You can find the full archive of The World We Need on Substack: https://michellemalancafrey.substack.com/

Sources and further reading:

Unveiling Big Oil’s Campaign of Lies, Natural Resources Defense Council, 2024

New Joint Bicameral Staff Report Reveals Big Oil’s Campaign of Climate Denial, Disinformation, and Doublespeak, US Senate Committee on the Budget, 2024

Merchants of Doubt (documentary), 2014

Merchants of Doubt (book), Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes, 2010

Shell and Exxon’s secret 1980s climate change warnings, The Guardian, 2018

Climate-colored Goggles, Substack by Sammy Roth

Drilled podcast, season 1

Subscribe to this podcast on Substack to get it in your inbox: https://michellemalancafrey.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile_chips

Is your bank funding fossil fuel projects? You can find out at bankingonclimatechaos.org. You can check your 401k or IRA at fossilfreefunds.org.

To look for banking options, you can check bank.green and the NCUA credit union finder.

https://michellemalancafrey.substack.com/

Morgan Harper Nichols and her annual Word of the Year list.

Thank you to Zegge for the music.

Is There Anything Beautiful Here?

Love Calls Us to Action

What Happened When I Invited Everyone Over

You Are More Than Enough

To receive the World We Need in your inbox, subscribe here: https://michellemalancafrey.substack.com/

To receive this podcast in your inbox, go to michellemalancafrey.substack.com to subscribe.

Referenced in the show:

Carla Dal Mas https://www.cadimastrategia.com/

The hard part is knowing when it’s time to quit and when it’s just hard, or inconvenient, or takes more effort than we feel that we can give. When do we just not feel like it versus when we need to quit? How do we keep going when things take work?

The World We Need with Michelle Malanca Frey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The World We Need with Michelle Malanca Frey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

A federal judge had ruled that the City and County of San Francisco Jail No. 3 was so decrepit that it violated inmates’ constitutional rights, including the 8th amendment about cruel and unusual punishment. Under duress, San Francisco agreed to build a completely new jail in 1999 – to be constructed on the site of the existing jail, while it was still operating.

The runoff from the construction site drained directly into federally protected wetland, home to a federally protected species, the California red-legged frog. I was hired by the construction management company to make sure nothing happened to the frogs or the wetland – because if more than four frogs were killed during the course of the project, it would be shut down.

This risk is why one of the project requirements was for every single worker on site to watch a 15-minute video about the frog and site protection before they started.

This is also how I became known to several hundred construction workers as The Frog Lady.

Not gonna lie, to most people on the site, the frog was a joke. While a small part of my job was checking storm drains for errant frogs, mostly it was about protecting the wetland. Keeping out dirt, all kinds of substances, and people. For instance, one day somebody accidentally connected the sewer line from the laundry room in the existing jail to our storm drain system and bubbly foam starting pouring out of the pipes into the wetland. Other times, I had to chase down people dumping things on the ground they weren’t supposed to or going into off-limits area. Essentially, I had to check that workers were doing everything by the book, which didn’t always make me a welcome vision around the jobsite.

I loved walking the property though. Located in a foggy suburb 30 miles south of San Francisco, the site was flanked to the east by a residential neighborhood, and to the west by coastal mountains – home to deer, red tail hawks, red-shouldered hawks with their black-and-white-striped tail feathers, skunks. I had to be careful about going out to the far edges of the site on my own in the late afternoon because of the bobcats.

At the foot of the mountain, on the jail property just past the wetland, was an organic farm. In the early 80s, a Sheriff’s Department employee, Catherine Sneed, started a program for the inmates, transforming an abandoned farm to a training program and abundant garden that donated food to needy families.

By the early 90s, she had founded a nonprofit called the Garden Project to employ those same people once they were out of jail. They worked at that farm and at another garden adjacent to police station in San Francisco, and planting over 10,000 street trees in the City.

