What do you do when you spent 20 years fighting climate change from every angle you could find: community organizing, Sea Shepherd, AmeriCorps, corporate sustainability at Microsoft... and you realize the prevention phase might be ending? Do you keep keynoting conferences about employee engagement while the Amazon CSO brags about marginal improvements to delivery vans the same week they platform the Melania documentary?
Or do you get a job at a salvage yard, start building your own shipping container house, and shift your energy from prevention to adaptation?
My friend Drew Wilkinson chose the second thing. Drew grew up in Phoenix, got into punk rock at 13, never stopped playing in bands, and somehow that trajectory carried him from DIY shows in Arizona to corporate sustainability at Microsoft, where he helped organize employees into one of the most effective internal climate movements a Fortune 500 has ever seen. His work there helped pressure Microsoft into its 2020 sustainability commitments. He knows what it feels like to make a real difference inside the belly of the beast.
But this episode isn't really about that success. It's about what comes after. Drew left Microsoft three years ago and started consulting independently through the Climate Leadership Collective, and the financial instability of that choice has been brutal. He's honest about it in a way that most people in this space aren't: he doesn't know where his next paycheck is coming from, some days he's crippled on the couch with grief and anger, and he knows that the spicy contrarian stuff he posts on LinkedIn (AKA the stuff that makes him uniquely valuable) also sabotages his ability to get hired by the companies he's criticizing.
We got into reform versus revolution, whether the system can be sufficiently reformed or needs to be tossed out entirely, the Austrian Catholic farmer who refused to swear the oath to Hitler (A Hidden Life, go watch it!), and whether Anthropic refusing to work with the Department of Defense matters when Sam Altman is waiting in line behind them. Drew brought up the GreenBiz conference panel that was literally three hours on "how to do sustainability without saying sustainability." I brought up the Amazon CSO posting about minor improvements to delivery van emissions the same week they gave the Melania documentary a platform. We both felt sick about it.
But we escaped that grim discourse when Drew started talking about his shift from prevention to adaptation. He's building a shipping container house on five acres in the forest outside Seattle, sourcing materials from the architectural salvage yard where he now works a couple days a week. 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 touch the problem and touch the solution. Three thousand pounds of doors didn't go to a landfill. That felt better than any spreadsheet ever did, and even though he may not have predicted this is where he'd be... isn't that life? Can we not be amazed and grateful for every surprise?
This Episode's Sponsors
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Listen to the RCC episode with Ryan Covington from Philip Lee LLP about project finance
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Resources
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Climate Leadership Collective
Earthwise Architectural Salvage
