I came back to I’m a storyteller. Now, let me just hold that thought backtrack a few years earlier, where I had written a book about the sacred Mayan calendar. And you think, OK, what you know, what does this have to do with the price of eggs? So.
Michael Gold (28:37)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
And this
is the Mayan calendar that was supposed to expire in December of 2012, right? That bizarre panic.
Birgitte (29:03)
Well, yeah, that was the…
Yeah, and the reason that panic happened is because people fundamentally didn’t understand that the Mayan calendar is actually a calendar system. There are at least three different calendar cycles. There is the Tzolk’in, which is the sacred astrological calendar, which is 260 days. There’s the Haab, which is the agricultural calendar, which is based on the solar cycle, and that’s what they used for agriculture. And then there’s something called the Long Count.
Michael Gold (29:21)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (29:32)
And the Long Count counts these vast millennia long geological cycles, not human lifetime. These are vast cycles that kind of think of it as the large gear, the middle gear, and then the smaller gear. And that’s how these work. And the Long Count, it just so happened that one of its large cycles was to come to an end on December 21, 2012. But then another one would just start. It’s not like it’s the end of the world.
Michael Gold (29:40)
Mm-hmm.
Well, some people thought it was but clearly they were misinformed.
Birgitte (30:02)
Yes, and
yeah, and I remember we had a Facebook page, we still do actually, and some people were upset with us and they would post on the Facebook page, they were, yeah.
Michael Gold (30:13)
They were upset the world didn’t end.
Well, you know, there’s few nuts in every bag, right?
Birgitte (30:21)
Yeah, and I’m going, really? I mean, if a prophecy like that didn’t come true, I’d be celebrating, not being mad, you know? I guess they had to return the bunker. I don’t know. So anyway, I had written the book about the sacred, the Tzolk’in, the astrological calendar, and I had written it because I saw that the Maya didn’t have a voice of their own, that there were a lot of white Western authors who would write books.
Michael Gold (30:27)
Yeah, right, right, right.
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (30:50)
about the calendar and they would either intentionally or unwittingly misinterpret it. And they, you know, because they were white Western men, they got up, the publishers were a lot more interested in publishing them than they were in the Maya because A, the Maya don’t speak English. They don’t have the marketing dollars. They don’t have the reach, you know. And so to me, it was like yet another way they were being colonized. You know, their culture was being appropriated once again. And so I said, all right,
Michael Gold (30:56)
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (31:19)
I’m going to write a book. I’m going to talk to one of the elders. And I did. I called him up on the phone in Guatemala, interviewed him, and wrote the book to say, is how the Maya really approached their calendar, and try to bring it as closely as I can to the modern audience, but still respecting their culture. So a part of that book talked about the creation myths of the Maya, which involve cacao and corn being brought to mankind by the, humankind by the gods. So the reason this is important for the book about the jaguar and the cacao tree is because I was thinking about, know, how do people change, how can we change people’s behavior? Because fear isn’t really going to do it, right?
Michael Gold (31:51)
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (32:17)
then I thought of that quote by the Senegalese engineer, Baba Dioum, which says, in the end, we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. And we will understand only what we are taught. So it goes, you know, if you really think about it, it goes back to education, right? Elementary, like how, when you’re a child,
Michael Gold (32:31)
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (32:45)
What are the first things that inform your world? For example, for me, there was no plastic in my world. I mean, we had a car, but we cooked at home. Nothing was processed. Nothing was prepackaged. That just did not exist. That was one thing. So it was that connection to food for me. And also, I had grown up, again, because there were no smartphones.
Michael Gold (32:53)
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (33:14)
No internet. grew up with two television channels, one in Czech, one in Polish. So effectively one, because I really couldn’t speak Polish. That’s too far removed even beyond Slovak. And then it shut off at 10 PM. There was like snow. There’s no programming at all. So, you know, my TV time was five minutes a day. And so I read books and I read The Hobbit when I was eight years old in Czech.
