Fire and Ice
Imagination, Optimism & The Quiet Power of Small Acts.
Making meaningful changes to how we live – and think – requires imagination. As children, we have it in multitudes. We’re brimming with it. But somewhere along the path to adulthood, daydreaming becomes seen as a flippant luxury so easy to set aside, replaced by responsibility, routine and the navigation of competing demands.
In the early 1900s when Alexander Winton began building automobiles, he was widely critiqued as ‘the fool fiddling with a buggy that would run without being hitched to a horse’. Of course, the sentiment shifted dramatically once people realised the scale of what he had envisioned. His invention would change the course of history - not because people saw a need for ‘better’, but because the new way of doing made more sense.
Flash forward to today, and many of the changes we must make to protect our rapidly heating planet actually require far less imagination than our predecessors had to harness. Thanks to early visionaries like Winton, the blueprint already exists. It’s up to us to make small but clever tweaks.
Electric vehicles look like petrol ones. Driving them doesn’t feel too different, either. When you plug in your Dyson AirWrap, the results are the same whether your electricity comes from coal or solar. The plant-based Impossible Burger tastes like a burger. You pick it up from the supermarket, eat it with fries and barely notice the swap. These solutions don’t rely on sacrifices nor are they lesser alternatives. They simply ask us to think outside the box when it comes to what is familiar.
Creativity and economics don’t often overlap, but when it comes to climate change, there’s a poignant intersection. The choices we make with our money, even small and seemingly insignificant, hold power. I’m fortunate enough to live in Australia, one of the wealthiest countries on earth, and I recognise that this shapes my perspective. For much of the global population, the survival of self takes precedence over the survival of the planet. But for those of us who are privileged enough to choose, our choices truly matter.
Each week, I try to make small decisions that align with how I want to leave the planet for my children, and their children, and so on. I opt for raw ingredients with minimal packaging, or packaging that carries clear recycling value. When I buy coconut water, I choose a pack of aluminium cans wrapped in cardboard – both of which are easily recyclable. The same cardboard becomes the toilet paper I later purchase. Of course, I can’t get it right every time due to the products on offer and that fact I am a fallible human like anybody else. But instead of fixating on the 20% of ‘failures’ in my shopping trolley, I focus on the 80% of successes. Perfection isn’t the point here; progress is.
Consumer behaviour is tracked more closely than we think. When even 5% of us shift our preferences, it signals to brands that change is necessary - and profitable. After all, brands have a vested interest in delivering what we want. These businesses will adapt, but only if we give them a good reason to. It has a compounding effect: the more we believe in our power, the more powerful we become.
Given the choice, most people would rather be part of the solution. The problem is that climate change has historically been presented as too big, too complex, too far gone. But that’s not a scientific problem; it’s a storytelling one. We can’t and won’t change our behaviour when we feel anxious and guilty. We change when we feel something and we know what change to make. Emotion is the backbone of the entire marketing industry and for too long the climate change narrative has leveraged fear and shame instead of hope and possibility.
From the families we grow up in to the content on our feeds, our lives are shaped by social norms. Whether it’s putting the toilet seat down or finishing the milk before opening a new bottle, these habits are deeply ingrained in us as the ‘right’ way - until we live with someone who sees it differently. But norms are rarely rooted in inherent truths, they’re more often myths and stereotypes reinforced through media and culture.
The campaign to ban cigarette advertising was powerful because it recognised just how much media influences consumer behaviour. That exact same influence can be used for good in this instance, too. RIISE’s TV and film studio reimagines shows and movies where characters live climate-friendly lifestyles, not as key moral messages or narrative arcs, but as part of coincidental background noise. This sort of storytelling normalises climate-friendly living. Seeing this in the media makes us want the electric car when it’s time to upgrade. It nudges us toward smart fridges, refillable skincare and T-shirts made from compostable materials that will eventually return to the earth.
We already have the solutions to climate change at our fingertips. This is not about sci-fi future-gazing. The answers to many of our problems are here, readily available, and often more beautiful and enjoyable than the alternative. We just need to position them correctly.
Robert Frost wrote in his poem ‘Fire and Ice’, “Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.” Desire and hate are both powerful emotions - but if you want to motivate humanity to act in its own best interest, desire will always come out on top. I’ve worked for many years in the worlds of renewable tech, science and financial risk management. I’m surrounded by data and logic, and have a deep respect for both of these things. Yet I am constantly reminded that optimism is the most potent and readily available resource we have. It’s what keeps us curious and reinvigorates that spark of childhood imagination, the very spark that our future depends on.