Climate Reflections from the Activate Community
Activate was founded by entrepreneurs, scientists, and investors who believe science has an outsized role to play in addressing climate change, the defining challenge of our time. Our mission is to empower Activate Fellows to remake our world by bringing their research to market—reinventing our economy to be sustainable, resilient, and equitable.
As individuals at an organization committed to the urgent work of mitigating climate change, how can we balance staying informed and inspired? We asked members of the Activate community—staff, board members, partners, and fellows—to reflect on their climate journey by sharing how they keep climate fatigue at bay, what sparked their climate "wake-up call," and how the work of Activate Fellows inspires hope.
What makes you hopeful about the Activate Fellows’ work to fight climate change?
Nicole Systrom, Activate Board Member and Founder, Sutro Energy Group
Nicole Systrom: Their clear-eyed pursuit of climate impact—so many of our fellows got on this life path because of their personal commitment to climate. We're lucky they have the skills, fortitude, and support to actually do something about it.
Brenna Teigler: What makes me hopeful is the hope of the fellows. They are so much more knowledgable than I am on the specifics of the hard work to be done—and they are dedicating their lives to taking it on. I believe in all of them.
John Nguyen, Director of Strategic Partnerships, Activate
John Nguyen: I’ve been reflecting on where we go from here. It seems we’ve reached a nadir on progress towards economic and racial justice, public health outcomes, democratic norms, and climate catastrophe. Failure of imagination in our public discourse to address grand challenges, the moonshots, is a barrier to real change. We limit our own solution set because we often get mired in what’s immediately before us.
The fellows inspire me because they provide so much hope when it seems like the solutions to address the climate crisis are so inadequate. They aspire to do the “big things” and so help stretch our moral, scientific, and technical imaginations of what is possible. We can’t begin to imagine what our world will look like in terms of food and ag tech, energy and climate, transportation, and computing. Activate Fellows help us reimagine what that world would look like and make it feel as if it’s right around the corner. I’m privileged and honored to be working with and supporting a group of leaders who are at the frontier of this sea change, helping us stretch our horizons of the possible.
What was your climate wake-up call?
Brenna Teigler, Chief Fellowship Officer, Activate
John Nguyen: I think the Arab Spring uprisings in 2010-2011 really brought into focus how global warming, food scarcity, fragile democracies, and political instability can severely impact huge swaths of people, many who are still dealing with this today. It reinforced for me the interdependence of our world and the real-life implications and knock-on effects of climate change.
Brenna Teigler: My climate wake-up call came later than many in our community. I was in my last year of completing my Ph.D., and I went to a talk about the water/energy nexus. Through learning about that topic, the true seriousness and urgency of climate change hit me. I then shifted from tackling healthcare-related challenges to energy and climate-related challenges.
Elise Strobach, CEO, AeroShield Materials, Cohort 2020
Elise Strobach: In grade school, I took my first visit to a local national park. When we arrived, the park rangers led us straight from the bus to a welcome building where they sat us down and explained the importance of respecting nature and the park. I took the rules very seriously from the beginning. As I walked through those trails and forests, their words echoed in my mind, “leave the park better than you found it.”
It was spring, so it was easy to see the tangible miracles found in nature and fall in love with the scent of flowers in the air and bird songs on the breeze. I thought: it would be very, very hard to improve upon nature. But, on the walk back to the bus, as I watched some classmates throw trash and break off branches along the trail, I realized the environment needs us each to protect its miracles. In that moment I heard my first call to join the climate fight.
How do you fight climate grief or stay motivated in the face of climate fatigue?
Nicole Systrom: I fight climate fatigue by taking joy in all the folks I'm lucky enough to collaborate with on addressing the climate crisis—including so many within the Activate Community. This work has to be fun—otherwise, we won't be able to stay in it for the long haul.
John Nguyen: It’s completely understandable and natural to be paralyzed by climate grief and I know I’ve struggled with learning how to “die in the Anthropocene.” Then again, I think about how this can be an end to a lot of what we’ve known, but in that space, the beginning of something new.
The only thing I can say is that in those difficult moments, I’ve been able to lean into the community for support and uplift. I can honestly say that I’ve never been in a sector that has been as supportive and collaborative as the climate community, from funders, strategic partners, to peer organizations and other stakeholders. Maybe because the full scope of the challenge is so vast that it needs “all hands on deck,” or that it attracts solutions-oriented, optimistic people, but this abundance mindset engenders such a sense of shared success and common destiny.
What climate-focused book would you recommend?
Nicole Systrom: All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson.
John Nguyen: Elizabeth Kolbert’s Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History was a gut punch when I read it. She artfully and starkly highlights how irrevocably we’ve changed the natural world and the species that exist in it, and brought me to reckon what it means to live in the Anthropocene. I’m looking forward to reading her most recent book, Under a White Sky, about the limits of techno-optimism to solve grand challenges.
What climate leader do you find inspiring?
Nicole Systrom: Gina McCarthy. That woman Just. Doesn't. Quit.