Before the Garden Project, the jail was a revolving door: 80% of inmates would end up back in there. Some were arrested dozens of times. Remarkably, once a person was a part of the Garden Project, something changed for them. Less than 25% of the people in the program had further offenses. Catherine always said she doesn’t teach farming or horticulture, she teaches work. It’s not just that the Garden Project gets people in touch with nature and plants, it’s that it provides employment and a way for people to provide for their families. I got to know some of the people working on the farm and saw first-hand what it meant to them.

I also experienced first-hand how hard it is to create to new habitat once its lost. The footprint of new jail extended onto an acre of the wetland. To make up for this, we had to build a new frog breeding habitat on the far side of the wetland, away from the construction site, nicknamed the frog pond.

This was the early 2000s and habitat creation had never been done for this species before – it had rarely been done for any species. I worked with a team of experts including a herpetologist to get everything about the pond just right. The pond had to be deep enough to hold water for several months, yet not so deep that the frogs wouldn’t be able to lay their eggs in it. After the heavy equipment dug the hole for the pond, it would need to be planted with specific native plants to provide the right conditions, the right ambiance if you will, for frog…lovemaking? Procreation.

We hired three guys from the Garden Project to do the planting. They were brothers and had been working there for years. The Garden Project had changed their trajectory, especially the oldest brother. In his late 50s, he had been a junkie and been arrested many times. But not anymore. They did their work diligently and exactly as we asked. Out of their own interest, they checked on the plants and the pond every time they were out there.

I’d like to be able to tell you there was fairytale ending for the frog pond, but it didn’t work out that way. The pond was deep enough for the frogs to lay eggs; we saw lots of them. But it wasn’t deep enough to prevent racoons from treating it like an all-you-can-eat-frog-egg-buffet. Every morning their little raccoon footprints would be all over the mud and the eggs would be gone. There were no tadpoles that first season.

However, I am proud to say that no frogs were killed or injured during my tenure. That project had its fair share of setbacks, but the frogs were not one of them. This made enduring all the frog jokes worth it (believe me, I have heard them all).

Unexpectedly, this job helped me to reconnect with an important part of myself. When I started the job, I was coming off a three-year stint working as a copywriter during the San Francisco dot-com boom, which had abruptly busted. I thought I wanted to be a fiction writer and was apply to MFA programs. Several months into the frog job, I found out the only program I got into was my extra-super-backup-last-choice. It forced me to take another look at my options. I knew it making a living as a fiction writer would be tough. Meanwhile every day I was using what I learned in college getting my degree in Environmental Studies. Working at the base of a mountain every day and getting real experience mitigating the impacts of building on the environment felt like going back to my roots.

This is also when a new professional accreditation in green building emerged. I learned so much about construction at this job that I was able to pass the exam for this accreditation, known as LEED, and get another job working on some of the first big green building projects in the Bay Area. This was the catalyst for me to build a career that I have loved in the two decades since. And I still get to write.

It's not a fairytale but there are a few morals to this story:

First, it’s cheaper, easier, and more reliable to protect nature areas than to try to re-create them. I recently shared on here about rewilding, which is about letting nature do its thing so it can heal itself. Rewilding is wonderful, but protecting nature in the first place is the best. When we lose habitat, we lose species – and we no matter the effort we put in, we might not able to fix it.

Second, we have proof that giving former offenders the opportunity to work dramatically reduces the chance they will commit crimes again. Yet, as a society, we still spend our money building more jails and not on breaking this cycle. The US Dept. of Agriculture called the Garden Project, “…one of the most innovative and successful community-based crime prevention programs in the country.” We know there’s another way forward and we need to take it.

Lastly, we shouldn’t be afraid of pivots, of changing our mind. I don’t regret any of the time I spent trying for other things. Sometimes we work hard for something or follow a dream then find that it wasn’t what thought, we don’t love it like we thought we would, or it doesn’t work out. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other dreams, other doors to walk through, and other happy endings that we couldn’t have even imagined, just waiting for us to take the leap.

The World We Need with Michelle Malanca Frey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Further reading:

The Garden Project

The California red-legged frog

Subscribe to The World We Need by Michelle Malanca Frey on Substack

A few rewilding links:

Knepp

Rewilding Britain

Eoghan Dalton and the Irish Rainforest (Beshara Magazine)

After Shutting Down, These Golf Courses Went Wild (New York Times)

De-Pave Park

Urban Rewilding; The value and co-benefits of nature in Urban Spaces (C40 Cities and Arup)

Too many tedious adult tasks, too much work, too much worrying. There is a time for those things, but there is also a time for consciously not doing them.

