Reform vs. climate revolution from Microsoft to the salvage yard
Punk rock DIY, white collar, blue collar: Drew Wilkinson on trying every angle he can on climate.
This is a summary of episode #402 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast, hosted by me, Ross Kenyon. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you enjoy your pods. You can also listen to it in its entirety right below this paragraph.
Quick Takeaways
Drew Wilkinson helped organize Microsoft employees into pressuring the company toward its 2020 sustainability commitments. His present work with the Climate Leadership Collective gives employees a seat at the table and demonstrated that internal organizing can move even the largest corporations. He’s clear that employees weren’t the only reason, but they were a key reason “beyond any reasonable doubt.”
The financial reality of independent climate consulting is brutal. Drew left Microsoft three years ago and has been self-employed since. He doesn’t know where his next paycheck is coming from, buys health insurance on the open market, and acknowledges that his spicy LinkedIn posts (the thing that makes him uniquely valuable) also sabotage his ability to get hired by the companies he criticizes.
Most corporate sustainability professionals know the contradictions they’re living inside. Drew’s experience: when you talk to them privately, they get it better than anybody. They’re the ones peddling the incremental progress stories while watching their resources get cut, their influence evaporate, and their job prospects shrink. The GreenBiz conference literally ran a three-hour panel on “how to do sustainability without saying sustainability.”
Drew is feeling a shift from prevention to adaptation. After 20 years of fighting climate change from every angle: community organizing, Sea Shepherd, AmeriCorps, corporate sustainability—he’s sensing that some of his energy should move from “how do we prevent the worst case” to “how do we adapt to what’s coming.” He doesn’t have a crystal ball, but he’s honest about where the trajectory is heading.
He’s building a shipping container house on five acres in the forest outside Seattle. Friends offered the land. The salvage yard where he works provides materials. He’s treating the project as a personal Petri dish for sustainable, climate-resilient building—including designing for wildfire risk in a Pacific Northwest that’s historically not had that problem but will within five to ten years.
Architectural salvage is a genuine climate solution hiding in plain sight. Old-growth lumber from demolished buildings in the Pacific Northwest is higher quality than anything you can buy new. Bricks, steel, fixtures, furniture: all of it has longevity well beyond when the original building comes down. Places like Earthwise Architectural Salvage are the last stop before the landfill.
The tangibility of manual labor has been unexpectedly grounding. After years of spreadsheet-based sustainability work where you rarely see the impact of what you do, Drew finds that moving 3,000 pounds of doors in a shift and knowing they didn’t go to a landfill is energizing in a way that corporate consulting never was. He can touch the problem and touch the solution.
The reform vs. revolution question applies directly to climate work. Drew frames it as the debate every activist in history has had to reconcile: can the existing system be sufficiently reformed, or does it need to be replaced entirely? Most corporate sustainability people are invested in the reform narrative. Drew isn’t sure that’s enough.
Playing it safe is the enemy of climate progress. Drew argues that the reason things aren’t moving fast enough is that not enough people are willing to take personal risks—financial, professional, social. Every successful social movement in history was driven by people willing to accept discomfort. Climate is no different.
The shift from prevention to adaptation naturally moves your focus from global to local. Drew doesn’t know how Singapore should adapt to climate change. He knows how his local ecosystem in the Pacific Northwest should. Adaptation is inherently place-based, which means the work gets more tangible, more communal, and more rooted the further into it you go.
“Yes, I care about the marsh and the woods. Albert was not gonna save them his way. You don’t go through the back door with a poem and a bonnet. You go through the front door with a tie, and you own the marsh and the woods. That’s how you’re gonna save them.”
— I Heart Huckabees
The Salvage Yard at the End of the World
Drew Wilkinson got into punk rock at 13, got his first guitar at 14, and never stopped playing in bands. By his twenties he was touring and putting out records at a small punk rock level. Not a PhD, not a climate science background, is how he ended up in Seattle, how he ended up at Microsoft, and how he ended up becoming one of the most effective corporate sustainability organizers a Fortune 500 has ever had.
The punk in the C-suite
Drew spent about five years at environmental nonprofits before landing at Microsoft a decade ago. The contrast was immediate. His previous organization had five people and couldn’t pay the electricity bill if the grant money didn’t come through. Microsoft had 50,000 people on campus, a private shuttle fleet, and a trillion-dollar market cap. He walked in as a skeptical punk rock anti-corporate contrarian who wanted to see what the beast looked like from the inside.
What he found was that the hypocrisies and contradictions are actually easier to see from inside than from outside. Microsoft is the largest cloud services provider to the fossil fuel industry in the world. As he puts it, you literally don’t have digital transformation of oil and gas without Microsoft. And yet, by organizing employees, by giving them a seat at the table, by helping them find entirely new ways to do existing jobs that accounted for sustainability, Drew helped pressure the company into its 2020 sustainability commitments. Employees weren’t the only reason those commitments happened, but they were a key reason.
The best part of that work, he told me, was something he didn’t expect: the feeling of not being powerless anymore. After years of feeling like one person against the largest problem the human mind can conceive of, actually making something happen inside a trillion-dollar company was hard-earned and hard to find anywhere else.
The tension that never resolves
But the whole time, Drew was sitting in a tension that he thinks every corporate sustainability professional shares. You’re doing a little bit of good inside a giant machine which produces tangible harm. He knows it. They know it. In private, off the record, at conferences, in the halls, they’ll tell you. They’re the ones who have to pedal the incremental progress stories while watching their resources get cut and their influence evaporate.
I brought up the Amazon CSO posting about marginal emissions improvements to delivery vans the same week Amazon platformed the Melania documentary. Drew brought up the GreenBiz conference panel that was literally three hours on “how to do sustainability without saying sustainability.” The whole point of that panel was that “right-wing snowflakes don’t like the word climate justice, so here’s how to keep doing the work while hiding it.” At 11:59 PM on the climate crisis, that’s what we’re spending our time on. What the actual hell is going on?
Reform versus revolution
We got into what Drew called the debate that’s as old as time itself: can the existing system be sufficiently reformed to address climate change, or does the whole thing need to be replaced? Most people in corporate sustainability are invested in the reform narrative. Their futures, their fates, their myths are tied to the idea that the system just needs to be nicer, better, greener. You start to shatter somebody’s worldview when you suggest the whole thing is rotten.
