See Through Network Founder and professional gift horse distributor Robert ‘SternWriter’ Stern reveals the origin story of a global network that measurably reduces carbon on a budget of zero.

The first of three articles by See Through Network’s founder, on the creation of a climate action collaboration for ‘Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active’. Its tone demonstrates See Through’s ‘Transparent Trojan Horse’ methodology’s flexibility, and its purpose. Just as ‘businesslike’ CVs dehumanise us, prioritising money before all else is making us drown, burn and shrivel.

By Robert ‘SternWriter’ Stern

Call me Patchy McZig-Zag

If I sit back from the daily details of the See Through Network, take a breath, and squint at it through half-closed eyes, I can kind of see how it reflects my patchwork career and zig-zag life.

At first glance, both the Network and my first six decades both seem as random as a patchwork quilt. 

Look closer, in direct sunlight, and you can discern four threads connecting all the patches:

1. Curiosity about what makes us tick (inherited from my neurologist Dad)
2. Respect for the scientific method (ditto)
3. Concern about human impact on the environment
4. Storytelling – adapting stories to best suit the listener

Listed like that, the sequencing too makes sense. Curiosity led to Respect, Respect to Concern, Concern to Storytelling. 

Does this help make the See Through Goal of Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping The Inactive Become Active, and the Networks sprawling range of diverse projects, look a little less random? 

By the end of this unconventional CV, all will be revealed, but it’s a project (and life) that’s not usefully explained in a ten-word goal, or one-page Executive Summary. 

Like any life, I dare say including yours, order only appears in retrospect. Most of us at any point in our lives, if asked by a stranger at a bus stop, bar or beach what we’re doing with our lives and why, could come up with an explanation.

At the time we answer, our rationale might sound as compelling and ‘true’ to us as it does to the stranger, but time has a way of changing truth. As life pulls us in unexpected directions we subtly update our narratives, imposing a logic here, implying a sequence there, fashioning a narrative that places us in control of our own Fate. 

What if, at any point during the 55 years before I conceived the Network in 2020, we’d met at a bus stop, bar or beach? What if you’d told me whatever I thought I was doing at the time was in fact one of a series of training modules designed to establish a scalable climate action network?

Assuming I didn’t walk away, assuming you were trying to convert me to your religion, I’d have told you whatever my ‘true’ narrative was at the time. But now, which one of us would have been telling the truth?

Hindsight makes a mockery of ‘truth’ and ‘lies’. We’re all different, but we’re all guided by stories. That’s why effective climate action demands eclectic, nuanced and purposeful storytelling.

The Network is designed to navigate the gap that separates the implacable, sheer rock face of atmospheric physics from the boggy maze of human psychology. Science speaks in cold hard facts, impervious to opinion. We’re squidgy, sweating, humans, evolved to like a good yarn. The Network uses storytelling to connect the science with the squidge. 

Take this article, loosely an account of my life and role in founding the See Through Network. I’m writing it one way, but assign it to different authors and they could come up with very different versions of the same ‘truth’: 

• Hollywood screenwriters would make the Network seem like the inevitable consequence of the first 55 years of my life.
• Wikipedia editors would fact-check a sequence of verifiable events, in the manner of a conventional CV or CIA file.
• Biographers, whose credibility depends on appearing to sounding like Wikipedia, but whose sales depend on writing like a screenwriter, would hedge their bets.
• Journalists, wobbling on the same tightrope as biographers, balancing verifiable fact with satisfying narrative, could cover the spectrum from Hollywood to Wikipedia, depending on the editorial policy of whoever was paying them.

Whoever the storyteller, and whatever the audience, we’re all pattern-seeking apes who enjoy a good yarn.

The Network’s The Truth Lies In Bedtime Stories podcast focuses on the subtle gap between truth and lies. The format tells incredible stories that are entirely true, largely, and ends up challenging the listener to work out not just which bits are true and which not, but when and why we bother to distinguish them.

My own preference would be for everyone to act on the climate crisis all the time. I set up the Network to nudge a few more people to act a bit more, more often. 

