Climate communication is entering a new era. Here’s what it actually looks like.

A movement moving through its stages 

Li has spent years watching the language around climate shift. Denial gave way to fear, then anger, then guilt. She compares it to the stages of grief. “That’s actually a really good representation of the emotional spectrum someone goes through when they’re experiencing grief,” she said. In her view, none of those stages were wrong. They were necessary at the time. But the movement has matured past them and is moving into what she calls the mass era. 

Morality into materiality 

One idea Li wants retired is the individual carbon footprint, an idea first popularised by oil companies. “It’s intentional and strategic and systemic,” she said. Instead of shaming people for flying or driving an older car, she argues the conversation should focus on what actually shapes people’s daily lives: energy, food, transport and insurance. “Make it tangible,” she said. “So not saying you have to sacrifice anything, but saying this will help you navigate your grocery bills or your insurance premiums.” 

Leaving innovation theatre behind 

Li is sceptical of what she calls innovation theatre: the carbon capture technology, carbon credits and start-up solutions that took over the climate conversation because they were fundable and novel. “Community building is not fundable in the way that a carbon technology is,” she said. She points to the Earthshot Prize’s network of finalists, including Coastal 500, which has brought together more than 500 mayors to protect coastal habitats, as an example of the hyper-local, community-led work she believes is the real climate movement. 

What she thinks companies owe the public 

Li doesn’t think meeting a sustainability target deserves applause. “That’s your due diligence, that’s baseline, that’s table stakes,” she said. In her view, the lobbying and regulatory push, the work of getting governments to move, should stay internal. Companies with the resources to do that work have a responsibility to do it quietly, not announce it. 

The public-facing side is different. There, she wants companies to bring the consumer into the story: where a product comes from, what it’s made of, the journey it took to reach them. Done well, she says, that transparency doesn’t need to be a pitch. It can just be visual, educational, and let people engage with it as much as they want. 

Trust your own experience 

With disinformation on the rise, and London’s mayor recently launching a global initiative to tackle it, Li’s advice for cutting through the noise is simple: trust what you’ve lived. “We almost live in an age of content pollution,” she said. With close to a third of Americans already reporting direct experience of climate change, her suggestion is to measure what you read online against what you’re actually seeing and feeling day to day. 

Choosing hope 

Her view on feeling hopeful for the future when it comes to the health of people and planet? Not blind optimism, but something more deliberate. “Hope is always a choice,” she said, comparing it to the devotion football and basketball fans bring to their teams. “If you can have hope for your soccer team to win the World Cup, then you can have hope for sure that we have a thriving, livable planet.” 

Screw It – Episode 13 – Full Conversation Transcript

Editorial note: this transcript has been cleaned up for readability, filler words, false starts and repeated words from the original captioning have been removed, and some clear transcription errors have been corrected. Wording and content otherwise reflect what was said as closely as possible. 

Kat Wirth: Welcome to Screw It. I’m joined by Sophia Li, award-winning journalist and climate advocate. Today we’re talking about the storytelling problem inside the climate crisis. Your background is in fashion. You worked at Vogue, you helped develop Vogue.com when that was new, and then you moved into the climate space. What made you make that transition? 

Sophia Li: Thank you, Kat, so much for having me. I believe all roads lead to climate. We often view it as a very niche part of the world, like, oh, are you in the climate industry or not. But very soon, everyone will be touching climate, because it’s all encompassing. Some of us get there a little earlier, and I’m very fortunate that I did. When I was at Vogue, we covered the Paris Climate Agreement, COP21, in 2016. We gave Christiana Figueres and everyone there the Vogue treatment. It was Trump’s first administration, so we covered a lot relating to climate impact, Standing Rock, a lot of political stories, I guess you could say quote unquote political. I loved those stories so much. I studied fashion business and journalism, but I very quickly realised these are the stories that need to be put out into the world, the stories that everyone needs to be clicking on. We were also producing stories like Kim Kardashian’s date night look and getting 7 million views in 24 hours. And I was like, okay, but we should be, as storytellers and journalists, holding the responsibility to ensure the public gets the stories that are necessary for our evolution and growth and unity. It’s not just about capitalism or consumerism, or making people feel less than. So when I left, I didn’t know I was going to get into climate. I knew it was one of the things I was very interested in. 

Kat: Did you have anything lined up, or did you just decide it was time to move into something different? 