Drew doesn’t claim to have the answer. But he frames it through the lens of movement history: what changes injustice, what advances progress for people who aren’t at the top of the pyramid, is movements. Not individuals. Individuals occasionally rise up and become the iconic figure, but even Dr. King without the civil rights movement and without Malcolm X—“two wings for a bird to fly”—is just a man writing letters.
I brought up the Terrence Malick film A Hidden Life, about the Austrian Catholic farmer Franz Jägerstätter who refused to swear the loyalty oath to Hitler and was executed for it. Was he a fool or a saint? On a small enough timescale, he abandoned his family for no regime-changing result. Zoom out and it’s an inspirational story about guarding the state of your soul independent of the outcome. Are you playing by the logic of human life or the logic of something larger? The question applies directly to climate work and the choices Drew makes every day.
The financial reality
Drew left Microsoft three years ago to consult independently. The word he uses is “perilous.” He never knows where his next paycheck is coming from. He doesn’t have benefits. He buys health insurance on the open market. And he knows that his LinkedIn persona: the spicy, contrarian, say-real-shit presence that built his reputation, also sabotages his ability to get hired. He’s literally throwing shade at companies that would otherwise hire him.
He reconciles it weekly. What’s the middle ground between being authentic to his punk rock roots and not shooting himself in the foot? He doesn’t know. But when he looks back on his life, he wants to be able to say: what did you do about the most pressing issue of your time? Did you play it safe? Were you more concerned about what people thought of you than what the world needed of you?
His argument is that the reason climate progress is stalled isn’t lack of ideas or technology. It’s that not enough people are willing to take personal risks. Protesting safely, voting nicely, asking employers something politely… that’s where most people stop. But every successful social movement in history was driven by people willing to accept real discomfort. Climate is no different.
Three thousand pounds of doors
About a year ago, friends offered Drew five acres of forest land outside Seattle. That opened Pandora’s box: if he’s going to build a house, what’s the most sustainable way to do it? Shipping containers for structure. Architectural salvage for materials. Low-carbon wool insulation. Rainwater harvesting. Permaculture. And designing for wildfire resilience in a Pacific Northwest that’s drying out in ways it historically hasn’t.
He got a job at Earthwise Architectural Salvage doing the classic punk rock move of getting a job at a place to get the discount. A couple days a week he puts on overalls and moves doors and lumber and bricks, saving building materials from the landfill and feeding them back into a circular economy. The old-growth lumber from demolished Northwest buildings is higher quality than anything you can buy new. Those were thousand-year-old trees. That wood doesn’t exist anymore.
Yesterday he moved several thousand pounds of doors. He came home covered in dirt. And for the first time in a long time, he could point at something tangible that he did. Not a spreadsheet, not a workshop, not a webinar. Three thousand pounds of doors that didn’t go to a landfill. He could touch the problem and touch the solution.
The shift
The conversation turned when Drew started articulating something he said he’d never really tried to put into words before. After 20 years of climate work focused on prevention (how do we stop the worst case from happening), he’s feeling a shift toward adaptation. Not abandoning prevention. But acknowledging that the longer things go in this direction, the less likely it is that we avoid the worst case. At some point you have to accept that, however painful it is.
On the other side of that acceptance is a different kind of work. Adaptation is inherently local. Drew doesn’t know how people in Singapore or Mumbai should adapt to climate change. He knows how his local ecosystem in the Pacific Northwest should. His shipping container house is the Petri dish. If he can build something climate-resilient and affordable using salvaged materials and permaculture principles, he can teach his neighbors how to do it too.
The zoom setting changes when you shift from prevention to adaptation. Global becomes local. Systems thinking becomes hands-in-the-dirt. The intangible becomes tangible. And the feeling of powerlessness that haunts so much climate work starts to lift, because you’re not one person trying to solve an incomprehensibly large problem anymore. You’re one person helping your community prepare for what’s coming.
Drew suspects others are feeling this same shift, even if they’re not articulating it that way. I think he’s right. And I think the conversation about when and how to move energy from prevention to adaptation is one of the most important ones the climate community isn’t having yet.
Full Transcript
Drew Wilkinson: You know, I would really have appreciated it if you did a Wayne’s World and did the, do you remember this? And he throws it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I don’t do that. It’s an obscure reference except to people who grew up watching the SNL best of DVDs and all of the movies that came out of SNL cast members. So, watched a lot of Wayne’s World as a kid. Did you as well?
Drew Wilkinson: I did. I did. I actually remember, I don’t know why I remember this, but it’s lodged somewhere in that nineties brain. You could buy the Wayne’s World VHS tape at McDonald’s. And so I had a special edition McDonald’s Wayne’s World VHS tape. So yeah, I watched it a lot.
Ross Kenyon: You’re talking about trying to find work. You just need to find that VHS and sell it. That thing’s got to be worth something.
Drew Wilkinson: Yeah. I heard VHS is actually coming back big time. Some of my friends are cinephiles and there’s some stuff that never got moved over.
Ross Kenyon: Really? Just like books that are out of print, but they’re only on VHS for films.
Drew Wilkinson: Yeah. A lot of obscure foreign indie films and stuff. Have you been to Scarecrow here in Seattle?
Ross Kenyon: I have been to Scarecrow, yeah.
Drew Wilkinson: Stuff like that. There’s a lot of stuff that you can find there that is only on VHS, it never left that format. So VCRs have gone up, plus everything old is new again. Cassette tapes are having a revival.
Ross Kenyon: This has come up on so many shows. I know you will feel affinity for this, but I miss the days when we had Tamagotchis and Game Boys and stuff like that, and you could go and play video games and the internet was just coming online and there was digital stuff that was coming, but everything was still very clunky. You would go to a Blockbuster and if they didn’t have the game or the movie you wanted, you’re like, I guess I’m not doing that this weekend. I need to find something else for the sleepover. And I sort of miss that. Whereas now it’s just like literally almost anything that you would want except for the stuff that’s only on VHS, in a moment’s notice you can find basically anything. And I liked the anticipation and the clunkiness. Actually, it kind of sucked when you were there, though. I think in hindsight it’s nice.
Drew Wilkinson: I do like a video rental store. I’m like first generation, second generation millennial. I’m right there in the middle, born in ‘85, so grew up with a foot in the analog world and I’m still very much—I have a record collection and I like analog things and I don’t have a smart speaker. So I feel squarely caught between the two eras that I have lived in my 40 short years.
