Denise Young (also LinkedIn, Twitter) is a writer & sustainability communications consultant. She has a background in financial journalism, which she applies in her green finance & net zero newsletter The Zeroist.
Based in France, Denise grew up in Hong Kong with a mother from Shanghai and a father from Sydney. Thanks to this multicultural background, plus a career as a foreign correspondent, public relations expert and strategic science communicator in Asia, Europe and the U.S., Denise feels freed from having a singular worldview, and powers her ability to connect dots in unexpected ways.
A big theme of our conversation was care:
“I think my message is about care. If we care for ourselves, we can care for each other. If we care for each other, then we can care for the things that around us that we want to leave for future generations.”
How can we live in a way that we bring the intention of care to everything we do, whether it’s big or small, short- or long-term?
The intention: of care and very specific attention to the particular need in that particular moment; of people listening to each other more; of not being in such a hurry; of not kind of filling up life with lots of tasks and to do lists and making that a proxy for life itself.
We recorded the interview on 4 March 2022.
Listen
Links
International Council for Science
IPCC
-Working Group 1: physical science latest
-Working Group 2: adaptation latest
-Working Group 3: mitigation latest
“Governing a great nation is like cooking a small fish – too much handling will spoil it.” Lao Tzu here
(26: 20) Senegalise writer who won the Prix Goncourt: Mohamed Mbougar Sarr.
Timings
0:50 – Q1 What are you doing now? And how did you get there?
1:52 – Q2. What is the future you are trying to create, and why?
14:45 – Q3. What are your priorities for the next few years, and why?
22:10 – Q4. If someone was inspired to follow those priorities, what should they do next?
24: 50 = Q5. If your younger self was starting their career now, what advice would you give them?
25:49 – Q6. Who would you nominate to answer these questions, because you admire their approach?
27:05 – Q7. Is there anything else important you feel you have to say?
Quotes
The big work is actually the small work. You need to work on yourself, look around for sources of hope and progress in the right direciton.
With the French protest movement called the Yellow Vests (or Gillet Jaune) the deep irony was they were protesting about inequality and purchasing power, but their role models were rich people who are in a cycle of hyper-consumption.
It’s hard to talk about progress, when ‘progress’ is the reducing the projected temperature in 2100 from global warming. Progress to a a less fiery circles of hell. We’ve been used to progress being an inevitable series of steps towards ever better rather than a rather ragged walk away from the worst that was possible.
Adaptation strategies will have to be constantly change (in the light of events, experience and new findings on climate). But current adaptation is so poor. If we have to go from that to a real-time agile policy making process to constantly adapt, gosh.
Changes are unique compared to past changes: global; faster; a deliberate landing zone aiming for (eg safe climate) and on-going (because natural world has been thrown far from stability, and so society will constantly have to re-adapt).
Priorities: profoundly changed by the pandemic. From big strategic thoughts to informed by a Chinese proverb: governing the world with the same care as you would cook a small fish. How can we live in a way that we bring that intention to everything we do, whether it’s big or small, short- or long-term? By changing the process, you change the outcomes.
The intention: of care and very specific attention to the particular need in that particular moment; of people listening to each other more; of not being in such a hurry; of not kind of filling up life with lots of tasks and to do lists and making that a proxy for life itself.
“I think my message is about care. If we care for ourselves, we can care for each other. If we care for each other, then we can care for the things that around us that we want to leave for future generations.”
What to do: Just removing yourself from the everyday hurly-burly and just going to some other place, wherever your personal energy and your kind of your own history and story where you come from your cultural identity, whatever those things, say to you go to find things. And I’ve found that in the process. After while doing that takes you into space where everything connects up again.
“If your personal inner space is more convergent and connected, then you are building your own resilience to then go out into the world and respond to all the news that’s coming in at us.”
Advice to younger self: don’t compete with peers, role models or others, because it crowds out so much good stuff and blinds out what is there in front of you.
In the current day and age of polarisation, and people not listening to each other. Perhaps fiction has a better chance of helping people to empathise with the others point of view.
David Bent 