This approach integrates human imperfections, rather than wishing them away. In my life, yours, or that of our species, decisions made at a certain time for a certain reason can turn out to have unintended consequences down the line, that are only visible in hindsight. It’s only natural to want to blame someone else, or find excuses to justify inaction, but there are plenty of ineffective activists trying the former, and climate deniers facilitating the latter.

The Network avoids both pitfalls by telling stories with many different starting points, converging on the same destination of measurable climate action. We always tell the same story, but in different ways for different audience.

A good test for any story is whether you can make it comprehensible to a smart child. If you doubt this, try explaining carbon offsetting to a persistent 8-year-old. 

When condensing the climate crisis into mini Fabulous Fables a child could understand, we often label the chapter about the Industrial Revolution fossil fuels ‘Oops’. Shit happens, but grown-ups who lecture their children about ‘taking responsibility for their actions’ aren’t practising what they preach.

Maybe we should call it the See Through Patchwork. 

A quilt, six decades in the making. A sustainable construction, made by a team of local artisans from available resources.

Human civilization: my part in its downfall

When I entered adulthood in the ‘80s, ‘worrying about the planet’ was an eccentric hobby.

Back then, planetary worries were about pollution, the ozone layer, biodiversity loss and habitat encroachment, mainly in the Amazon. 

Through the 1980s, I began connecting these ‘environmental concern’ dots.

Expressed this way, another personal connection has just struck me. The Quiet Revolutionary – the heroic role played in a Plot to Assassinate the King by someone you’ve all heard of  is a See Through Prodcast about me, my Dad and his hero. I spend ages writing, reading, and producing the thing, but have only just observed it’s also about connecting dots. Storytelling makes you notice such connections.

(Spoiler alert: the ‘someone you’ve all heard of’ was James Parkinson, a Napoleonic-era physician blessed with curiosity, passion, powers of observation and clear thinking. In 1815 he published a pamphlet speculating that a collection of apparently unconnected symptoms might have a common cause. Essay on the Shaking Palsy was instantly ignored. Decades after his death in Paris, the founder of modern neurology realised its genius,and named what we know now as Parkinson’s disease after its hitherto-forgotten author.)

Like Parkinsonian symptoms, my teenage ‘eco-concerns’ turned out not to be siloed problems that just happened to occur at the same time. They turned out to all be symptoms of the same disease – our fossil fuel addiction.

The realisation took me years. Connecting dots and discerning the climate boffin chorus shouting their warnings into the void was harder pre-Internet.

Over my adult life, the climate boffins’ dire projections have become verifiable data.

My teenage concerns about pollution and biodiversity loss now look quaintly trivial. For my daughters, now the same age I was in the ‘80s, the climate crisis is a fixable problem my generation has let become an existential crisis. 

My children, and future generations. will bear the brunt of the mess we’ve bequeathed them. When they look up, a sustainable future is receding further towards the horizon. When they look down, Despair is wrestling Hope to the ground. 

As an activist, this is daunting. As a storyteller, I’m grudgingly impressed. 

In my lifetime, Big Oil’s have invested billions in ‘petroganda, and are still getting a fantastic ROI. Even today, most people’s understanding of how to ‘save the planet’ involves recycling, celebrity flight-shaming, signing non-binding online petitions, or switching to an EV. Mwahaha. Just as they planned.

Their PR shills know how to subtly re-frame a story, amplify insecurities, quash reason, and bypass logic. They must high-five each other when exasperated activists like Greta, XR or Insulate Britain gift them ‘just listen to the scientists’ appeals, or ramp up provocative civil disobedience. 

The See Through Network doesn’t contradict their headline-grabbing form of activism. It complements it. Some people probably do have to urge people to ‘Save The Planet’, but it often appears to backfire.

Even as a schoolkid, ‘save the planet’’s unscientific framing phrase annoyed me. Earth is 99.9% rock, I’d say, with a thin green smear on the unsubmerged bits. Earth is billions of years old, with billions to go before we’re engulfed by the Sun.

Humans have barely been around for 300,000 years. We’re statistically certain to join the 99.9% of all species that are now extinct. Our plot twist is that, having ingeniously erected a man-made gallows, we remain intent on kicking away the bucket ourselves. 