Ross Kenyon: This is obviously mirrored in your career as well. You strike me as someone who does try to straddle multiple worlds, and sometimes that feels really great and empowering and different and gives you a special ability to see things that maybe others in your position do not. I’m sure at other points it makes you feel like a black sheep who’s sort of always on the outs. With your punk friends, you’re sort of a corporate sellout. With your corporate sellout friends, you’re probably a punk. What are you meant to do with these mixed identities, Drew?
Drew Wilkinson: Yeah, great question. It is an interesting tension to have come from an underground subculture. For listeners who don’t know me, I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, Tucson, Arizona. I got into punk rock when I was 13. I got my first guitar when I was 14 and I never stopped playing in bands. By the time I was in my twenties, my bands had gotten serious enough that I was able to go on tour and put out records, all at a very small punk rock level. But that changed the course of my life. It’s how I ended up in Seattle. It’s how I ended up at Microsoft. It’s how I ended up doing corporate sustainability work.
But yeah, it has been an interesting journey to try and reconcile, especially in the professional sphere, the last 10 years where I went from not very professional at all to being an expert in my field, which is a tiny, dark corner of sustainability. But yeah, to straddle that line—I actually struggle with this more than you might even realize, literally on a week to week basis. Because in my heart, in my soul, in my life, I am a contrarian. I am an activist. I am spicy. I want to speak truth to power, especially when it comes to climate stuff.
And yet for the last three years, I’m an independent consultant. I’m an expert in my field, which is employee engagement for sustainability, and LinkedIn is the only social media that I have anymore. It’s an amazing tool, although sadly I do feel like it’s going the way of all other social media platforms and getting full of promoted crap and AI slop.
But I do generate a lot of business from there. I’ve built my reputation on that platform and that is my platform. Maybe because I’m used to performing on stages and in a punk band, I’m literally screaming at people. And while I can’t really do that professionally, I would like to sometimes. So I use my LinkedIn platform to say real shit. To say the stuff that me as an individual, as a human, as an activist, as someone who’s deeply concerned about climate change, wants to say. Things that you’re not likely to hear in a corporate friendly space like this, where everybody’s afraid to bite the hand that feeds. And I know that some of the things I say sabotage my ability to get future business. I mean, I’m literally throwing shade at companies that would otherwise hire me.
And so I have to reconcile with that tension all the time. What’s that middle ground? How do I be true to myself, authentic to my roots? How do I bring what I think is my unique point of view into this industry? But how do I also not shoot myself in the foot so that I can literally stay alive doing it? I don’t know. I’m wondering that all the time.
Ross Kenyon: I feel a lot of affinity for this. Since the podcast has been independent, I’ve progressively let looser and looser with the kinds of things I’m willing to say and talk about. And also just feel the big feelings of working on climate, especially with the way that the world’s been going in the last year. You’re like, cool, we were barely going to make it if we were going to make it then. And now it’s slipping farther and farther away. And you’re like, are we just preparing for a world where we’re adapting or not to a much warmed planet that is imperiled? And that is a terrible feeling.
And I don’t like engaging with a lot of the content that still has a climate boosterism that feels like it would’ve been more appropriate several years ago, but is not calibrated to the new reality. And the—I’ve said this before so many times—it reminds me of when Bernie was in the primary and he just kept getting farther and farther away. People were like, this is how Bernie can still win. It became a meme of itself because it was just 0.001% chance that the electoral map would ultimately turn out this way. And some of the climate stuff feels that way to me too. Are we looking at the same world anymore?
And saying that though puts you at an employment disadvantage because people don’t want you to feel negative or it needs to feel optimistic to make sure that we’re still going to be able to sell credits or that corporations are still going to want to pursue their commitments. And I think pointing out that the world has changed somewhat is not a message that a lot of people are quite willing to have or hear.
Drew Wilkinson: I agree. Especially Americans, right? The answer to that is we know, trust us, we’re exhausted. It’s not just climate stuff, it’s a full onslaught on civil society. It’s all the horrible things that come with Trump 2.0. And so yeah, people can be forgiven, especially sustainability practitioners, from going, I don’t need to hear how bad it is. I live it every day. I’m watching my resources get cut. I’m watching my influence evaporate. I’m watching my job prospects shrink back up.
People in the industry get it better than anybody else, and yet it is so interesting to watch because for those who still do have corporate masters, what do you see? More greenwashing, more AI for sustainability propaganda, more overly—what did you call it? Climate boosterism. Yeah. It’s tough. It’s a really, really difficult moment to be dedicating all of your professional energy to solving climate change right now, for obvious reasons that go far beyond just one administration’s ability to take a wrecking ball to it. I mean, we’re losing everywhere that counts, and we have been for 50 years.
Ross Kenyon: It’s funny to me that you think that climate professionals feel that way because some of the negative reactions that I’ve experienced to some of the more dour predictions that I’ve had or analysis that I’ve put out, whether in private or in public—I’ve had some people who didn’t really want to hear it and they do work in this space. Where they’re like, no, various parts of European or Japanese or Canadian policy is still going to come through. Or look at how China is standing up their own carbon market. And these things are more important than—that’s more signal. What’s happening in the US is noise. The US will double back, the midterms, the Republicans are going to get crushed and the next election’s probably going to be a Democrat. So don’t worry too much about it, and pointing to this only makes us worse at our work. I’ve encountered some amount of resentment for pointing this out among climate professionals. But it sounds like that was not your experience, or has not been.
Drew Wilkinson: Well first of all, nobody has a crystal ball. Let’s hope that those people are right. It remains to be seen.
Ross Kenyon: I so desperately hope so.
Drew Wilkinson: Yeah, right. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I do know that Trump had already cost us invaluable time that first four years alone. I mean, Jesus, at this point, we are very, very, very late. Emissions haven’t even leveled off, let alone started drawing down. And so literally every day counts, let alone four years thrown in the trash going backwards.
And I think that depends on a person’s inherent faith that these systems will actually respond to the climate emergency, that things like the Democratic Party are even in a position to take meaningful action on this. And that’s not a narrative that I share at all. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise. One is better than the other, but not by much. And on the things that really need to change, they’re in lockstep. And those things are never up for debate or on the ballot. Like endless war and endless growth.
So yeah, I think this kind of gets into the reform versus revolution debate that’s as old as time itself, and certainly not special to climate, but is a conversation that every activist who’s ever fought for change at any moment in history has had to reconcile with, which is: can the system that’s in place be sufficiently reformed to address whatever we’re fighting for? Or does the system need to get tossed out and replaced with something else entirely?