Michael Gold (33:26)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (33:43)
kudos to whoever translated that. I read a French mythology, like a French romance, medieval romance novel, romantic novel, I should say. I read Chinese mythology. I read Polynesian mythology. mean, just, you know, how did the world get created? How do different cultures around the world see the world? And I think
Michael Gold (34:10)
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (34:12)
that actually has a lot to do with sustainability. You we talk about the global South. You can’t talk about the global South unless you’ve actually gone there, read their stories, talked to the people, maybe even lived with them. Otherwise you are multiple steps removed. And so all of that, the love for food, the connection to the land and this love for mythology coalesced into this story of the history and the mythology of cacao.
Michael Gold (34:25)
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (34:41)
because it is a, it’s an ancient food. It’s a sacred food, 5,300 years old. Like it’s like bread, wine, corn, chocolate. Those are our sacred ancient foods. And if we, to that quote that I just read off, if we can understand cacao, then we will learn to love it on a much deeper level than just, oh, this is good stuff, right?
Michael Gold (35:07)
It tastes good. Yeah.
Birgitte (35:09)
It tastes good. It’s, you know, I’m going to buy some of it for Halloween or Valentine’s Day, whatever, but I don’t really understand it. It’s like, where does milk come from? Okay. Hopefully most people will know cows, but where does cacao come from? Where does chocolate come from? Right. And there’s this very deep mythology that, that is intertwined with cacao. So I created this story that I always describe as the Chronicles of Narnia mixed with the golden compass and dipped in chocolate.
Michael Gold (35:16)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm. Hmm.
So this is a fiction novel, right?
Birgitte (35:41)
Very, yes, historic, lot of history in it, lot of history of chocolate for sure, but yeah, fiction all the way.
Michael Gold (35:47)
Mm-hmm. so it sounds like you’ve cultivated in yourself a desire and a practice of bringing these big concepts of sustainability and climate and mankind’s place in the natural world and communion with nature to a very intimate space, right? Like thinking about cacao as almost a metaphor for all these things. Is that accurate? And I guess like, how did you decide in a way that these questions and these topics are what you wanted to focus on in a professional sense?
Birgitte (36:27)
Yeah, think I would say it’s the same reason why entertainment, tourism, sports are the most successful industries, no matter what economic downturn we’re in. People still want to be entertained. I think we’re hardwired for stories. We haven’t been on this planet for that long if you really think about it compared to the overall geological span of the planet. We’ve been here only for a few seconds, right, as they say. And so those stories, that proclivity toward telling stories, I mean, stories are even like when you gossip about your neighbor, that’s telling a story, right? Or when a politician gets up on stage and he says, whatever he thinks he needs to say to get the votes of the people. He’s also telling a story. so commercials tell a story, films tell a story. We’re always telling ourselves stories. And those of us who are storytellers, we can choose to be disingenuous about the way we tell stories. We can lie, we can manipulate, we can cajole, we can frighten, or we can be responsible.
Michael Gold (37:35)
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (37:53)
and supportive and empowering and encouraging. So to me, if you really want to change people’s behavior, you should tell the story of that thing, whether it’s plastics, whether it’s food, air pollution, food, emissions, whatever it is, tell the story, but tell it responsibly and tell it with love. That’s what I would say.
Michael Gold (38:18)
And you have sustainability and climate and those kind of topics very much in your manifesto kind at LUCITÀ. Do you feel like, to what extent do you feel like they need to be foregrounded in the work you do versus kind of addressed through kind of more oblique or more allegorical or metaphorical ways? Like how do you strike that balance? Because it’s a challenge for a lot of communicators in this space and people who do kind of the things that you do or at least want to.
Birgitte (38:48)
Yeah, yeah. that’s me on the fiction side, right? That’s the publishing side of me. There’s another side of me, obviously running a business, we have clients. So we work with clients. And to answer your question, I’ll give you a very specific example, which actually first sparked with a FinTech client, because we don’t do just sustainability.
This fintech client actually was in a net zero building, so they were doing all the right things, materially speaking, even though they’re in fintech. I was doing their marketing and I was one of the first people to do their marketing because they were a startup at the time and they’re really big now. Their name is Clover, which is the main competitor to Square. At the time, they were having
Michael Gold (39:20)
Mm-hmm.
I’ve heard of Clover, yeah.