Describing the problem as ‘saving the planet’ betrays the very hubris that caused our problem in the first place. To kick their habit, addicts must first recognize the problem. Planetary preservation ain’t ours.

To be clear, the planet’s fine. I’m just a big fan of human civilization and I feel bad about the shitty bequest I and my generation are delivering them.

My entire adult life, I’ve struggled with the realisation that we’re ingenious enough to burn, drown and shrivel ourselves to extinction, smart enough to realise it, and stupid enough to still keep burning fossil fuels. 

Like most of us, I did what I could, while earning a living.

By 2021, my four years as a businessman, decade in TV news, two more making documentaries, combined with a student lifestyle and prudent saving, had earned me a rich store of experience and (probably) enough money to stop working.

The See Through Network is my attempt to do something to bring a sustainable future a bit closer, while I still can.

My Zig-Zag Life

My patchwork of experiences, contacts and references, stitched together with my zig-zag threads, are all detectable in The See Through Network.

My first big zig was at Edinburgh University. In 1983 I started studying Politics & Philosophy. Within a few weeks, I’d zagged to Chinese. Now, this looks smart, but in truth Chinese back then was about as popular/relevant as Sanscrit. 

I admit that for much of my professional life, when asked why I made this switch at a time when the embers of the Cultural Revolution were still smouldering and China was a basket case, I’ve modestly hinted at my prescience.

Many have fallen for my humblebrags. 

• ‘It wasn’t hard to predict China’s rise’. 
• ‘It seemed likely my adult life would be intertwined with the world’s dominant superpower’. 
• ‘Wasn’t it obvious China would revert to its historical dominance?
• China could hardly avoid making more people richer faster/emitting more greenhouse gas than any time in human history’.

In truth, my Curiosity thread tugged me. 

I was simply beguiled by China’s language, intrigued by its history and fascinated by its culture and philosophy. In the early 80s, China was as remote as Mars. 

Once I realised the state would pay me to spend a highly formative 1984/5 year studying in the PRC, Chinese it was for me. 

Once I graduated, my ‘career’ has followed this pattern. Zig-zags, connected by my threads, often made possible by speaking foreign languages). 

Here are the main zags.

Textile Trader

For four years after graduating, to the amusement of my friends (I’m not the most fashion-conscious) I was literally in the thread and cloth business, working my way up the London textiles trading division of a Japanese trading giant. 

As globalisation exploded, I trotted the globe as a high-flying salariman. I linked poor-country suppliers with rich-country customers. It was an education in geopolitics, international trade, and cross-cultural negotiation, for which I was handsomely remunerated.

Along the way, I learned formal office Japanese, and was fascinated by my employer’s corporate culture. Maybe that’s why what was then the world’s biggest company made me the youngest 課長 (kachō: section manager) in its 140-year history.

Eco-guru

In 1991, I quit and flew to Japan, at the peak of the Bubble Economy. 

I landed in the world’s most expensive city with a suitcase and a dream of becoming an environmental consultant to major Japanese corporations.

TV News Journalist

Discovering I was a few decades too early to secure the job I’d made up, and failing to convince Japan Inc. a familiarity with Tang poetry was a sufficient qualification, I fell into journalism.

I spent the ‘90s writing the odd article for The IHT, The Times, The Guardian and Sydney Morning Herald, but mainly producing/reporting for US news networks across Asia.

Highlights included:

• my global sumo scoop for ABC News in Tokyo
• reporting on the death of Deng Xiaoping for NBC Asia
• a special report on the Three Gorges Dam as CNBC Shanghai Bureau Chief, my first dip into longer form visual storytelling

I learned how to get tough stuff done, to high standards, on limited resources, to meet a hard deadline. I learned to follow the money, and question everything, with multiple sources. I learned visual storytelling. 

By the late 90’s, I was CNN Beijing Bureau Producer/Reporter. This turned out to be the last time anyone paid me a salary.

Dad

CNN’s Atlanta HQ was full of excellent journalists all devoted to the same mistress, 24-hour news. Entering the second millennia with a second child on the way, I preferred being a present father to a lifelong affair with the News Cycle. 

I quit CNN and returned to my native UK. 

Like when I went to Japan in ‘91, everyone thought I must have a job lined up.