And most people that you’re going to encounter in a professional setting, especially those whose futures and fates and faith and stories and myths are tied to, this needs to continue, it just needs to be nicer and better and greener or whatever—you start to shatter somebody’s worldview if you go, no, the whole thing is rotten and needs to be tossed out. Most people don’t want to acknowledge that, at least not professionally. To a colleague, maybe at home over dinner or something, but I don’t know.
Ross Kenyon: When you were at Microsoft, how did you experience feelings like these? Did you feel enough optimism from your work or enough agency that these feelings were not as powerful, or maybe you even forgot them somewhat? Did you have to suppress them? Did you still feel them but persisted in the work anyways? And is it that once you have a paycheck that is robust, working at a nice company that has retirement and healthcare, it’s really easy to buy into the corporate mythology of, you know what, we actually can make the system a lot kinder and gentler. And when you’re on the outskirts of it, it’s much easier to see the hypocrisy and how a lot of this messaging is BS. How did it feel though, when you were in there? Do you remember feeling like it was a bunch of BS, or did it feel like you were actually a part of something that was meaningful enough?
Drew Wilkinson: Both. Ironically, I would say that for someone like me, again, contrarian coming from a counterculture punk rock that is very anti-establishment, very anti-corporate, coming in with that set of experiences and perspectives, those politics, those beliefs, I was always skeptical. I was like, okay, I’m in the belly of the beast now. Let’s see what the beast actually looks like from inside as opposed to outside. And so I would actually argue that it’s easier to see the hypocrisies and the contradictions when you see how the gears turn than it is on the outside.
When I got to Microsoft, and that was 10 years ago, I had just come from five-ish years of my career in environmental nonprofits. And so the first thing that I noticed coming to Microsoft was, wow, this is not a resource constrained environment. The place I was at right before was five people and it was like, if we don’t get this grant, we can’t pay the electricity bill. And then suddenly the headquarters of a trillion dollar tech company, 50,000 people on campus, a private shuttle fleet. Just that alone was the staggering difference of the venue essentially.
And so yeah, I was the whole time deeply skeptical of how far will one of the largest, most powerful corporates in the world, by any stretch—market cap, influence, longevity, however you want to slice it—Microsoft is about as big as it gets. How far are they willing to go to address sustainability? Knowing that the answer is probably not far enough because again, it’s a single company within a system.
And so as we started to organize employees, as we started to push for more sustainability initiatives, for a more serious set of commitments from the company, which we succeeded in helping get in 2020, I did feel some optimism. That first of all, the company’s going to do more than it was doing before. I tried not—not saying it was all due to me, but employees played a very important part in the years leading up to the 2020 sustainability commitments that Microsoft made in getting them to do that. Not the only reason, but a key reason beyond any reasonable doubt.
So, felt good about the fact I was able to help make something happen that either wouldn’t have happened otherwise or would’ve happened much slower, much later, whatever. But was also pretty clear-eyed about the kinds of things they would do and the kinds of things they probably would never do, and that tension existed the entire time.
But the one thing I will say about it is that one of the worst parts of trying to do anything about climate change, whether it’s in your personal life, your professional life, your political life—ideally, you’re fighting in all three arenas at the same time—but one of the worst parts about this work is feeling powerless. Is feeling like I’m just one person. I’m just a project manager. I’m just a voter. I’m just whatever. I’m nothing. I’m insignificant. I’m small. I’m one person. And that feeling of powerlessness against what is arguably the largest problem that the human mind can even conceive of. Arguably not even accurate to call climate change a problem. It’s a poly-crisis with thousands of problems. It explodes the brain instantly to think about the scale of it.
And so the one really wonderful thing about the work that I did at Microsoft by mobilizing employees, by giving them a seat at the table, by giving them power, by helping them blaze a trail for entirely new ways to do existing jobs like software engineering that take energy efficiency into account—things like that. Super inspiring, super empowering. The side effect of all of that was I don’t feel so powerless anymore. And you really cannot put a price on that feeling because it is hard earned and very difficult to find those moments in your climate work, whether it’s activism or in your professional life, where you go, hell yeah, something I did definitely made a difference. And that’s hard earned.
Ross Kenyon: But still, when you look at the scale of it—
Drew Wilkinson: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: It makes you wonder, how much of an impact did this really have.
Drew Wilkinson: Over time, yeah. At some point, every single one of us has to find this sort of philosophical middle ground of, I’m doing maybe not everything I can, because if any of us were seriously doing everything we could, we’d probably be dead or in jail, right? Like, let’s be real. So that’s not the right framing of it, but doing enough. How do you get to a place personally where you feel like you’re doing enough?
And I’m not saying I have a perfect answer for that, but somewhere in that is, there’s more I could be doing. There’s a hell of a lot less I could be doing. I’m constantly asking myself if what I’m doing is enough. I’m constantly edging my risk. I’m taking slightly or maybe sometimes drastically larger risks to fight for a climate stable future. And then an acknowledgement that yeah, I am one person. It’s not my responsibility to solve this. I would love to, but I can’t.
And at some point in my own journey, having been concerned about climate for well over 20 years and trying lots of different places and ways—from Food Not Bombs and community organizing to marches, protests, direct action with Sea Shepherd, corporate work—I’ve tried addressing climate change in every single place that I could get myself into.
And at some point I finally just had this moment where I was like, I am doing enough. For now. And letting go of this idea that it’s up to me. I didn’t make this problem. I’m not going to be the one who single handedly has the solutions, although I’ve got some ideas if you want to make me king.
So I don’t know. It’s hard. How do you square that—feeling like you’re doing enough and also letting go of, it’s not all on me.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t know. I grapple with many of these same feelings too. And some days I feel like the work was good and I could detach from the results and be like, you know what? I gave it my all the day. I did the things that I was best suited to do. And also, it isn’t my job to solve the entire planet. And I think that’s a recipe for burnout and depression, because that’s really too much responsibility for humans to wear on a regular basis. I think it can really chew you up badly.
Drew Wilkinson: Oh yeah, totally. I’m not saying I do it perfectly. I’m saying that some days are heavier than others. Some days I’m crippled on the couch and I can’t do anything because I’m so overwhelmed with grief and anger and all the things that come with watching the planet get destroyed so that a couple people can be really rich. There are days when I can barely function and then there are days when I’m just really mad about it and able to channel that into something productive.
