Megan and Polo believe in ‘action against depression’. They are the faces and brains of The Green Journey, a non-profit organisation sharing stories about how people around the world are combating climate and environmental crises in their own creative ways. Unlike your typical glamourous influencers, the duo travel around in the lowest-carbon way possible, including crossing the Atlantic in a sailing boat. They see travel as a force for good, uniting people with different interests.

Prior to The Green Journey, Megan and Polo both worked in environmental consultancy, which is a great way to develop a green career, according to Megan, as you get to be exposed to various solutions and see what clicks. A consultant’s skills in asking questions and prioritising tasks have proven to be useful in their remote entrepreneurial venture, as well as getting your transport sorted, such as asking for a hitchhike.

One of Megan and Polo’s favourite books about sustainability is Drawdown - they even spent a lot of time re-reading it recently. The book offers a comprehensive guide to climate solutions across different sectors.

Listen to the podcast or read the transcript below.

Yongsi: I discovered The Green Journey on Instagram. You guys were biking in the hottest months of the year, which is actually the hottest year on record, from Venice to Athens via Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro and Albania. But that was just a tiny part of your journey. Could you give us an idea of what you do?

Megan: The Green Journey is a climate storytelling 501(c)(3) located in the US. It's really great that you found us on Instagram, but we have one goal, which is to share and discover climate solutions from around the world. That really means that we're focused on bringing to light new media stories and formats of people who are actively working to solve the nature and climate crisis.

Our twist is we do this without flying on our journey around the world and without taking individual cars. Like you saw on Instagram, we go bikepacking and take public transportation. Recently, we even sailed across the Atlantic Ocean. Our goal is to reach all continents so we can share these stories from around the world.

Polo: Yes, and we'll be around the world on the road for the next three plus years. Right now we've covered Europe. In 2024 we'll cover North and South America.

Yongsi: Where are you currently?

Megan: Right now we're in St. Lucia, which is a small island nation in the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean Sea. St. Lucia is a really exciting place to tell climate stories because it's a small island developing state, which means that St. Lucia is incredibly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. But the people who live here have historically done very little to contribute to the climate crisis.

We're gonna be sailing around the Caribbean for the next couple months with the goal of getting to Miami in early March. At each island stop, we're going to share solutions from the local economy, climate activists and nature warriors there to bring to light the incredible work that's being done in these environments.

Yongsi: So you'll be covering topics on climate change adaptation and climate justice. Is that right?

Megan: Yes. What's incredible about the Caribbean is there are so many stories here of adaptation and climate justice. But even apart from those narratives, there's already real work being done on the ground by people who live here without international intervention and aid to create solutions.

Actually in Barbados, we just visited Solar Dynamics, which is an installer of solar hot water heaters, which is a technology that basically heats up water with solar tanks so you can have hot showers. A fun fact is that Barbados is the number one country in the world for these solar hot water heaters. Nobody talks about that in climate narratives, right? That's the type of story we're trying to bring to light.

Polo: A second very interesting project that we went and interviewed is the largest nature restoration project in the Caribbean. It's a 280 acres former sand mine, where it was basically a huge dune of sand that they extracted for 50 years in order to turn it into concrete and cement for construction purposes. 10 years ago, the owner of the mine decided to turn it into a restoration project. That person along with many other people on the island got together and started to restore the ecosystem. They started to plant trees and attract animals. Right now they are growing their own food in that place.

We've been there and it's really like a tropical jungle. It's a green paradise for real. They’ve turned that place from a ‘yellow murder’ where it's just like sand and machine extracting that sand for decades into like a lush tropical place where you have mangroves, lakes, reefs and the beach ecosystem. So many animals! We saw monkeys, crabs, and hummingbirds. An incredible story. That's just Barbados. That's just the first island we landed on. We are really excited to explore the Caribbean beyond that.

Yongsi: Oh wow, I'm also very excited to hear your updates! For our audience's information, I've put down links in the description below on how to follow The Green Journey on social media.

Now back to Megan and Polo. Let's talk about your entrepreneurial journey since this is a podcast about careers. Why did you start this project? Specifically, why did you choose to tell climate stories?

Megan: I read a statistic literally yesterday that was done by a group of University of College London, I think. The statistic was that 98% of environmental news media is negative. That was one estimate, so it could be somewhere below that range. But the overwhelming consensus among scientists, researchers and academics is that the majority of the climate news that we get today is negative.

The paper also dealt into how negative news is a barrier to action, and that it takes away agency when people are reading negative news stories all the time, because it creates a feeling of ‘learned helplessness’, which is a term from psychology. We really saw that there was a need and an opportunity for climate narratives and climate news that focuses solely on solutions.

