A brief story about the story of how See Through uses stories to reduce carbon

Approaching its fourth anniversary, See Through has grown from a weekly blog to a diverse global network of hundreds of pro bono experts. Each volunteers time, expertise and energy to leverage a social media reach that’s set to pass a million by early 2025, across four programmes interlinking journalism, carbon reporting, social media and online edutainment. All on a budget of zero. Here’s how it happened…

From eccentric hobby to existential crisis

In early 2021, living in a city still recovering from a botched Novichok assassination attempt, Robert Stern was sifting through the wreckage of three recent failures of his own. He was salvaging usable components from which to construct a fourth attempt to scratch his lifelong itch.

Over his life, Robert had seen his teenage ‘environmental concerns’ develop from an eccentric hobby in the 1980s, to today’s existential crisis. Throughout his adult life, relatively minor concerns about pollution, deforestation, ozone layers and nuclear energy had gradually been subsumed by the overwhelming evidence of planetary heating resulting from the carbon we were transferring from underground to the atmosphere.

Over his career, Robert had seen this polycrisis unfold from a variety of perspectives – academic, commercial, journalistic, personal – and from around the world, in many languages (he speaks five fluently, and has broadcast in English, Chinese and Japanese).

By 2021, Robert had come to a decision. The climate crisis’s urgency meant the time had passed to slyly integrate climate action into his eclectic career. Now his children were adults, Robert was free not only to focus on climate activism full-time, but they gave him a personal stake in doing whatever his could to mitigate the worst consequences our fossil fuel addiction had bequeathed them.

What could Robert do about it, and how could it be done more effectively?

Ineffective climate activism

Robert was more than familiar with ineffective climate activism, having observed, and reported on, the negligible impact most climate activism has had rising emissions over his adult life.

For four decades, as observer and amateur dabbler, wherever his career zigged or zagged, within the constraints of making a living, Robert had done his best to ‘do his bit’.

From the ’80s, as sinological scholar, international textile trader, globe-trotting journalist, documentary filmmaker, broadcast consultant, business owner, teacher, translator, storyteller and parent, Robert had done what he could to smuggle ‘green’ messages and calls to action wherever possible.

But, he reflected in 2021, with no discernible results.

How to change this? At the very least, Robert wanted to be able to quantify his failures objectively, to measure climate action ‘success’ or ‘failure’ in a way that could identify what needed fixing.

Over 2020, Robert had resolved to see whether his unusual combination of experiences, skills and contacts could be put to work to address global heating directly, with measurable results.

He was now ready to put them to the test. 

Three Failures Spark a Success

By early 2021, three attempts had failed:

1. Journalism: As ‘SternWriter’, Robert had been experimenting with various storytelling modes, registers and techniques of persuasive writing to move people from inaction to action. As an experienced international journalist, with articles published in titles like The International Herald Tribune, The Times and Sydney Morning Herald over the years, Robert had a respectable track record as a writer, but this journey reached a dead end when his local newspaper declined his offer to provide a regular column, even when he dropped his fee to zero. (Robert’s discovery of the extent of the corporatisation of local news later formed the basis of the See Through News Newspaper Review Project). 

2. Local Politics: Soon after joining the local branch of the Green Party, Robert was asked to stand as a candidate in the local government elections. Ten days after he’d initiated what he reckoned were creative and positive steps to bolster his credentials, deploying his experience as a TV producer, Robert received a strong reprimand for overstepping party discipline. Both Robert and the Green Party thought it prudent to part ways at this point. (During this period Green Party peer Baroness Jenny Jones did, however, become the first participant in what was to become The Think Game.)

3. Social Media: a friend who prefers to remain anonymous but who Robert calls ‘The Man Who Won The Internet Three Times’, had been giving Robert daily ninja training in the dark arts of leveraging the free infrastructure provided by our Silicon Valley Overlords to effect social change. TMWWTITT was ready to hand over the blueprints of the strategy behind his own online triumphs, but after weeks of failed attempts, Robert’s impatience to find the right brand name for his adaptation had left them on the brink of falling out. (Averted with the brand name ‘See Through News‘, which met TMWWTITT’s strict demands of being unique/unclaimed not just as a web domain, but on all social media platforms).

So, as he tried to salvage something useful from the debris of three false starts to construct a fourth, Robert wasn’t short of material.