And what’s also really hard, especially—and what is different having gone from in-house at a giant company to now consultant—is at least when you work inside the confines of a single company, you mostly get to see the effects of what you do. Maybe not instantaneously, but there’s a ripple that comes out and you can kind of see it. When you parachute into a company as a third party who’s like, I’m here for six weeks, and then hopefully I talk to you again, but I don’t know—I generate these ripples. I generate this change. I often use the metaphor that I’m teaching people how to garden so that they can feed themselves, as opposed to, here I am cutting up your food, and here comes the airplane. I’m teaching people how to create the conditions in their workplaces where this work can be successful.
But what’s really hard about it is that as a consultant, you almost never get to see what happens six months, nine months, 12 months later. If you’re lucky, they’ll check in with you or they’ll respond to your check-in email. Here’s what we tried, here’s what didn’t work. But at some point you just have to trust that it’s rippling out and you’re probably not going to get to directly see, touch, experience the effects of that, but that it is doing something. Whether or not that something is enough goes back to the previous question, but it’s hard. There’s just an element of faith in it that it’s going to do something and it’s what I can uniquely do. And that’s higher up the curve than a lot of people get.
You kind of hit on this a second ago, which is there’s so many people right now lined up around the block going, I want a climate job. Climate change is an existential threat. I’m super motivated by it. I want my professional energy to be addressing that somehow. Wonderful. That didn’t exist five, 10 years ago when I was doing this work. And so it’s amazing that there’s so many people, but at the same time, there will never be enough climate jobs title-wise to satiate that demand. And so at some point you have to—yeah, I don’t really know where to take that.
Ross Kenyon: I like your focus on this. Every job can be a climate job and just because it’s maybe not in your title, you don’t have to go for this. That being said though, I can imagine some of this is really discouraging. I mean something like Holly and Will’s work with the enabled emissions campaign, or I had something recently that cracked me up slash really frustrated me, which is that I saw the CSO from Amazon the same week that the Melania documentary was released on Amazon, bragging about how some portion of the Prime Last Mile fleet had some marginal emissions reducing thing.
I’m like, yeah, you’re also giving cover to an administration that is the worst on climate ever. And so I’m supposed to clap for your tiny little thing on your Prime delivery vans? The—do they know? Does she know that it’s a joke or is there a part—do you have to suppress that to do that job? It’s humiliating. I feel humiliated for her by proxy because it’s such a farce. I wanted to comment on that. But also because of LinkedIn, you can’t just be like, this is a joke. You must be humiliated.
But saying that out loud—I’m sure this person is a very nice person and it’s hard to say no to an offer like this, and it’s a prestigious job. But also, come on. That made me feel bad. Anger, sadness, humiliation by proxy. It was terrible to watch.
Drew Wilkinson: Yes. That is the tension that corporate sustainability professionals have to sit in all the time. And it’s tough because most of them are environmentalists. When you get to talk to them in a private setting where there’s some trust—friend, colleague in the halls of a conference or whatever—they trust me. They know. They know as good as anybody because they’re the ones that have to pedal this crap. But it is part of the song and dance of what it means to work in sustainability and make a living wage because so many of these jobs are not that.
So my experience is that most of those people know. And by the time you get to an executive level, like a CSO, I don’t know. I don’t claim to understand the psychology of millionaires or whatever. But I’ll just say lots of people are willing to do anything for a paycheck regardless of how hypocritical it is.
I’ll tell you a really quick, funny sort of anecdote to that. So I just came back from GreenBiz. It’s the oldest, best, well-established corporate sustainability conference in the US. Been around for 20-something years. It’s great. It’s in my hometown of Phoenix, so I get to go home and eat Mexican food and see my friends and family. I went to a three-hour workshop with comms professionals where the entire thing was how to do sustainability without saying sustainability.
That was the whole point. We just did this new survey and shockingly, all these right-wing snowflakes don’t like it when you use the words climate justice or whatever. So the whole thing was, to stay alive in this moment as a sustainability practitioner, here’s how to keep doing the work, but hide it.
And I was just like, this is so insane. We are—it’s 11:59 PM in the climate crisis and this is what we’re spending our time and energy on. But in the US, yes, that is what we’re spending our time and energy on.
And one last piece of the anecdote: one of the panelists on this works for one of the largest PR consulting firms in the world. One that has continued to work with fossil fuel clients, despite public pressure from many groups saying you shouldn’t be doing PR cover work for fossil fuel companies, which their campaign has been really successful—actually a bunch of PR companies have said, we’re not going to do that anymore. Not this one.
And so similarly to you on LinkedIn, I thought about raising a question in front of the whole room and having a gotcha moment, and I was like, that’s not really fair. I actually know this person. I don’t know their perspective. So instead, I opted to go up to them after the panel was done and talk to them privately and ask about this and just be like, I’m not trying to gotcha. But how does it feel? To be leading sustainability work inside of a machine who—and I know the answer to that because I did it, and Microsoft is the largest cloud services provider to the fossil fuel industry in the world. You literally don’t have digital transformation of oil and gas without Microsoft.
But still, it was interesting to hear their perspective on this, and that is the tension that a lot of these in-house sustainability people have to sit with. I’m doing a little bit of good inside of a giant machine whose main objective is to do harm. But isn’t that all of us? I mean, at the macro level, that’s the whole thing, isn’t it?
Ross Kenyon: I think so. You can even see it pop up in other places too. The game theory of something like Anthropic’s refusal to do certain types of business with the Department of Defense and losing that contract and losing access to servicing the US government for other functions, and then who’s waiting right behind Anthropic’s refusal? Sam Altman is ready to just jump in there. So Anthropic saying no, you’re like, cool, that was an interesting, courageous thing for someone who’s historically been very concerned about the risks of artificial general intelligence and the militarization of AI. Cool. But then other people are just waiting in line.
Would it be better to have the more scrupulous person be using their technology for things that they don’t like, because maybe on the margin they can make some changes? Or is it better to wash your hands of it and give it to the less scrupulous person? Which of those is better? And what are you responsible for? Are you ultimately responsible for the outcome or your own, the state of your soul?
One thing I’ll connect this to, have you seen the film A Hidden Life?
Drew Wilkinson: No. What is it?
Ross Kenyon: It’s a Terrence Malick film about a Catholic Austrian farmer during World War II who refuses to swear the loyalty oath to Hitler and everyone in the film’s like, just do the oath. We’ll give you hospital duty. You won’t take up arms. You can just serve out your tenure and survive. And he’s like, no, I think this is an evil organization. I refuse to. And so he’s ultimately executed. And he’s on the road to sainthood in the Catholic church right now. I think he’s been beatified. It’s a true story. It’s a beautiful film too. Terrence Malick, yeah, there’s lots of shots of grass, as he always does.