I think when we talk about solutions, we're talking about real solutions because there's also a piece of the movement that's positive back to nature. I guess it doesn't encompass boots on the ground and it says, let's just all be happy about mother nature and against fossil fuel companies - that's also part of the movement. But we really wanted to talk about technology, activism, entrepreneurship, science, all in one. We found that solution storytelling was the large umbrella that could encompass that.

Polo: I think it comes down to two things. The first one is, as Megan said, the climate crisis deserves better stories. Right now we are being served negative doomsday scenario type of stories, and we don't want that anymore. When we meet people on the road who are concretely working on solutions, it gives us so much hope, right? We really believe in action against depression. The minute you start acting against the climate crisis, whatever it is that you're passionate about, then you see the crisis as an opportunity. We're not being naive out there. We know that the situation is pretty bad. But it's an incredible challenge that gives us an opportunity to create a better society. So that's the first thing. That's really what motivated us.

The second one is that we have the sentiment that travel can be used as a force for good. What we mean by that is that we want the travel aspect of The Green Journey to be the entry door for many people who might not be interested in climate topics. They might be interested in following two people going around the world in a new way. It’s like a 21st century type of exploration that uses low-carbon forms of transportation. Once they enter that door, once we show them the different places in the world, we also show them how people are acting on the ground, creating climate solutions. It's really the intersection between climate solutions, positive news and travel as a force for good.

Yongsi: You are documenting your travelling experience, but you're not the conventional travel bloggers who usually talk about where to shop, how to dress, that kind of consumerism stuff.

Megan: We're not trying to sell anyone anything. If anything, we're trying to unsell you stuff and show you that it's possible to travel to an incredible place like St. Lucia, where we are now with a $20/person daily budget and still experience these things. I will say that comes with passport privilege - we do have a lot of passport privilege being French and American. I don't want to mention the travel aspect without recognizing that. But because of the way we travel, we really do adopt an anti-consumerism perspective. You'll see Polo wearing the same three shirts all the time. We eat ramen sometimes. It's not a glamorous life.

Polo: When you have 50 and 65 litre backpacks, you cannot consume many things. There's very little things you can carry around. Our goal is not to be travelling influencers at all. We see ourselves as maybe a new wave of explorers. We use this travel as a means to tell stories and work on something greater than ourselves.

Yongsi: When you arrive in the place as a complete stranger, how do you get people to trust you and tell you their stories?

Polo: You ask questions. The first thing you ask questions, you want to be curious. You want to assume that you don't know anything. That's more like on the road when it comes to the travel logistics. Let's say you want to go from point A to point B and you have no idea how to get there. You start asking locals, piecing the pieces together and understand how to move around.

When it comes to climate stories, Megan is actually in charge of doing a lot of research. She is very good at finding those amazing opportunities. Often we just contact them ahead of time. Sometimes it’s someone we know introduces us to someone on the ground that we can interview. That's how it goes.

Megan: Asking questions about climate is so important no matter where you are. The other night we were riding a minibus. We started talking to the minibus driver about local agriculture in St. Lucia. He was super passionate about food independence for the island and the progress that the island has made on food independence.

What's really interesting for us as travellers is drawing the connecting thread in St. Lucia. They grow a decent amount of the food on the island but they still import the majority. In Barbados where we had been just a few nights before, 85% of food is imported. So even more food is imported. As you draw a line throughout the Caribbean or the countries that we go to, some of the learnings of agriculture going on in St. Lucia and the biome there can be then transferred and shared with other communities around the world that are trying to do similar actions.

Yongsi: Have you come across any barriers of language yet?

Megan: It depends on where you are. We're lucky that a lot of the travelling so far has been done in Europe and the Caribbean where we speak the languages, at least two of them. When we got to Eastern Europe, there were definitely some moments where language was a challenge, especially when we went to the Vjosa Wild River National Park in Albania. We met with activists who had lived in the same village for their entire lives and never left. Of course, they spoke Albanian. We didn't speak a word of it. Luckily, we had a friend who was able to translate for us. Certainly, the more you meet with activists and solutionists who haven't come in touch with traditional Western media, which is really our goal, that's when the language becomes a challenge. But it's a challenge we embrace.

Yongsi: Do you keep track of how many people you’ve talked to?

Megan: We need to do a tally on the spreadsheet. We have a spreadsheet somewhere, but it's a little bit out of date.

Polo: Besides the strangers on the road - that's part of the track - for the climate people, I would say around 50 people that we've interacted with, interviewed or used their learnings into articles and videos. That's in less than a year, around eight months. By the end of the three plus years of The Green Journey, that number is going to go up quite a lot.