Like then, I didn’t. But reckoned I’d busk it.

Entrepreneur

In 2000 I set up Litmus Films, a grand-sounding production company run from my ‘global shedquarters’ in a Wiltshire village. The overheads, in both senses, were low, but I had no income. 

I reckoned documentaries couldn’t be all that different from news reports. Both involved pointing a camera at something to tell a story,  

My naivete was soon exposed. News and docs were both highly competitive, driven by who you know, and centred on London. But they didn’t overlap much otherwise. 

I knew no one, was two hours from London, and now had an extra mouth to feed.

Filmmaker

I edited my first documentary from footage I’d filmed on a camcorder on a family trip to Ulaan Baatar in our last months in Beijing. We only needed to renew our visas, but it was a chance to investigate an unlikely-sounding story a photojournalist friend had told me about his first trip to Mongolia a few  years earlier.

The Mongolian Navy: all at sea told the tale of the seven sailors of the good tug Sukhbaatar. The tug and its three barges, based on a lake by the Russian border, made up the landlocked country’s fleet.

The sailors started as comic eccentrics. Only one could swim, they had nothing to tug, and the lake froze solid for half the year. By the end, they’d become heroic, keeping their passion afloat literally and figuratively.

I loved learning to shoot and edit, but was too green to spot the best story. I only mentioned  Mongolia’s only (accidentally) qualified deep-sea navigator in passing. Ganbaatar could swim, but was stuck behind a desk in a bureaucratic backwater. Decades later, my first attempt at a podcast rectified this.

It wasn’t unusual, back then, to be a professional TV journalist or documentary filmmaker without any formal qualifications. This may have provided me with the chutzpah to set the See Through Network’s ambitions so high, not to mention doing it zero-budget.

TV production, like coordinating CNN’s coverage of the first US Presidential visit to China since Tiananmen, has left me undaunted by prospects many others find daunting. Years of serially immersing myself in a wide variety of parallel universes as a journalist and filmmaker have also accustomed me to absorbing and analysing information quickly. 

I’ve adopted these magpie habits for the See Through Network. I can pick up the shiny bits of carbon accounting, data-driven businesses, AI, supervising software development projects, games developing etc. required to make a start on the nest. Then I  just need to find expert colleagues to do the job properly.

Self-taught ‘digital native’ YouTubers apart, such learning-on-the-job no longer seems possible with so many university courses in journalism, media studies and film production.

When students ask me about my qualifications, I tell them I have a First Class Honours Degree in Chinese, which has turned out to be the only qualification I’ve needed. 

Most of them think I’m joking.

Polyglot Hack Of All Trades

My key lesson, once I entered self-unemployment, was to never say ‘No’, and always keep a straight face when saying ‘Yes’.

A decade delivering crafted TV news stories to crazy deadlines develops a can-do attitude. It also creates a confidence that can appear reckless or overweening to those who’ve never tried it.

Now I was no longer living in Asia, my hard-acquired Asian languages were not so easily monetised, but fluency in Chinese and Japanese was still pretty rare. Monoglot Brits are particularly easily impressed, so I rode the Polyglot train as far as it would take me. 

I found ways of leveraging my languages and contacts to put rice on the table by accepting a variety of jobs for which I had neither experience nor qualifications. 

Gigs included:

• mentoring Eastern European journalists on ‘BBC values’ for BBC World
• leading social documentary workshops around China
• bridging cultural gaps at the Shanghai and Suzuka F1 Grands Prix
• marketing TV entertainment formats like Robot Wars to China and Japan

In front of camera, I co-presented a game show in Mandarin seen by more than 100 million Chinese. 

I also found myself explaining Israel’s ethnic and religious complexities, in 90 seconds, in Japanese, live on Japanese public TV. 

Storyteller

As you might imagine, such larks have given me a fine repository of unusual stories – you’re just getting the potted version here.

I started paying more attention to how anecdotes improved with each telling. I’d analyse how and why, and apply my conclusions to my next project. 

This paid off professionally. Thousands of experienced, qualified, talented documentary filmmakers were scrapping for every commission, but it took more than filmmaking ability to make a freelance living.