Drew Wilkinson: Trees, slow motion.
Ross Kenyon: Trees. It’s beautiful. I love it. I think it’s a really wonderful film. But what’s interesting about it is that there’s a sense in which what he did was the peak of foolishness. You abandoned your family and allowed yourself to be murdered by the state to essentially no end. On the small enough timescale, that’s true. If you zoom out a little bit, you’re like, wow. This is actually an inspirational story about guarding the state of your soul independent of the outcome and, what are you responsible for? It’s basically your own actions and what you choose to give moral cover to.
And so is this person a fool or is this person a saint? And maybe there’s a possibility of both being true at the same time. Are you playing by the logic of God or the divine or the logic of human life? And depending on how you answer that might change how you feel about this person, but this very easily applies to what we’re talking about here. Are you meant to be in the system and making things a little bit better, or are you meant to be someone who is out there papering flyers on telephone poles, DIY, Fugazi, sort of punk aesthetic? You’re outside the system. Screw the corporate media. I’m outside of this entirely. Who are you meant to be in a world that demands this of you?
Drew Wilkinson: Are you actually asking that or is that a rhetorical question?
Ross Kenyon: I’m asking anyone who’s listening. And then also you have the impossible duty of answering this question, at least for yourself. If not, offer some advice to everyone.
Drew Wilkinson: Yeah. Well, a couple of reflections on the movie that you just referenced. Number one, I think what it speaks to is the difference between individuals and movements. And predominantly throughout history, what changes injustice, what advances social equity, what advances progress for those of us who aren’t at the top of the pyramid, are movements. Occasionally there’s an individual who rises up and becomes the Dr. King of their movement or whatever. But even so, if you had Dr. King by himself writing letters and you didn’t have the civil rights movement and you didn’t have Malcolm X—I might also add, two wings for a bird to fly—movements are what change things.
And it is almost impossible to put an individual activist person into their context during—that’s a hindsight thing. Outside of some fringe things like Dr. King. And so you could argue that this priest—certainly not the only one to do that. There’s probably thousands of lesser told stories of people also refusing to swear the oath and getting executed without the fanfare or the story. And it also speaks to how important it is for all of us to see our efforts at making change as part of a movement instead of just me, me, me, me. It’s that hyper-individualistic focus that is a product of living in a western capitalist consumer society that also makes us ineffective because when you think it’s all about you—your personal carbon footprint or what have you—then you fail to realize that the only thing that really changes systems are massive amounts of people. Movements.
And then to try and answer the question of how I feel, kind of—because I’ve raged against the machine, I’ve raged within the machine—I think my own personal journey, I have been able to get access to the inner workings of different power structures than most punks have ever gotten. So I’m like, well, I can play that game. I could, when I was in corporate America, be in the room with C-suite level executives and I can talk their talk and meet them where they’re at and be that liaison between an activist set of employees and an executive. I can do that.
And so to me, I never let go of where I came from and who I am. Part of it’s just stubbornness. I am a spicy contrarian activist and I own that for better and for worse. There’s things about it that are wonderful. I definitely cause myself a lot of unnecessary financial harm by being that. But I am that.
And at the end of the day when I look back on my own life, I want to be able to look at myself and say, what did you do about the most pressing issue of your time? Did you play it safe? Were you careful? Were you more concerned about what people thought of you than what the world needed of you? And so almost every time I edge on the—I’m just going to do the thing, take the risk, be the thing.
And so because I have a foot in both worlds, I can be corporate. I also come from Fugazi, like you said, one of my favorite bands of all time. So glad you dropped that. So my unique contribution is being an insurgent, being able to go into these spaces and stir these things up in places where people are normally never exposed to these ideas.
And that is something that definitely comes from punk rock. I’ll never forget the first time I heard about veganism. I was 17 and this militant vegan punk band came and played a show. And they had “vegan” tattooed across their necks in giant letters. And they only had four songs, but they talked for like 15 minutes about each song. Political rants about factory farming, all this stuff. And it was like, whoa. I’ve never even—I remember thinking at 17 when I first heard of veganism, keep in mind this is way before veganism was the mainstream thing that it is now, I remember my 17-year-old brain going, you’ll die if you don’t eat meat. What are you talking about?
But anyways, I come from that world, but I also, some of the Fortune 500s hire me to come in and do work for them. And so that is my unique role, to come in and sprinkle in some of that punk magic dust in the places where people just aren’t getting it.
Ross Kenyon: I’m laughing. I like what you’re saying. It’s fascinating. I’m also trying to imagine Joe Strummer or Tom Morello in a business suit at a company offsite. It’s a category error in some way. But okay, tell me more about the financial hardships of raging against the machine. What’s it like working outside of the system?
Drew Wilkinson: Perilous. Perilous. Insecure. I never know where my next paycheck is coming from. I don’t have benefits. I have to buy my health insurance on the open market like every other schmo that got screwed by the Affordable Care Act. Unstable is maybe if I could wrap it all up in one word. Especially going from Microsoft to self-employment, the difference is stability, instability.
So it’s hard. Psychologically, you just have to steel yourself, and I’m sure you can relate to this too as an entrepreneur. You might think you have the best idea in the world. You might think that lots of people will pay you for that idea. Whether or not that’s actually true based on what you can or can’t actually do to deliver that idea to the world. Or based on market conditions that none of us have hardly any control over. Timing is everything. So you might have the best idea in the world, but it’s 10 years too late or 10 years too early.
Your conviction in your talent is not a guarantee of success without the backing of a large company. And so it’s a leap of faith in yourself to say, wow, look at all of these risks of doing this. I’m going to do it anyways. And especially for people like us who are doing this, not because we’re like, I think I’m going to have the best taco restaurant Seattle’s ever had—which no shade, I want more good tacos in Seattle—but there is a fundamental difference for people who are doing impact work. I hate that phrase. But choosing to take personal financial risks like that for climate change is different. And table stakes, I think, because ultimately why we’re not making the progress we need on climate, at least in this country, is because you don’t have enough people willing to take enough risk.
They’re willing to protest safely, they’re willing to vote nicely, they’re willing to ask their employers something nicely. Occasionally. But we all have got to be taking more risk, personal risk. And again, I’m not saying everybody needs to chain themselves to a pipeline and get arrested. But the reason that things aren’t moving is because there isn’t enough pressure built up and there isn’t any meaningful threat to the status quo. And every study of any successful social movement in history, what separates them is people willing to take personal risks, whether that’s getting arrested or doing an interview or leaking documents, whatever. There’s lots of ways to do that.