Birgitte (39:43)
a bit of a challenge marketing their point of sale devices to the small business merchants. Like any other tech company, they would focus on the bells and whistles and the features and the software and look at the beautiful. The hardware was beautiful. It’s beautifully designed. They were called the Apple of FinTech, but people weren’t really responding. I said,
Michael Gold (39:56)
specs. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (40:09)
why don’t we tell the stories of the merchants who use your products? That’s what you’re missing here. And it’s not about telling them in the third person, let’s interview them and let’s let them tell their story. Now being a journalist, right? There’s a right way and a wrong way to interview someone you can, like you’re interviewing me, we’re just having a conversation. We’re not going down a list of, you know, from the product team, make sure you get them to talk about this feature and make sure.
Michael Gold (40:15)
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (40:38)
That’s not an interview. That’s not a story. You know, I asked them, what’s your origin story? Tell me about that. And they just opened up the floodgates. know, everybody had a different story. You had someone who’s a boutique retailer, someone else who started a chicken wings restaurant in Florida, right? There’s all these different stories, which were amazing. And the most
Michael Gold (40:40)
Right. Right.
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (41:06)
Interesting story was one in a cafe in New Jersey bought by a couple whose daughter had Down syndrome. And they said, did you know that when you’re 18 and you have Down syndrome, you know, all that support, all the social support that you got goes away. You’re considered an adult and good luck to you. And they’re like, but how is a person with Down syndrome supposed to just, you know, go out on their own? And so they bought this cafe.
Michael Gold (41:26)
Mm.
Birgitte (41:34)
and they hired only people with intellectual disabilities. And it turned out that Clover’s interface was so intuitively designed that these people could take orders, could have customers pay their bills, no problem. The customers were stunned because of course, usual idea of someone who has an intellectual disability, you think that they can’t do anything, which is of course not true. And so that turned into a story
Michael Gold (41:50)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (42:04)
not overtly about Clover. It was a very human story, a story of empowerment, know, people with intellectual disabilities. And yes, Clover’s there, you know. So you don’t constantly want to just throw your client or your marketing points into people’s faces. Just be real and tell the real story. They get it. They understand, okay, it’s Clover, you know, here it’s on Clover’s website. We get it. We don’t need to be
Michael Gold (42:14)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (42:34)
whacked over the head with it. And I think that’s what a lot of communicators, lot of marketers miss.
Michael Gold (42:36)
Yeah.
Yeah, mean, kind of whacking over the head, I think is one of the Achilles heels of the climate movement in a lot of senses is that a lot of people feel like they’re being whacked over the head and they’re being lectured to and they’re being read a list of facts and figures or conversely, they’re being shown a photo of a polar bear struggling on an iceberg. it, know, how, what do you think about—how would you advise climate communicators on the better ways maybe to get their message across and resonate with more people who, know, for whom this isn’t really a very salient topic or they’re just sick of it?
Birgitte (43:23)
Yeah, I think before we get there, we need to talk about why is it that climate change is failing to resonate? I mean, it’s resonating now more because we’re living it, right? We’re living the crisis part of the climate change equation, but it’s still, I would say it’s still failing to resonate. And then we can go into the strategy and tactics. So three reasons. One is that
Michael Gold (43:40)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (43:54)
climate change, the idea or the concept of climate changing has a very personal, different personal meaning for everybody. Everybody has a different lived experience of what that means, right? And that is because climate is a vast, massive, convoluted, completely interconnected planetary system. It literally is the embodiment of the theory of chaos.
You’ve got the butterfly over there in Asia and a tornado in the US. And apparently they’re connected somehow. So in order to wrap your brain around that, about what climate really means, it depends on where you live and who you are, how much money, assets, and power that you have. So you can have a family living next to a coal plant, probably not in a great neighborhood, they will have a very different sense, very different lived experience of the climate than a billionaire who can jet off to Tahiti to surf on his private yacht, right? So, and those are extremes. And most of us don’t want to have to be revolutionaries or activists. All we want is we want a good life. We want to get married, have kids, enjoy our lives, do something meaningful in our careers.