Sophia: I did have something lined up, but it was with another big fashion conglomerate. At that point I was almost turning 30, still in my late 20s, and I was still letting my ego be in the driver’s seat and making my decisions. I was still very attached to the identity that the institution of Vogue and Condé Nast brought me. I can say now I drank the Kool-Aid, and that was just part of being in my 20s. I left thinking I would go to this other big institution, they were creating a role for me, and very soon I realised that’s actually not what I want. But I needed that safety net to be able to go and do it, because climate wasn’t what it is now. That was around 2018, 2019. The Paris Agreement had happened, but fashion wasn’t really touching climate. I worked on a lot in sustainability and fashion first, then I started working a lot with the United Nations. Very quickly, when you work on one injustice problem in a sector like fashion, you understand the human labour costs, the resource costs of the natural world, the political implementation. And you realise very shortly that if you want to work on solving the injustices in fashion, you really have to look at climate at a large scale. That’s kind of how it trickled in. All roads lead to climate, some of us just get there earlier than others. 

Kat: Has your relationship to the fashion industry changed since? 

Sophia: Oh, a thousand percent, yes. I’ve had this love-hate relationship with fashion for most of my life. It was very much love. Retail was my first job. I started working retail when I was about fourteen and a half, they allowed me to work at Limited Too because I was almost fifteen. Then I worked at Banana Republic, very American brands, which is partly why I studied fashion business with journalism. I loved fashion, working at Vogue was a dream of mine for years. But more than fashion, I loved storytelling and the things that shift how we perceive the world and move through it, which is why I loved fashion in the first place, because it’s how we interact with the world. After I had this awakening moment of understanding how toxic the fashion industry is, not just the chemicals, but toxicity in every form, I really broke up with fashion. I didn’t shop for years. I would only shop while travelling, like if I was in Japan, I’d go to the local ceramics shops, that was how I indulged as a consumer. Recently I’ve come back around to loving fashion because I’ve met so many incredible designers and people looking at fashion from a holistic standpoint and reinventing the supply chain. They’re doing it with such heart and care that I’m like, why wouldn’t I love it. It was one of my first loves. Food and fashion, we touch them both every day. 

Kat: No, absolutely. It makes me think, I read an article in Vogue about your wedding, and it seemed like the perfect mix of fashion and climate. You had climate advocates there with your friends and family doing speeches, and you managed to mix in humour and warmth. You had a rap battle? 

Sophia: Yeah, I did. That’s so funny. 

Kat: Do you think, because I think climate in general has had a branding problem, a communications problem, and you’ve touched on that before as well, do you think part of the solution, or what we need to see more of, is humanising it, mixing in humour with the seriousness we’re seeing? 

Sophia: Yes, yes, a thousand percent. The climate problem is a human problem. At the end of the day, humans are so moved by a sense of playfulness, a sense of silliness, a sense of humour. There’s nothing funny about climate, but you can have levity and playfulness while moving through it. One of the greatest acts of resistance to being a functional human being under late-stage capitalism is to activate your joy, your playfulness, the things that money cannot buy, that cannot be commodified. That’s a sense of humour. A lot of people meet me and say, wow, you’re so much more playful in person, so much funnier, but you only talk about climate online. And I’m like, no, a sense of humour is how I move through life. I picked my partner because he’s the person I laugh the most with. Those are my friends too. Laughter has to be part of the movement because it’s so ingrained in us as humanity. That’s one of the ways we can shift our climate communications, and we definitely need a rebrand for climate communications. 

Kat: In terms of how we communicate around climate, I think it’s gone through a few different phases or eras. There’s been the scaremongering, the guilt era, the carbon footprint, the moral outrage, Greta Thunberg and those movements. Why do you think they haven’t been successful in achieving what they needed to achieve? 