And so for me, as terrifying and unstable as it is to be doing this work, especially in the last year at financial disadvantage, it means this is, to me, the appropriate response to a crisis. I’m taking risks. I’m trying stuff that’s uncomfortable. I’m willing to risk my own personal mental, financial stability in order to make the change that I want to happen happen.
And I wish everybody would do that. Not exactly what I’m doing, but constantly be asking themselves, how much more risk will I accept to fight for climate change? Because playing it safe is never going to get us there fast enough, period.
Ross Kenyon: Why is there a disconnect between the financial rewards of playing it safe and doing things within the system? Those jobs pay pretty well. And so much of the work that is even outside of climate that so desperately needs well paid, happy, well adjusted people doing it are not. You see this at nonprofits that are doing very important work or people who are social workers, working with people that have fallen through seemingly every crack that society has opened for them to fall into. And barely make a living wage at all. You can help a company greenwash and make 300 grand, or you could make an order of magnitude less by solving a problem that’s really desperately needing solving.
Drew Wilkinson: Yeah. And I’m not trying to throw shade at anybody at all in any of this, because the flip side to the scenario you just gave is, okay, maybe you play it safe in your corporate cushy role, but you make 300K and you donate 100K a year to various—I mean—
Ross Kenyon: But it’s almost like they did.
Drew Wilkinson: Let’s just say hypothetically, there is a Robin Hood out there who’s taking from the rich and giving to the poor. The point is there are many ways to contribute to the success of the climate movement. Not all of them have to be your job. And especially if you’re locked into a job that is unscrupulous or unsustainable, there are ways to redirect the resources that you get from that toward climate outside of just the 40, 50 hours of labor output that you have a week.
So that’s what I want to be clear is, I’m not trying to say everybody better take financial risks and be consultants now. Not at all. I’m saying the ways that we can contribute to a more effective climate movement is by being willing to take higher risks.
And that can look like a lot of things. For some people, it might be risky to eat a Beyond Burger when all they’ve ever had is McDonald’s. I don’t know. But edging that and getting out of the comfort zone—I think maybe that’s the heart of what I’m saying. We’re all sitting here in the first world, well, I would say increasingly less comfortable as the cost of living makes it insane to even just scrape by, but relatively speaking on the human pyramid, pretty comfortable, pretty safe. Don’t have to worry about food insecurity or poverty or war in the same ways that billions of people in other parts of the world do.
So from that position, it’s easy to just go, well, I’ll try a couple of things, but I’m not going to get in trouble. And that’s what we need to be pushing against—that feeling of, I’ll only do stuff as long as it feels comfortable to me. No, that’s not how we solve climate change. I’m sorry. That’s actually not how we solve any social movement.
It is an uncomfortable process by default. So the faster you get to, yeah, I’m willing to be uncomfortable—and also I don’t have to be uncomfortable alone. You find brilliant, compassionate, green-hearted people everywhere in this work. That’s maybe my favorite part of doing climate work. I have made lifelong friends, colleagues. The kinds of people who are drawn to this work, in spite of the low paycheck and all the things that we’ve ranted about, are generally my people. They’re amazing, compassionate, brilliant, empathetic people, and you could make a lot of great friends just doing this work. So PSA: take more risks and make more friends.
Ross Kenyon: The paycheck portion of this is so relevant to each of us too. I feel like if the cost of living weren’t so high, I think I would choose to reallocate a fair amount of my time away from the pure remuneration seeking. I feel really called to do death and dying work, but also feel pretty penned in by my life and needing to support a family and noticing that every month you’re like, cool, this is not going great. I think—and doesn’t feel like we’re getting ahead.
I imagine it’s probably similar for you, but you’ve also found ways of doing things and maybe have a way forward that give you some access to this. We recently hung out at your workplace where you’re working with salvage materials and trying to help people build in a way that is much less wasteful. And there are things that you’re looking forward to that maybe they’re not the avenue you would’ve chosen in a vacuum for how you would contribute to climate change. You might have chosen something that was higher paying and more prestigious and less blue collar in a way. But also it seems like you’ve grown to appreciate that actually the work that is being offered to you is ennobling and a valuable solution that people are overlooking and should be taking with gratitude as a chance that they have to offer something genuinely new.
Drew Wilkinson: Totally. Yeah, so much to unpack here. I’m glad you brought this up because I definitely wanted to touch on this in our conversation. So just by way of context, my main goal this year is to build my own shipping container house. I have, again, some lovely friends that I met through climate movement building work that have five acres of land in the forest outside of Seattle and graciously said, we want you to come live here and be part of our family.
That opened up about a year ago a sort of Pandora’s box of, well, cool, if I can build my own small house—not tiny, but if I build my own small house—what’s the most sustainable way to build a house? And I’ve been around, I know a little bit about green building and permaculture. But in the last year, I’ve taken a crash course in all of these things to answer this question for myself: how do I build the most sustainable house I can possibly do with my limited resources?
And so this is a very punk rock thing to do—when you want a discount at a place, get a job at the place. And we’re very fortunate that in the northwest we have a really robust architectural salvage economy here. And so for those that don’t know, architectural salvage is essentially saving, reclaiming anything that could be reused from a building. I’m talking bricks, steel, lumber, but also toilets, sinks, furniture—all of the things that make the built environment. Many of them have a longevity that goes well beyond when they’re demolished. And so places like where I work, Earthwise Architectural Salvage, are a last stop to take these materials and redistribute them back out before they go into the landfill.
Yeah, I got a job there about a year ago because I was like, well, I want a discount on cheap building materials. Also, this stuff already exists. Ergo more sustainable. It’s not some cheap, prefabricated crap from Home Depot. In many cases, old building materials, especially lumber in the northwest—because those were thousand-year-old, old-growth trees—you literally can’t get wood that high quality anymore.
But it has been incredible to work there because yeah, it’s blue collar work. It doesn’t pay very much. I’m not doing it for the money. But my early career was all manual labor jobs. My first climate job was AmeriCorps. I was out putting shovels in the dirt doing endangered species habitat restoration. And it’s only the last 10-ish years or so that I flipped and became a desk worker. So the last year has actually been really beautiful because I’m halfway between manual labor—a couple days a week I put on a pair of overalls and I bust my ass. Yesterday I must have moved several thousand pounds of doors. Came home covered in crap. And desk work. So that part of it is really great.