Michael Gold (45:12)
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (45:19)
And when we have to worry about the climate, in addition to the genocides and the wars in other countries, our healthcare, our finances, our education, the safety of our children in our schools, it’s just, it’s too much, right? No one person can handle it. So that’s number one, why it fails to resonate. Number two is people have diverging goals that actually share the same root.
What does that mean? A regular person can’t spend a lot of energy on the climate and change their behavior. That is the same reason that a political leader or corporate executive also cannot. That might be a little counterintuitive, but here’s why it’s not. It’s a different level, a different scale, but at the end of the day, it’s all rooted in the same truth, and that is that we care closest, we care most about what is closest to us, what we’re used to, and what we understand and live daily. In other words, what our brains are wired to, right? We have that lived experience. So sure, there’s a difference between the person who wants to make an impact, but perceives themselves as being powerless, which is probably most people, and
Michael Gold (46:32)
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (46:45)
the politician who does have the power to change things, but he cares more about staying in power and appeasing the people keeping him there. So you see that they’re both, nevermind the value judgment, nevermind what the it is, they’re both paying attention to what is closest to them, right? So that’s the same root, but the goals are completely different. And then number three is conditioning for comfort. That’s what I call it. We are taught and conditioned by our
Michael Gold (47:00)
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (47:14)
educational, political, economic, and media systems to desire convenience and comfort. And that works, and also probably by having lived in caves for so long. And so that works really well because we’re naturally wired to ensure that we have resources and safety. We seek pleasure and we seek to avoid pain, right? And this is going back to why social media, entertainment, sports, tourism,
Michael Gold (47:21)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm
Birgitte (47:43)
constant quest of money, that’s why it takes up so much of people’s lives. So given these three things, what’s a communicator to do, right? A climate communicator. How do you break through all that? And especially post this election. So a lot of people are very upset, devastated, both emotionally and materially, if they were on the chopping block, right? Other people are ecstatic. It’s really quite
Michael Gold (47:53)
How do you break through all that?
Birgitte (48:12)
something to watch the media kind of to the left of center and then to watch the media to the right of center and maybe further to the right of center. They’re like two different planets and you really think, wow, are we on the same planet? And so no wonder we can’t really understand each other. so we communications professionals
Michael Gold (48:27)
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (48:42)
We cannot expect to keep using the same strategies as before and get a different result, right? There’s a famous quote about that. So even if you write a press release about something that your client did that’s actually great, a certain percentage of the public will naturally assume it’s greenwashing just because it’s a company, right? So talking and advertising on their own as they were before no longer work. You have to know.
Michael Gold (49:00)
Mm. Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (49:11)
earn the trust and the respect through action and through relationships, the way that you treat people. Hello, UnitedHealthcare. So in a way, it’s back to the good old ways of doing business and fostering relationships and certainly not using AI to read resumes and determine who gets health care and who doesn’t. That’s not the way. So what that looks like directly on the ground, think,
Michael Gold (49:13)
you
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (49:41)
Yellow Dot Studios is doing a great job. They’re using humor, you know, a little bit of satire, a little bit of sarcasm. I would say all the late night shows, my God, I mean, if everybody could just take a standup comedy course, I think that, you know, the humor really does break through because there’s just been so much pain and so much negativity. It’s…
Michael Gold (49:46)
Mm.
Mmm.
Yeah, you’re not the first guest I’ve had that’s mentioned the use of humor as a tactic in sustainability and climate communications. Have you used it yourself and for a client or in your own work?
Birgitte (50:18)
Yeah, we’re about to. can’t say what we’re going to do. But there is a client that, yeah, just watch us April fools. But yeah, this is in electric vehicles. But we did do actually Valentine’s Day just happened. so one of my clients was in the electric vehicle space. They provide extended warranties. And so
Michael Gold (50:22)
Okay.
Okay. This is in sustainability specifically. Interesting. Okay, interesting.
Birgitte (50:44)
It just so happens that they launched their extended warranty in 2019 on Valentine’s Day. And I said, you didn’t. And they said, we did. We didn’t write, we didn’t mean to, we just did, you know, because they were like so heads down working. And I said, well, that’s brilliant. Why don’t I write a sonnet? And I did. It’s, could, I could send you the link. you know, it’s the, How Do I Love Thee sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And I just.