I get it, you’re busy. There are bills to pay. People want things from you, need them from you. But you can’t be there for them, you can’t be there for yourself, and you certainly can’t resist authoritarianism, save the planet, or otherwise make the world a better place without time to just be a human with no agenda.

You might feel like you can’t, but you can.

Not that’s you need it, but here is your permission to rest, p

Rest

For the love of all that is holy, sit down and put your feet up.

Sure, you can do “active rest” like meditation. If you’re lucky, maybe get a massage or soak in a hot tub. But really, it’s perfectly fine to lie on the sofa and stare at the wall, with no other stimulation other than whatever is happening in your own mind.

(Looking at social media will not refresh you and may even depress you. But if you need a short transition from the mania that is your life to get to the resting state and memes are what get you there, we get it.)

Most importantly: don’t feel bad about resting. Being alive means you are entitled to rest. Your to-do list will never be complete. In fact, you are better able to knock things off that list with some rest.

Everyone knows that the best part of yoga class is savasana–the bit at the end when the entire room lies there motionless in silence (the Sanskrit translation for this is ‘corpse pose’ – surely there is a better name for something this delicious)? What if we did this outside of yoga class? Dedicated time where we just lie down near each other in silence, basking in the joy of rest. Can we make this a thing?

Play

As mammals, we’re born to play. Your pets play with other animals and with you. Elephants get all roly-poly with each other. Dolphins body surf and play the in waves. Even alligators have been known to repeatedly go down a watery slope. Play is our birthright.

Play that moves our bodies is especially good for us. The brilliant book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Drs. Amelia and Emily Nagoski shows us how we can break chronic stress through vigorous movement like dancing. (I’ve been watching old episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and Christina and Meredith knew that sometimes you just have to dance it out.)

Exercise can be play too. Play does imply enjoyment–don’t force yourself to exercise because you feel like you are a bad or inadequate person for not doing it more/longer/better. Do it for the joy of fresh air, wind moving in your hair, seeing sky, hearing birds, letting your mind wander. No need to time your play. Joy cannot be measured and joy does not have rules.

A few weeks ago, I swam in a lake for the first time in years it was magical. Flipping my body around completely in fresh water felt like being able to breathe again. Like restoring my body to a setting it had forgotten. Is there a way that you used to move your body that you don’t anymore?

Love

For a quick reminder that quality of life isn’t about quantity of stuff, take a look at your favorite photos. My guess is that they’re all of people and experiences you cherish. Something you did or someone you love. That cute jacket you bought won’t love you back–it’s a dopamine burst at best.

Love is why we are here. Today you could tidy your house or do the laundry or cross off some other items on your list. But since we go around only once, here is your permission to skip those things. Instead call a friend, play fetch with a dog, text three people you are thinking of them, smooch someone, spend time with your kid. Or maybe just lie there with someone you love (full circle back to Rest).

Rest, play, and love are worthy in and of themselves, needing no other outcome. But the truth is that we are better able to show up for our loved ones, our colleagues, and our goals if we are replenished.

When we replenish ourselves we make it possible for others to do the same. This is not the “self-care” of bath bombs and products for pretty people, but real care that changes our priorities and our lives.

Rest, play, and love are the gateways to mindfulness, and when we strengthen the connection between our mind and our body, we feel more connected to the world and have more empathy for it.

“Who we are and how we show up in the world defines how we work with others, how we interact with our surroundings, and ultimately the future we co-create.” – Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, The Future We Choose

Summer is the perfect time to practice this holy trinity. Your mission, should you choose to accept it: take the muscle memory of the rest, play, and love that you are getting this summer and bring it with you all year. Make it your mantra when the encroaching winter darkness makes time feel scarce, when holiday chaos ambushes us, when it’s the middle of a weekday grind and you have all the activities, when another news cycle throws us off kilter.