Sophia: I’d actually reframe that. They have been successful in getting society to where we needed to be at the point we understood the climate crisis, and now we’ve evolved beyond that movement. If you look at those movements, the first was denial. We had a lot of data and there was denial. Then fear-mongering. Then anger. That’s actually a really good representation of the emotional spectrum someone goes through when experiencing grief. With individual grief, we go through denial, we go through being scared, then anger, and then many other phases. A sense of humour helps too. When you lose a loved one, at some point you just want to laugh. Then at the very end of the grief cycle come the sceptics. So I wouldn’t say those movements were unhelpful, I think they were necessary, that’s exactly what we needed at that point in time. We needed to be enraged, we needed to be scared. But now we’ve almost matured out of those emotions, so what happens next. Just like with the grief cycle, you keep evolving as humans, so as a collective, what does that look like. I think as a collective we now need to move into the mass era, and there are some short-term and long-term goals that matter here. For the short term, there’s the morality piece, everyone was shamed a lot, the individual carbon footprint, which, by the way, was created by BP, one of the biggest oil companies, and that was intentional and strategic and systemic. We need to shift away from that whole morality piece. Instead of saying, you flew to London, and I’m like, yes, this is my job, I sadly couldn’t take a sailboat here, or, you drive a car, and I’m like, yeah, I actually drive my dad’s twenty-year-old car instead of an electric one, because founders of EV companies have said it’s more sustainable to keep an old car running than to use the resources for a new one, depending on how much you’re driving. Instead of you, you, you, you, we need to move from morality policing into people understanding it’s a materiality conversation. According to Yale’s climate communication research, the things that matter most to voters in the US are energy, food, transportation and insurance. Climate impacts all four, insurance premiums, food prices, flights and trains delayed because of heat domes and heatwaves, energy costs, the Strait of Hormuz, which we’re experiencing right now. Those are the things people care about, that touch their daily lives, so that’s where we need to focus, on how addressing climate and using the solutions we have changes how people get their energy, food, transportation and insurance. Morality into materiality, make it tangible. Instead of shaming people for what they do, show them how this helps, not that they have to sacrifice something, but that it helps them navigate their grocery bills or their insurance premiums. 

Kat: Sort of like a how-to guide, and empowering them. 

Sophia: Having them feel they have ownership in this movement, because a lot of the time it feels too big, too abstract, too far off, 2050 goals. It’s happening today, right now. I think it would be remiss not to mention the heat dome in the UK. The UK just broke record temperatures in June, the last time it was this hot was in 1976, there are school closures. France also has a heat dome right now, they’ve limited visiting hours at the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower because it’s too hot, they’ve restricted drinking water in public fountains because it’s too hot. I was in an Uber here and the driver said all the schools are closed because they don’t have the infrastructure, aircon, and the kids forget to drink water, which is a health risk for them. So instead of saying the climate crisis is coming, here’s our 2050 carbon neutral goal, it’s, this is a Tuesday afternoon for a parent who has to deal with the kids not having school and still go to work, and the tube or the subway is down. I had someone yesterday who was supposed to fly in for a panel but was stuck in Copenhagen for four hours on the tarmac because flights into Heathrow were being limited. This isn’t some far-off thing, the climate crisis is here right now, impacting your day-to-day life. It’s like a Tuesday afternoon, how are we going to move about this. Making it tangible for people is part of climate communications. That’s a short-term goal. 

Kat: Who do you think is responsible for making that shift, is it governments, is it companies, and how can people know who to trust? 

Sophia: That’s such a great question. I think it’s all of the above. There’s no silver bullet in the climate movement because it’s the most all-encompassing thing that touches all of us. Yes, it’s governments, it’s infrastructure, we’re seeing that a lot, like the mayor of London was very proud yesterday that London Climate Action Week is happening here, saying a hundred thousand people are participating, that most of their buses are electrified. So yes, on a governmental level. And businesses need to do their due diligence, reaching their targets, their ESG standards, their GHG protocol and all the other acronyms. But I don’t know if the average consumer needs to know all that. I just want big businesses to follow the greenhouse gas protocol, follow the Science Based Targets initiative, and be net carbon zero by 2030, you do that, you guys focus on that. Does the average person need to know all that information? I’m not sure, it’s a little overwhelming, you don’t need a PhD to go shopping for your furniture. 

Kat: You’ve also said that right now climate has got co-opted by innovation theatre. What do you mean by that? 

Sophia: So how we got here in the first place, as the climate movement was building momentum, we had Fridays for Future, we had the marches, it was really exciting, everyone was angry and saying, okay, we know this is happening, let’s take action. Then very quickly, and this is what happens in late-stage capitalism, the movement got commodified and innovation theatre took over. Innovation theatre means all the technology that’s come up in this space, carbon capture, buying carbon credits, all of that has taken over the conversation because it’s monetisable and novel. Novelty is fundable. Community building isn’t fundable in the same way, you could fund it, but it’s not scalable in the way a carbon technology is. Regeneration, soil health, these are practices we’ve known for hundreds of thousands of years, but we’ve lost that, because it’s not scalable in the sense that late-stage capitalism wants. It’s the kind of thing you could pitch to VCs, a 30x return within a certain number of years, and then sell, private equity gets excited about that. But innovation theatre became the whole climate conversation, and took up so much air in the movement. Now I think we’ve matured, we understand, and we’re like, wait, that’s not the climate movement at all, sure it’s part of it, but community building, localisation, regeneration, rewilding, that’s the true climate movement. I think that’s what’s shifted. 