Michael Gold (50:55)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Fabulous.
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (51:11)
wrote a version for, how do I love my EV? Let me count the ways. And so that’s not humor, but it’s fun. So either fun or humor, you know.
Michael Gold (51:16)
my gosh.
Mm-hmm.
It’s different than what people expect, right? It’s not the same old, same old for sure. So, Birgitte, you have a very strong sense of your own kind of worldview, your own theory of change, essentially, around how to communicate and around how to affect behavior change in others.
Birgitte (51:24)
Yeah.
Michael Gold (51:40)
What’s the interface with the clients like? When you’re going in for the pitch or when you’re working on projects, how do you make sure that the client is on board with what you are delivering? Because you’re not just a service provider, you’re clearly a true thought partner with your clients in lot of senses.
Birgitte (51:57)
Yeah, I would say that, you know, first you got to pick your clients right. I mean, it’s kind of like, you know, who do you date, right, on a personal level? You really have to have a good chemistry with the people that you’re working with, because otherwise, it’s just, it doesn’t, you know, sooner or later, it’s going to tank. So, and then it becomes so much easier, you know, and then it’s really not a hard lift, because you both have, or you all, I should say,
Michael Gold (52:02)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (52:27)
You all have a similar goal. You all want to get there. if they’re the types of people who are not, it’s not about their personal ego. It’s about the project and the impact of that project or product or service or whatever it is, right? That is true team effort. If they’re those types of people, it just, the story kind of writes itself. know, I mean, we were just on a call before you.
And we were brainstorming about something and I said, well, how about this? And then, you know, their VP of sales said, how about this one? Yay. And then it just coalesces and you come up with the best thing that you yourself couldn’t have come up with. So that’s how I like to work. mean, sure, I can bring in a lot of my strategy and I do, right? Because I have, and I think it’s also very helpful that I am.
Michael Gold (53:18)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (53:23)
a literary author because I bring that storytelling to the table. I don’t look at it just from, we have to do a press release and we have to do Google ad copy. I literally don’t think like that. I go straight to the jugular. I go straight to the story. What’s the story here? And what’s great is that some of my client teams, they’re really picking up on that and they’re starting to think like that. So then I no longer have to do all the heavy lifting, right? Because I can’t
Michael Gold (53:27)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (53:53)
I can only service so many clients at a time, so I like to teach them how to fish, as it were.
Michael Gold (53:58)
Mm-hmm. And in terms of the value system, how do you know that the clients are aligned with what you care about? I mean, you have strong views about sustainability, climate, et cetera. What’s the kind of process that you, or the sort of criteria that you look at there?
Birgitte (54:14)
Yeah, I mean, they define themselves really, know, electric vehicles. I mean, sure, everything, you know, there are certain aspects of the production process that are still fraught, right? The rare earth, the metals and all of that, where are they mined? But it’s very hard to find an industry that is completely squeaky clean. So, you know, does that mean you basically curl up under a rock and don’t do any work? No, you…
Michael Gold (54:36)
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (54:43)
you work at it, right? Now there are certain sectors that I will not work with no matter how great the people are. know, tobacco, guns, fossil oil companies, there are certain sectors that I will not work with. But given that, you know, food, marine carbon capture, decarbonization of buildings, there is so much out there that’s possible that it then no longer becomes part of, you know, which sector, it’s rather, what is the story that they’re telling and who are they as a people? Because I want to have an, it’s not just about having an enjoyable time, it’s about not having to butt heads. Because I found that too, you know, I’ve worked with some groups where they’re in one of my preferred sectors, but the chemistry isn’t there or
Michael Gold (55:31)
Hmm.
Birgitte (55:42)
or they’re actually not as ethical as I thought, which then becomes shocking, right? Like you say, how can these people who are in this industry be like this behind closed doors? Well, that happens too. Whether they’re nonprofits, whether they’re corporations, they’re people. So you get, it’s all kinds, even in this space.
Michael Gold (55:54)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Right.