Take doses of rest, play, and love like vitamins.

Doctor’s orders.

The World We Need with Michelle Malanca Frey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I felt deeply called to write a book about climate solutions. The vision of a world powered by clean energy with livable cities, healthy people, and thriving ecosystems fills me with delight. I wanted to share this vision and a roadmap for getting there.

In late 2022, blissfully ignorant of what writing a book actually demands, I made an outline and started typing. I thought would surely succeed because, in addition to a great idea, I had secret weapons: determination, organization, and self-discipline. I would muscle my way through. Plus, I planned to self-publish so I could just skip the whole book proposal thing and get straight to putting it out there.

About four months in, I got super busy with work and set the book aside. In my mind, I had about half a manuscript and I thought I could knock the rest out in another 4 or 5 months. (If you are a writer, it’s OK to laugh right now.)

Two months went by before I picked it up again. To my surprise, I found that what I had was terrible. Worse than terrible, it was boring.

I had thought I was cleverly disseminating important and sometimes complex information in a very digestible way. But when I read it with fresh eyes, it felt more like a report than a book. It was not an engaging story that carries the reader from page to page, but more a well reasoned exercise conveyed with a modicum of personality. Snooze. I can barely even think about it without starting to fall asleep.

But there I was – with tens of thousands of words. Was I just supposed to throw them away, along with all the hours and months of effort they represented?

Apparently, yes.

While there was no way I wanted to keep writing that book, I still felt deeply compelled to talk about the climate future we could have. People are afraid of climate change and how it’s getting worse. They want to know what do and if what they do makes a difference. But, if not this book, then what?

This reckoning with my now-dead book idea coincided with a period of terrible sleep (shout out to my ladies over 45, IYKYK). If I slept for more than 2 hours at time, it felt like a miracle. Often, I would fall sleep right before my alarm went off. A complete zombie by midday, writing in some kind of orderly, logical flow felt impossible.

So instead, I started putting large sheets of paper on the floor and drawing –sometimes objects, sometimes abstract – then making notes on the drawings. This allowed me to think in a way I hadn’t done before. I was getting to something that my conscious mind, with its default to the rutted grooves of the familiar, had always blocked.

Through this process, I got to the bones of it: the question for me was not what did I want people to know, but how did I want them to feel?

We’ve had the solutions to climate change for decades. And, while yes, our elected officials and policymakers should have made getting to these solutions easier a long time ago, there has also been a multi-decade campaign, funded by the oil and gas industry, to make sure they didn’t. Our business as usual, money as usual, politics as usual has meant we have kept poisoning ourselves as usual.

Beyond this, as a culture we also haven’t had the collective fire in our bellies to make these solutions happen. Doing things differently takes effort and most of us are stretched just living our daily lives. And with a challenge this massive, it can be easy to think that what we do doesn’t matter.

What needs to change is how we feel about the solutions, how we feel about doing things differently. And, most importantly, how we feel about the effort we will have to make.

Some people might be motivated by the fear of what catastrophic climate change will mean for them. But research shows fear doesn’t motivate over the long term – in fact, it can make action even less likely. I learned this the hard way when I had the crap scared out of me by a very well meaning Al Gore at a Climate Reality training.

What we need to do for our climate is about small and big actions, small and big changes. To make these happen, fear isn’t going to do it. We have to be moved by our love of our ourselves, our loved ones, and our world. We must be deeply moved by our love for life.

Love is what calls us to action.

Love reminds us that all things are possible. Think of someone you love right now. Did you even know such love was possible before they came into your life? Would you move mountains for them? Is there something you wouldn’t do if their life was in danger? This is the energy we need to be channeling.

The heart of the book I am now writing is all about this. The actions we need to take must be connected to how they protect us, our loved ones, and our world. Otherwise, they are just more items on already very long to-do list.

Not surprisingly, writing this book is taking longer than expected. Partly because books take a long time and I need to define my own take on this topic, and partly because right now the world seems to be falling apart in ten new ways daily.

This matters too–because we don’t get to have a happy climate future if we don’t also have a robust democracy, social equity, and an economic system that works for everyone.