Kat: There’s a few really interesting Earthshot Prize finalists who’ve figured out how to place a value on the positive aspects of land. 

Sophia: Yeah, instead of cutting down the trees. Exactly, and doing that with local indigenous communities, in the Andes mountains. I love the Earthshot Prize finalists because there have been 75 finalists so far, and so many of them are working at the hyper-local level. There’s one called Coastal 500, where they’ve brought together over 500 mayors to protect coastal habitats. All these mayors get together, and the founder was telling me that all the mayors in Honduras said, we need to understand what we’re protecting, so they had a conference and went snorkelling together, and then they learn off each other, there’s resource sharing and community building. It started as a very hyper-local framework and then expanded. There are so many incredible solutions right now, start local, that’s another climate communications rebrand, going from these hyper-disconnected, far-away, intangible levels, from globalisation to localisation, instead of 2050 targets. Talk about what’s happening in the river you go to, your water source, your local park with invasive species, think more locally, because everyone has an area that’s part of their daily life that they’d love to protect. 

Kat: How do you think we can go from a more global type of communication to the more local? I’m thinking in terms of journalism, we know a lot of the local papers are disappearing, how do you reach local communities, but also find those stories and tell them to the rest of the world? 

Sophia: I guess it goes both ways. A lot of print is disappearing, but I love local radio, WNYC in New York, for instance. There are still other mediums, and because of the decentralisation of information through social media, there are people talking about what’s happening on a local level there too. But I’d also say, instead of having these stories come to you on your feed, experience them in person. If I’m in New York, go to Governors Island, experience the resilience projects in person, don’t just see it through a screen. In London, I want to see these solutions and this community building in real life. I think we’re all getting back to the tangibility of it, and of course storytelling and advocating for it is important, but if everyone just experienced what’s happening in their backyard, in their local community, got involved, that’s satiating enough. 

Kat: I was watching the film How to Live on Earth the other day, and there’s an example about bees in China, where due to the use of pesticides, the bees had disappeared, so people had to pollinate the flowers by hand. It was such a powerful example. 

Sophia: But instead of leaving it there, they were also showing the local solutions, how they’re fixing the problem so humans can stop doing the work the bees were doing. All of this isn’t so radical. Look at climate solutions, besides carbon capture and cloud seeding, a lot of the best climate solutions are just practices we were once aware of, connected to indigenous ecological knowledge. Understanding how bees are part of our ecosystems, having pollinators, our ancestors knew that. This isn’t radical, it’s a remembrance. It’s about how we bring this ancient wisdom and traditional ecological knowledge to meet us at this point in history, and I believe those can be in equilibrium too. 

Kat: Do you think the emotional side, the connection to the planet, needs to go hand in hand with the science? 

Sophia: Yes, yes, yes, they need to go hand in hand. We’ve known the science since the eighties, we didn’t enter the climate movement on the science alone, we entered through fear and anger, but that’s still an emotion, and we can translate emotion, transfer it. If you understand fear and anger, you also understand deep devotion, deep love, deep gratitude, and that’s what we need in the movement. I think those emotions are the most sustainable. It’s one of the reasons I love being part of this movement so much, because I have a deep emotional part of me, I come from a long line of Buddhists, six generations, all my great-grandparents and grandparents had this deep understanding, that everything living is in equilibrium, in symbiosis, there’s a symbiotic relationship to every living thing, and you understand how you want to move through life, being a steward of the world you’re in. My parents are scientists, so growing up in a very scientific family but also with these Buddhist roots is what drew me into the climate movement, I didn’t even know that until I started connecting the dots. This emotional, scientific side, they do coexist, and that’s what’s going to help us move forward. 

Kat: Humans have known for generations what science is only showing us today. I think forest bathing is a good example. 