Right, of course. And then how do you kind of pay it forward? Like how do you mentor others? How do you kind of bring up, know, sort of spread your lessons and your sort of sense of what works more broadly?
Birgitte (56:21)
Yeah, I definitely, I mentor younger people, younger professionals. I give some of my time pro bono, for example. That’s another way, right? I will discount my rates. If there’s a startup that can’t afford the full rate, I will give them a nice healthy discount just so that I can work with them. I’ll secretly not bill them for some of the hours, right? mean, so there’s so many different ways. I would say,
Michael Gold (56:37)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (56:50)
a mix of volunteering, mentoring, and pro bono, and discounted work.
Michael Gold (56:56)
Mm-hmm. And I guess just of thinking back about, you know, all the work you’ve done and the sort of twists and turns and the different swings that your career has taken, is there anything that you would maybe tell your younger self about the trajectory that you’ve chosen, maybe help yourself shape the future that you’re ultimately doing now?
Birgitte (57:21)
Yeah, how many things you said? Three things? Yeah. What would I tell my younger self? I would first and foremost tell myself, start publishing sooner. Don’t wait until you become a mom. For Christ’s sake. You know, I still have manuscripts that need to be finished. It’s just like, how do I get 48 hours in a day?
Michael Gold (57:23)
As many as you know, maybe we’ll cap it at three, as many as you want before up to that
Mm-mm.
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (57:48)
So would say, yes, number one, start publishing sooner. Get your words out there. Get your message out there. And that doesn’t necessarily mean just books, right? I mean, I have a newsletter called The Muse. I should have started that sooner. You know, all this stuff. Number two, I would say to trust in my own power and intelligence more. And that…
Michael Gold (58:03)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (58:15)
Again, I think it comes from having been born into a country where you’re suppressed, your voice is suppressed, you’re not encouraged to speak out. So, you know, being both a girl and, you know, having grown up in a communist country, that’s like a double whammy against you. You’re basically taught to just, you know, just be quiet, do it like the, you know, like the boys are doing it because you’re a girl. I mean, that’s literally how I grew up.
And I think a lot of women will be nodding their heads when they hear that, especially us in this generation, right? And then I think the third big one is to be a lot more financially savvy and forward-looking in terms of personal finances. So what does that mean? That means that when I was 20, I mean, I hadn’t had…
any financial education, either at home or in school or anywhere. And then when you couple that with, you know, being a dreamer and being a writer and wanting to travel, like, you just, you don’t think about financial stability that early in your life, but you should, right? Because if I had, let’s say I had put more into my 401k, the small one that I had when I was at the PR company, I’d probably be a multimillionaire many times over now.
Michael Gold (59:18)
Hmm.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (59:42)
You know, and
Michael Gold (59:42)
Hehehehehe
Birgitte (59:44)
then you could really help, right? So it’s that it’s not about money for its own sake. It’s about like when you’re on the plane, put on your own mask first before you help someone else. It’s the same thing with finances. You can’t help others if you’re not financially grounded. I look at all these billionaires and I think, you know, you look at someone like MacKenzie Bezos or I don’t know what her last name is now, but
Michael Gold (59:56)
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Birgitte (1:00:11)
the former wife of Jeff Bezos, look how much she has done. And then you look at them, the boys, not that this is a gender thing, I don’t wanna say that, but if you have billions, maybe you should think about where you’re spending that money.
Michael Gold (1:00:18)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
And kind of as a final question, what thinking to the end of your career, and of course, you’re nowhere near to the end of your career, but what would you want your last word to be? What would you want your epitaph to be about the contribution you made and the change you were able to create in climate and sustainability or otherwise?
Birgitte (1:00:48)
Yeah, hopefully I have another 50 years. I would say, you know, if I could say or people could say that I inspired people to think and to think for themselves and to see the multicolored, sometimes difficult nuance in life and to use their minds and hearts for good, then I will sleep very well for the rest of eternity.
Michael Gold (1:01:18)
Well, that’s a wonderful place to end. Birgitte Rasine, thank you so much. This was a wonderful conversation.
Birgitte (1:01:24)
Thank you so much, Michael. I loved every minute.