This is all a long way of saying that love has called me to do something. I am committed to writing and talking about connection, love in action, and tangible steps we can take to create the climate future we need. Given the scale of the change, we will need to do these things for the rest of our lives and if we center love and connection, then the journey of getting there can be as rewarding and joyful as the destination.

Links:

https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fossil_fuel_report1.pdf

https://michellemalancafrey.substack.com/p/how-i-learned-to-love-the-sun

For background, I have not been and would not go to my own high school reunion. If I was invited, that is. Which I haven’t ever been. Let’s just say that there is no love lost there.

I ended up at this reunion because maybe a dozen or more students from this one high school in Southern California decided to go to college where I did. I became good friends with a few of them and hung out with many of them at some point. Dozens (maybe hundreds?) of meals, parties, mountain bike rides, hangovers, live bands, and questionable decisions later, there are bonds that have stood the test of time.

We started with nothing more in common than being young, being in the same place at the same time, and having, shall we say, a zest for life. We have pulled these threads of connection along from city to city, even to different continents. Sometimes the threads have been very stretched and have even disappeared for years, only to once again appear into the fabric of each other’s lives.

It wasn’t an official reunion, it was just the members of their high school’s Baton Rouge Cajun Cooking Club. Someone brought 11 x 17 black and white copies of a group photo of the club from that era. Fifty teenagers donning late 80s Southern California cool. Tie-dyes and thrifted dashiki shirts were apparently a strong local microfashion at that time. This hippie look was counterbalanced by at least as many kids in the photo throwing rock and roll hand signs. Disparate social groups presumably united around a common love for gumbo, music, and marijuana.

One couple had flown in from Paris to be at this reunion. Another from Ireland and another from Florida. Several people had driven up from Southern California. There were only 20 or so people at this picnic at a windy park in Marin County. No one from this high school club was both living in the same location and in touch regularly. They came from all parts, including halfway around the world, because of a connection they forged decades ago.

Listening to their stories of where life had taken them, I noticed that I didn’t hear a lot of talk about careers, homes they owned, or even places they had traveled. This is not how they defined themselves. They talked more about their lives now, their health, their kids. There was the occasional tale of shared misadventure from long ago but mostly it was about the here and now. Maybe it’s because it’s too hard to recap decades in a few minutes but I think it was more about a desire to connect around who we are, not the path that brought us here – centering our present, not the past.

Just two nights earlier I had been to another kind of reunion: a dinner with a handful of people to celebrate the 12th anniversary of the lifesaving heart transplant of a dear friend. We are all close to him but not to each other – it’s the love for our friend that has connected us all from a deep place for many years. All of us in midlife, all with children of various ages, we really appreciated a moment like this. A connection refired to celebrate, to honor something precious. When you are in the depths of parenting and life’s big responsibilities, these nights can feel like gems emerging from a dark field. This group reformed for this moment, then disassembled ourselves and went back to our daily lives.

Over that weekend I saw people in phases and activities that they never would have imagined as young adults. Living with someone else’s heart beating inside their bodies. Living with a slow gait after a traumatic brain injury. Rebuilding finances after a divorce. Co-parenting instead of in union with the person you thought you’d be with forever. Living with elderly parents. Renesting after the kids are out of the house. Launching another business. Moving countries. Loving again when you thought you wouldn’t. Burying the hatchet.

All of us were drawn back together not just to connect, but for the chance to rekindle the part of ourselves that existed before the weight of time had changed us, clung to our legs like mud, threatening at times to pull us into the morass, but somehow still letting us – so far – rise above.

Ideally, we wouldn’t wait for a reunion or a celebration to light that flicker of connection. We are lucky if we have threads from the past that we still want to pull on. I’m not saying it’s easy. I am not shy and yet I still felt a little weird about showing up to not-my-reunion. My fondness for the people I did know got me past it, and the new people I met were welcoming and kind. After all, everyone there was, in some way, strangers to each other. We have come so far and are so different to who we were then.

Maybe we don’t carry relationships along over time, but rather they are something that we continually choose to re-create.

We choose to keep the embers alive so we can forge that connection, again and again.