But the other thing I was going to say, and this kind of touches back on something we were talking about earlier, which is the intangibility of sustainability work. You’re in a spreadsheet, you’re in a Google Doc, you’re running a workshop, you’re running a webinar. You’re doing some carbon math if you’re Ross, or whatever.
Ross Kenyon: No one knows, but yeah.
Drew Wilkinson: You do that stuff, you know that it has some kind of impact out in the world, but you hardly ever get to see it or touch it. So that can be really frustrating and demoralizing in a way.
And so I didn’t expect this outcome, but having worked at the salvage yard for the last year, it’s like—I’m hitting my personal intervention point in climate is arguably much lower here, right? A huge part of my own journey and my own activism has been, what is the highest possible intervention point I can access? Given who I am and what I am and all of that. And the large corporate Microsoft was a way higher level than I ever thought I would be able to get into. So arguably working at my local salvage yard is a much lower intervention point. Fine.
But at the end of an eight-hour shift like yesterday, I’m covered in dirt. I’m exhausted. And yeah, I didn’t stop climate change at the highest intervention point I could access. But I did stop 3,000 pounds of doors from going into my local landfill. And there is something extremely energizing about seeing the tangible output of your labor. I can touch the problem, I can touch the solution. My literal blood, sweat, and tears. It’s just different. It’s not computer work. It’s so different.
And that has really been energizing and grounding, frankly, in this era of climate dystopia that we’re heading into. The days that I go there, I like it. I love working there. Plus if you like antiques and oddities and weird old cool stuff—and I do, I grew up pretty poor and thrifting a lot—so there’s that.
But it has been very energizing. And it is a climate job. It is a hundred percent. I’m stopping—I’m saving building materials from going into the landfill and contributing to an entire circular economy in my backyard. And that feels awesome, even though the pay sucks. So I’m not about the money.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I mean, a good chunk of last year too, I delivered farm share boxes. And again, low lever to pull, but also necessary work. And maybe the important thing that’s the commonality here is it’s directionally correct. You may not always have the opportunity to be the big fancy person keynoting a conference. But also we’re all a part of the same directional movement here and that is what is ennobling about it.
I also think it’s wrong to look down on different types of work, blue collar and white collar. And I also think people who expected to have a white collar career getting an opportunity to work in a different kind of field that’s blue collar is also a good experience in the same way that if you know people who never did anything in service, never waited tables, never served bar—there’s something that’s really—
Drew Wilkinson: You’ll never treat service workers the same again after working in that. It’s tough.
The other thing I wanted to say about it and articulate for this is—and you’re one of the first people I’ve ever even tried to articulate this with, so forgive me if it’s not fully fleshed out—but we mentioned a couple times in this podcast that it’s pretty late in the game. It’s 11:59 on the climate clock. 1.5 now seems like it’s in the rear view mirror.
And so none of that is to say it’s too late. Not at all. But what I—this shift that I’m sensing happened within myself just in the last six months or so—is I’ve spent the last 20 years of my life on prevention. Doing everything I can. Again, from on the streets activism to corporate organizing. Everything that I’ve done for environmental issues has been, how do we prevent the worst case scenario from coming true?
And I feel this shift happening in me right now where in order to acknowledge where we are in the moment and where I can most effectively put my own energy. I feel myself shifting away from prevention into adaptation, which is kind of a weird, it’s an uncomfortable feeling. Because on the one hand it’s accepting that we are going to hit the worst case scenarios probably. Again, I don’t have a crystal ball. I’m not saying that to say it’s hopeless.
But I am saying that the longer things go the way they’re going, the less likely it is that we avoid the worst case, period. And so at some point you have to accept that no matter how painful that is cognitively. But on the other side of that is adaptation. If things are going in this direction and if our collective response or even individual response is insufficient to stop that, at what point do we shift our efforts from prevention exclusively into also some adaptation and mitigation?
And this is where I feel this really nice energetic alignment with working at the salvage yard, building my own sustainable house. Because when I say sustainable, I don’t just mean I’m using found objects and low-carbon wool insulation and all of that. I also mean built to withstand wildfires in western Washington, which has historically not happened, but in the next five to ten years, as things continue to dry out, will happen.
So the more I learn about all of this, and again, my house project is my Petri dish to really get my hands dirty with this permaculture stuff—I feel this shift happening of, yeah. Put your own oxygen mask on first. Once I can create this space for myself, that will hopefully give me an upper hand in adapting to a warmer, drier Pacific Northwest. How do I then go help other people in my community do it based on what I learned how to do?
Because most people love the idea. People that I talk to, they love the idea of a shipping container house or a tiny house or a sustainable house or permaculture. People up here want to harvest rainwater and grow food and live on their land in a way that doesn’t come at the expense of the wild animals that they share it with. But they don’t know how. And they think that it’s too expensive to go out and do these things. And I want to prove that it—not everybody’s going to get a job at the salvage yard, but these things are more attainable, more affordable than you realize.
And that shift from prevention to adaptation is also about changing your zoom setting on how you view climate change from the macro—the highest intervention point, systems level thinking, got to have it, not saying don’t do that—but when you shift into adaptation, I don’t know how people in Singapore should adapt to this. I don’t know how people in Mumbai should adapt. I know how my local ecosystem in my region should adapt to climate change.
And so there is this natural shift. You shift from global to local as you move towards adaptation and mitigation. And I don’t know, I’m articulating that because I suspect others are feeling the same way, even if they’re not articulating it that way. And maybe if they aren’t, this gives us all something to really think about, which is, don’t abandon prevention. That’s not what I’m saying. But we all have a finite amount of energy in the world. And it’s probably time to start looking at adaptation and mitigation first for you and yours, but then for everyone around you. Your neighbors, your community, all of that. I’m curious what you think about that. I know you’re really far along the journey too.
Ross Kenyon: I agree. I’m going to do a podcast on this soon that will maybe better answer this question, but I’ve been thinking a lot about what personal adaptation means and to what degree should people who are far-seeing and concerned stay in situ where they are and try and help their community versus going someplace that’s safer for climate reasons. There’s a lot to say about this, but I’ll treat this in greater detail in the future. And we’ll have to have more chats here. Drew, thank you so much for coming on. I know this was a long time coming. I really respect what you’ve done and look forward to learning more about your journey.
Drew Wilkinson: Yeah, thanks. Likewise. Hopefully next time we can record it at the salvage yard.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, sounds good.