Yongsi: Wow. 50 people over eight months. That's more than like six stories per month. That's impressive.

Polo: Sometimes different people fit into a single story. But it's important to have different types of perspectives to write or to tell a story to avoid it being a single story. We do talk to a lot of people. We learn a lot and we love sharing those learnings with our audience.

Yongsi: How do you divide work between the two of you?

Megan: Since this is a career podcast, right, that's one of the early challenges of launching your own venture. That remains true when you're a two-person team, whether it's an NGO like we are or a for profit business. At first, we both had our eyes on the to-do list for everything. Also remember that we're partnered together romantically. This could even sometimes create some strain there, like you forgot to send that email.

After eight months of working together, we've gotten pretty good at having our certain territories of what we're each responsible for. I love to write. I love to do outreach. I spend a lot of my time focused on the written elements of some of the stories. Polo is our expert photographer, drone driver, social media aficionado. In that way, we're lucky that we've gotten better and better at staying within our swimlanes to be effective with our time.

Yongsi: What is your day-to-day like? I know it sounds like a silly question because no day is the same when travelling.

Megan: No, I just laughed because it's funny, right? Because like you said, there is no day-to-day. It's better to think about it maybe in terms of a week-to-week. In any given week, we try to have one day - I think this is a good tip for any remote entrepreneurs - where we really sit down and just focus on work. We have a weekly to-do list that we get done and we focus our heads down eight hours of work, almost like being in an office.

Then there's a couple of days for travel. There's at least one day off a week to enjoy serendipity. In that way, we still do have that experience of being on the road and have space for unexpected learnings. When we're not doing something like the transatlantic, we try to have at least two climate related meetings in the country that we're in.

Yongsi: In your case, is it possible to separate work from life? For example, would you go on a hike where you would not think about work at all?

Polo: That's a tough question, at least for me. I see The Green Journey as a passion. When you're on a hike, maybe you’ll find something new about the island that might connect you to the story we are working on. The brain is always expanding, especially the way we are doing it, you're learning so much because you're in close contact with nature. I tend to think carbon insulates you from people because when you travel by more carbon-intensive forms of transportation, you don't have the same approach to culture. We are not necessarily typing things on the phone as we are hiking. But I think the brain always focuses on The Green Journey to a certain extent.

Yongsi: Besides all the great fun and excitement during travelling, can you tell us more about the challenging part as remote entrepreneurs?

Megan: I think time zone challenges are real. Definitely working with a global audience like we are and a global group of climate activists and entrepreneurs and solutionists. Managing across time zones of Europe and Americas and soon to be Asia can be really tricky.

Also just being far away from home and family is a challenge we face. We're both very lucky in that we're close to our families and even shout out to Tom's older sister, who was a big inspiration for us in sailing across the Atlantic. It's hard to be away from them. But luckily, we live in an era where it's easier than ever to get in touch with people.

Yongsi: Exactly. I mean, that's how we managed to do this podcast with an ocean between us. Now, I want to talk about your previous experience before you started The Green Journey. What did you do for work before?

Polo: We were strategy consultants for large organisations, non-profits or governments.

I was working more on the ESG strategy, especially decarbonization of operations of large organisations.

Megan: I was working more for climate tech startups, advising low-carbon cement companies through series C, helping develop go-to-market strategies for solar. I would say to anyone who's thinking about starting a climate career, that consulting is a good place to start. You can touch lots of different climate solutions and learn about what lights your inner fire. But I have such immense respect for builders, who are actually deciding to go all in on one solution or pick an area of the climate crisis that they want to focus on. That's what we're doing now.

Yongsi: How do you apply skills that you've learned at the consultancy to your work at the Green Journey?

Megan: The most important skill that anyone can have starting off in their career is curiosity and asking questions. As consultants in the climate space, you are constantly asking questions, whether it's about scope three emissions or how well a new residential inverter works. This skill directly transferred to asking for a hitchhike on a sailboat or asking a local resident of St. Lucia about what their fears are for global warming in the next 50 years. Questions are the thread of building and that is what we did.

Polo: Also the ability to structure the project and being able to go from a long to-do list to the most important and the most urgent task. Prioritisation is extremely important in a consulting project. I think it's extremely important in any project overall.

Yongsi: But compared to established consultancy, The Green Journey as a small non-profit organisation is obviously very different and requires you to learn new things. How did you do it while travelling?

Polo: Yes, definitely a lot of new skills. In terms of video editing, videography and so on - I come from a photography background more than videography - you learn on the go, reading and watching tutorials. Social media are a bit tricky to navigate nowadays, especially Instagram as they made such a pivotal move to video. But there's a lot of resources out there that I've been taking advantage of.