Sophia: Yeah, I could never pronounce it properly. That’s an interesting example, it’s something that’s been practised for a long time, people knew it had health benefits, but recently science has shown that the phytoncides trees release to protect themselves are what’s actually helping lower human heart rates. There are so many psychological and physiological benefits, our cortisol levels decrease, we release dopamine, we feel a sense of connection. That science just proves what we already knew, that we’re constantly surrounded by concrete buildings, out of tune with our own circadian rhythm and with nature itself. When we forget our frequency as humans and part of nature, and then we get out into the forest, that’s why earthing is so positive, being barefoot on the earth has benefits too. All of this science proves we are nature, we’re an extension of it. When we go back to the source, forest bathing, hugging a tree, rooting barefoot in the ground, it might seem silly, but we’re getting back into the same frequency as our baseline, which is nature. Nothing I will ever buy will feel as good as being in nature, being out there, surrounded by it, humbled by it. Nothing you buy will make you feel that connected. 

Kat: In terms of the communication around climate moving forward, where is it heading now? 

Sophia: I think we’ve touched on this. It’s moving away from innovation theatre and carbon technology into something community-focused, regeneration-focused. It’s not about platforming the tech or the companies, it’s more about platforming how we’re all part of the solution, creating micro-communities, micro-solutions, grassroots understanding, incorporating traditional ecological knowledge back in. That’s the momentum that’s happening. A lot of people think climate has gone out of fashion, at least in the US, because it’s become a partisan issue, even though it was Richard Nixon, a Republican, who established the EPA. It shouldn’t be a partisan issue. I’d say it’s quite the opposite of out of fashion, it’s just that climate used to refer to a movement or a business on the carbon, ESG side, but now it needs to encompass community building, grassroots work too. That’s where I think it’s evolving. 

Kat: The mayor of London just launched a global initiative this week to fight climate disinformation, and it’s such a fragmented topic, there are so many different opinions out there. How should you, as a consumer, approach the information you’re getting, how do you know what to trust? 

Sophia: There’s so much information out there that I believe we almost live in an age of content pollution. Just like there’s air pollution and noise pollution, there’s content pollution, and we obviously can’t trust all the noise we’re fed. I’d say go by your personal experience first, because at least in the US, one in three Americans has already experienced climate change in their own backyard. There are so many people who are, quote unquote, climate refugees, wildfires, floods, hurricanes. Everyone in London is experiencing this heat dome, everyone in the UK and France, twenty-six countries in Europe have reported higher heat levels. We’re all experiencing the climate crisis. So compare your personal experience to what you see and the disinformation out there, if it doesn’t seem aligned, be very critical of it, the same way you’d be critical of an advert. We should have that same critical eye and ear when it comes to information and news. 

Kat: Back in the day you were always told to check your sources, you knew you couldn’t trust everything on Wikipedia, for example, or you needed to check who funded the research. Today it feels so much more complex. 

Sophia: I also think, if you’re the average person just trying to make a life, living paycheck to paycheck, trying to put food on the table and live a good, dignified life, you don’t need to understand the whole complexity of the climate crisis. I don’t think it’s everyone’s responsibility to carry the weight of what a very few corporations, a few governments and a few billionaires have done to us. I think their responsibility is to vote and take care of their livelihood and their immediate family. Do they need to know all the different initiatives, acronyms, terminologies and regulations coming down the road? I don’t think so, I don’t think they have the bandwidth for it. And it was never someone in the Global South, who’s impacted by climate far worse than anyone in the Global North, and who didn’t have anything to do with the emissions, who should be responsible for that. 

Kat: Companies are reporting on their targets and their progress. Are you saying that should just be standard, not something you proactively communicate, just baseline? 

Sophia: Yes, that should just be on the website somewhere if I want to look it up. If you have an impact report, you should have an impact report, because it’s transparency, it’s good to be accountable, to have the public hold you accountable, to have transparency. Every company should have an impact report, especially if they’re public and making a certain amount on a global level. But I’m not going to clap my hands and say, congratulations, you met your twelve percent target this year, that’s your due diligence, that’s baseline, that’s table stakes, you’re just meeting regulation, which is why regulation is so important, but you should have always been doing that. I’m not in a place where I can applaud any massive corporation for just doing their due diligence. 

Kat: That’s a good example of communication from a company. What should they be doing, should they be focusing on enabling the consumer, is that the sort of tone companies should have, or how can they help? 

Sophia: Enabling in what way? 

Katarina: Enabling in terms of, I don’t know, let’s say lowering prices on sustainable items, or a more sustainable way of living, that could be one example. 