I soon learned a commercial documentary filmmaker’s ‘art’ wasn’t so much mastering framing, knowing which lens to use, or using natural light as spinning a good yarn.

Filmmakers were much like jazzers. To make a living, they need to cultivate their art, be good listeners, and hustle like hell.

I self-studied the strange alchemy of converting conversational tidbit base metal into commercial documentary pitch gold. 

A chat with a Norwegian fish marketing executive I sat next to at dinner became Tamils of the Tundra, a news feature about how Sri Lankan refugees were keeping Norway’s Arctic fishing industry alive.

I did my scales and worked on my technique. 1. Spot an untold story. 2. Find a universal truth in it. 3. Persuade a broadcaster to pay me to tell it. 

Rinse and repeat. You’re only as good as your next gig.

Global citizen

Having made a living from viewing Asia through American eyes during the ‘90s, I spent the Noughties getting paid to view Europe through Asian eyes. 

A scoop, acquiring exclusive access to a reclusive Hong Kong billionaire, opened the door to Japanese state broadcaster NHK. My experience from my salariman days enabled me to enter, bowing, and become a trusted supplier. 

I made dozens of documentaries about Europe for NHK. I wasn’t Britain’s most experienced, qualified or accomplished documentary filmmaker, but I was in a tiny minority of competent ones who spoke fluent Japanese. NHK was a nice little earner. Its budgets, though modest, were not yet shrunk by YouTube.

Then Fukushima turned Japan introspective. NHK was not so interested in commissioning docs about Europe. 

The commissions dried up, and I had to find another way to get someone to pay me to tell stories.

Autodidact Pragmatist

By the time my Japanese well dried up, alternative funding oases were shrinking fast. Budgets, never generous, were getting tighter.

Stretching them increasingly required doing more of the work I used to pay specialists to do. Filmmaking requires a broad range of business, creative, technical and political skills. Ducking and diving, I acquired them on the fly. 

They were the means to the end of feeding and raising a family. That was the bread and butter. The jam was to get paid to tell stories I’d discovered, largely the way I wanted to tell them, without all the compromises demanded by the gatekeepers and purse-holders.

It was only when I started attending documentary festivals, and meeting filmmakers who’d actually studied filmmaking, that I discovered how fortunate I’d been.

Even before the Internet bled it dry, independent documentary filmmaking was more of a lifestyle choice than an industry. For most of my fellow festival-attendees, documentaries were ‘passion projects’. Most were mainly funded by day jobs in advertising, inherited wealth, sugar daddies, angel investors or side hustles.

When my Japanese gravy train hit the buffers, I joined their club. I too began to spend most of my waking, working hours hustling for money. 

When I wasn’t desperately pitching to broadcasters, film funds, charities etc. to cobble together paltry budgets, I was negotiating to keep costs down and retain anything for myself. If filmmakers spent as much as 15% of their time actually making films, they were doing well. Filmmaking, hard though it was, turned out to be the easy bit.

These days, when academics, entrepreneurs or NGO workers complain how tough their business is, I’m quick to tell them I spent twenty years in what I still claim to be the ‘begging-est business of all’, indie doc filmmaking. The inconvenient truth was that supply of documentaries had always outstripped demand. Now the market was flooded with new filmmaking graduates, the doc business was withering, and funding pools were drying up.

Meanwhile, in the ‘real’ world, literal drowning, burning and shrivelling was on the rise, as atmospheric physics did its thing, and the climate crisis deepened.

Throughout my filmmaking years, the background chorus of climate boffins was growing louder and more panicky. Year by year, their forecasts became data, and still emissions rose. 

The carbon trading industry, which I’d seen Chinese companies play like a fiddle as early as the ‘90s, was approaching a trillion dollars, and still emissions rose.

Businesses still solemnly declared themselves to be ‘carbon zero’, based on ‘offsetting’ and voluntary reporting standards. Everyone somehow kept a straight face.

From my rapidly-deflating filmmaker bubble, was it possible for me to make a difference and make a living? 

Could I convince people to pay me to tell sustainability-related stories and feel they had a real-world impact?

The answer, it turned out, was yes and no. In that order.

**In Part 2, Smuggler, Robert juggles climate, storytelling and money, and drops some balls.