Yongsi: Basically you need to be extra flexible and fit some learning sessions in your travelling schedule too.

Polo: Yes, absolutely. We took the first few months in Europe as that trial period where we focused on what we enjoy, what we enjoy less, what we feel like we could be good at and where we could focus our skills on. I took advantage of that time, for instance, to focus a bit more on social media.

Yongsi: Can you share your favourite hubs for learning these new skills?

Polo: Yes, I use InShot for video editing. I watch all the tutorials about how to use that app and be the fastest possible when using it. YouTube has so many great tutorials.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell what is commercial, marketing and doesn't really work from what is genuine advice and tutorials. I would say YouTube tutorials for whatever editing app you use will go a long way.

Megan: I'm a little more old fashioned. I really like to learn from books. When I decided I wanted to increase my writing skills, I actually went and read Stephen King's On Writing. I read a lot of other books by authors who I was really impressed by. What I like about books is they're a gift that keeps on giving. You just buy it once and no one's going to try to sell you anything else on it.

Yongsi: Amazing! I'm sure you'll be very happy to answer the last question of this interview. But before then, let's talk about money. So how do you fund your project, because you're a non-profit organisation right?

Megan: Yes, it's a non-profit. We don't take money for our travel expenses. A big part of what we do is we wouldn't ever want to ask anyone to pay for us to travel. We saved a lot of money during our old career. We also stay on a very tight budget of around $20 per person per day. A lot less than you'd pay living in San Francisco.

One of the main ways that we're fundraising for things like website hosting, outreach and being able to help hopefully eventually pay some of the other people who are volunteering their time to write with us is Substack. A lot of the support for our project comes through Substack, where people can pay a little fee to read our stories. Of course, the stories are always free, but that money goes a long way in helping us spend time finding more stories and engaging more people in creating them.

Yongsi: You're living on $20 per person per day. That means it's below the poverty line of the United States. So what do you think of your quality of life at the moment?

Megan: It's hard to say there's a better quality of life for us at this stage than waking up every week in a new country. To us, that gift of being able to travel with a purpose overwhelms a lot of material comforts and material security that we'd be looking for. I think entrepreneurialism is not for the faint of heart. In particular, nonprofit entrepreneurialism is really not for the faint of heart, because you have all of the uncertainties of building your own thing with also the given statement of our mission comes before our pocketbook. And our mission comes before our personal desire to make money. But it's so worth it to see the world every day in the midst of the climate and energy transition.

Yongsi: At some point in the future, when your journey comes to an end, what will you do? Have you thought about this?

Polo: I have no idea. Personally, I'm really deep into the phase of The Green Journey that I'm not necessarily projecting myself on the next phase. It will also depend on where that journey takes us. When you travel this way and when you focus on climate solutions this way, there may be a place or there might be a solution that I feel like I really want to focus on. But I'm really keeping an open mind for that potential opportunity to arise.

Megan: I think we will always work on sharing climate stories from around the world. When a day does come where we have to settle into one place, we will still try to maintain that global network and do things like this, where we have calls with people from the other side of the Atlantic to discuss climate.

Yongsi: I guess one step at a time. You have time. You still have quite a few continents and many countries to cover. Now, finally, can you recommend a book or two that inspire you about sustainability?

Megan: I've got one non-fiction recommendation. We just spent a lot of time re-reading Drawdown. Drawdown is really a great book if folks haven't read it. It's a little bit old now just in terms of the numbers, but the principle is the same that the solutions exist. They're everywhere to be found. They exist across sectors. It's a really comprehensive guide.

Polo: For the audience who's not familiar with the Drawdown Project, it's a project, I believe, out of MIT with a goal to stop and reverse the phenomenon of global warming through focusing on high impact solutions. What they did is they reviewed the scientific literature available and created large categories of very specific climate solutions. They quantified the impact in terms of emissions reduction and also in terms of funding required and net cost.

One of the findings is that most of the solutions have a positive net cost. It's really helpful because sometimes in the public debates you hear people saying solution A is not helpful and we should instead focus on solution B. Well, then it has a more scientific approach with clear numbers in terms of impact that a potential solution can bring.

Yongsi: I've heard of the book actually. One of my classmates from Carbon Management, Yanaika, she co-authored a book called De klimaatschok. It's in Dutch. It’s sort of a spin-off of Drawdown and talks about solutions in Belgium in specific.

Polo: Project Drawdown is a huge project with large assumptions at the global level. But being able to translate that at the national level with a concrete roadmap is something very inspiring.

Yongsi: Yes, and I look forward to seeing more local solutions reported by The Green Journey!