Last week, we had a small company offsite. You know how these go: Brainstorm for a couple days, everyone has homework. One of my tasks is to post about why I started one5c, something I have actively avoided doing.
I don't like posting about myself. It feels thirsty and fake. I prefer to celebrate Corinne and Sara Kiley's work, how they've 7x'd the newsletter list in mere months. Or how, along with Gabriella and Liza, they launched our terrific sustainable eating newsletter, Cool Beans. I'm stalling.
Here's the short version: In August 2021, I flew cross-country to a fancy car show. A couple days before my flight, the first section of the 6th IPCC Assessment Report dropped. I read the 32-page executive summary, and, like many others, couldn't stop thinking about it. Then, waiting to board my flight, I downloaded the entire 2,000-plus-page report; I spent the entire plane ride devouring it. I read it in the car to my hotel. I read it in my hotel room. I couldn't stop.
I'd been a science and tech journalist for 20 years; I understood the danger of the climate emergency. But this was the first time I'd encountered it in such stark terms.
More importantly (for this story), it was the first time I'd read something like this as a dad.
At breakfast the next day, colleagues and I wargamed a meeting with an important auto exec. Out of nowhere, I blurted "the only thing that matters is the environment." My mouth seemed to move on its own, some tendril of my lizard brain playing puppets with my tongue. My colleagues gave me the "Donny, you are way out of your element" look and kept talking.
I didn't care. I just kept thinking about the environment—and the irony of this event: literal smog-belching cars on an unnaturally manicured golf course that might, in my lifetime, end up underwater... due in part to the emissions of those very vehicles.
I thought about how I'd have to hurry to show my daughter how the gnarled cypress trees cling to the sharp edges of the Northern California coastline. I wondered where the coastline would even be when she was my age, or if people could live there. I thought about how much she and her generation would have to endure just to survive the world we were leaving them.
And I decided to do something about it. Media is the only thing I know how to do, so, on the flight home, I started working on a new media project. One that, instead of trying to scare us all, would inspire us to action. Once home, I called Howard Mittman, and asked him if I could run it by him. He said it had legs. I started working on my exit plan.
The rest is pretty typical startuppy stuff: meetings. Reporting. More meetings. I've spent the past few years learning about sustainability in public—and that can be humbling. But the other day my daughter asked me what I do when I'm at work. I droned on about writing and editing and inking partnerships, and then she asked, "and doing that is going to save the world?"
And I said yes.