Sophia: I think it depends on the size of the company. If we’re talking about Ingka Group, I’d say there’s a lot of work that needs to be done internally, and companies like Ingka Group have a lot of lobbying power, a lot of political power, so that’s something that’s important to you as well, getting involved with regulations, what’s happening on a governmental level. But that should just be internal, we’re going to keep this internal, we’re doing this because we have the resources and the consumer base to approach it. Then from a public-facing side, I think making sustainability more accessible has to come from a systemic level, it would be incredible to see some of the most global companies try to do that, how can global companies work with other global companies across sectors to reduce that, instead of just staying in their lane, saying, no, I’m only in this category, so I’m only going to stay in that category. There’s a responsibility there. I do understand it’s hard to be a company right now, because what a lot of consumers don’t understand is that if a company isn’t profitable, it can’t even enact its sustainability initiatives. 

There’s no sustainability initiative without a business strategy and profitability, because the business doesn’t exist. That’s the reality. So don’t add to the noise out there, keep your reporting, keep the baseline, do that internally, have your impact report, do your due diligence, have the transparency, let the public hold you accountable, if consumers are curious enough and have the bandwidth to go through it. Get involved on the political side, empower and enable policies that help at scale, even on a local level, you could do it just in your own country, it doesn’t need to be the entire EU, a lot of the time those policies end up expanding to the EU anyway. And on the public side, I think taking the consumer through the journey, the storytelling, this is where your desk came from, understand the full journey, make it visual, educational. If consumers are curious, great.  

Kat: Every few years there’s a new list of words companies use around sustainability. And then it takes a few months and you realise that’s not a word you can use any more because it can be misleading, there’s a lot of regulation around how you communicate, which is a good thing because we don’t want misleading information out there. Do you think it could also be contributing to the divide, when companies use terminology that isn’t easily accessible to most people, do people feel like they’re not part of the dialogue?  

Sophia: We’re getting wiser as we go, which is good, the climate movement, sustainability, these are living, breathing things, not just words. They represent something, they’re really holding up a mirror to the crisis and where society is. These movements, how we view and define them, keep shifting, because humans are shifting, and sustainability is a response to how humanity is reacting to the crisis we created. I think it’s a little hard for people to understand these aren’t concrete, finite words, like when I say apple, it’s always going to be an apple, that’s a finite, tangible thing. When I say climate, it’s ambiguous and abstract, it’s evolving and shifting as it should, same as health, same as longevity, longevity is just another word for health right now, climate is just another word for a thriving, surviving planet, sustainability is another word for a livable planet, because to sustain something isn’t even to regenerate it, it’s to sustain it. When these terminologies come along and then we realise, wait, that doesn’t really apply to us any more, maybe it applied in that era, in that timeline, but we’re evolving very fast, humanity’s understanding is evolving at such exponential speed, the information we’re getting is evolving so fast, so of course the terminology shifts too, and that’s hard for people, because understanding climate is like learning your ABCs, there are so many acronyms, so much terminology, what is nature positive, it means nature isn’t just a resource, nature is considered a stakeholder, and there’s net positive, nature positive, that’s what it means. Climate positive, what does that even mean? I understand why terminologies get dismissed and retired, but I think that’s healthy, because we’re evolving. 

Kat: Do you feel hopeful when you think about the future from a climate perspective? 

Sophia: Hope is a choice. You wake up every day and think, is today going to be a good day, and that is a choice, hope is always a choice. Let me put it this way, because this is easier. The Knicks just won the NBA Championship in New York, we have the World Cup games going on, England were playing yesterday and I overheard people on the tube saying, I hope we’re going to win, and then people saying, yes, I know we’re going to win. That’s a choice, when you choose for your team to win the World Cup or the NBA Championship, that hope is so active, so potent, there’s so much devotion and fandom and energy around it. That should definitely be the same for a thriving, livable planet. Of course I’m going to choose to have hope, proactive hope, that this world continues on and we make the best of it. I’m a futurist, I love dreaming of an incredible, more efficient, optimal future for generations to come, and I know my ancestors would be astounded by the opportunities and experiences I’m going through now. My parents, in one generation, the first time they got on a flight was when they immigrated from China to the US, that was their first time flying, and now I’m taking flights to the Amazon rainforest to meet indigenous communities there. That was just in one generation. I can’t even imagine what my daughter is going to experience. I know my ancestors would be so glad we went through this life, that we can have this incredible, abundant life. So I am going to be so hopeful, because that’s all I am, that is humanity, at its baseline we have hope, we have hope to keep going, survival is so ingrained in us, that’s why we’ve evolved so much. If you can have hope for your soccer team to win the World Cup, then you can have hope for sure that we can have a thriving, livable planet. 

Kat: Sophia, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been great talking to you. 

Sophia: Thank you so much, Kat.