Fourth Time Lucky

In early 2021, armed with TMWWTITT’s branding strategy, Robert and a group of friends and contacts founded what was to turn into the See Through network. 

Following the advice of an experienced climate protester, who warned of Big Oil’s success in toxifying the term ‘activist’, they settled on the 10-word Goal of ‘Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active’. 

This Goal’s first half reflects the hard science, respect for data, and technical rigour that underpins all See Through projects. Its second half reflects the soft skills, the squidgy storytelling element essential to moving ordinary people from climate inaction to action, the last half-century having demonstrated that facts alone are not enough.

This pragmatic combination of hard science and sophisticated storytelling forms the foundation of See Through’s ‘transparent Trojan horse’ storytelling methodology, refined through Robert’s writing experiments. 

Early Projects

As more volunteers joined, bringing new skills, contacts and energy, See Through developed from the See Through News website, newsletter and YouTube channel, into a rich variety of projects. At first sight, they appear random or unrelated, but in fact are all linked by See Through’s underlying goal and methodology. Some examples:

• A global network of community Facebook groups, providing See Through’s direct path to ordinary people (on track to pass a million by early 2025).
• A Superhero Drawing Competition, The Think Game, and Concert in the Key of C, all hits when trialled at COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021.
• A Languages Day speech at a secondary school, with textbook Trojan Horse insertion of carbon drawdown lessons to an initially sceptical audience of British 12-18 year-olds.
• 10-15 year-old students at an HIV orphanage in the illegal Nairobi slum of Mathare, creating award-winning videos with a week’s remote See Through News mentoring. 
• A unique experiment in community filmmaking, mentoring 4 first-time documentary directors, a dozen more novice filmmakers, staff and children at two local primary schools, and half a dozen local charities, culminating in a world premiere screening at an iconic London cinema.

Not all See Through projects come off, but each success adds a new component to the See Through mechanism, designed to convert ordinary people into taking action that measurably reduces carbon.

And the different characteristics of each project attracts new volunteers, with new skills and resources, to the See Through network.

The network grows

Initially drawn from Robert’s contacts, the See Through Network soon attracted new recruits from new pools.

With each new project, See Through’s global network of volunteers expanded its diverse range of skills, experience and backgrounds: journalism, filmmaking, advertising, business, computer science, AI, storytelling, performance, music, administration, education…

Every new See Through network volunteer shares, to some degree, See Through’s sense of urgency in finding a fresh, pragmatic approach to tackling climate change. 

Pilot projects evolved into four distinct, robust, comprehensive programmes. They interlock to serve the same carbon-reducing Goal, but involve distinct specialisms:

• 2021: See Through News (journalism and storytelling)
• 2022: See Through Games (online edutainment)
• 2023: See Through Carbon (carbon reporting ecosystem) 
• 2024: See Through Together (social media content)

To date, they’ve all passed See Through’s challenge to maintain impetus, integrity and originality, while avoiding the familiar traps of setting unattainable goals, or being distracted/corrupted by the need for funding.

The more it achieves without money, the greater the motivation for others to join.

Whether contributions take the form of coding, filmmaking, building websites or moderating Facebook groups, are one-offs or ongoing, See Through volunteers are all unpaid.

Money: sometimes sludge, not always lubricant

See Through initially assumed it would need money at some point, but as projects were successfully delivered by volunteers working pro bono, the issue of fundraising was pushed further toward the back burner, where it remains.

With every new project, the need for money became less urgent, and less obvious. In a world full of justifiable scepticism and suspicion of scammers, it has turned out that, for See Through’s volunteers, achieving it all without the need for a bank account is a compelling demonstration of See Through network’s integrity.

Many volunteers have worked in conventional charities or NGOs, and experienced the time-and energy-sucking deflation that comes from spending more time raising, spending and auditing money, than actually doing the thing the money is meant to facilitate.

In Dec 2022, this conviction was given a further, out-of-the-blue boost, with an unsolicited, donation of half a million dollar’s worth of supercomputer-grade cloud computing. Within five months of a standing start, this gift-in-kind was converted into the inaugural See Through Carbon Competition, promoting carbon drawdown in the Global South.

What’s Next

Nearly four years into its journey, assembling the See Through bicycle as it rides it, the network is rapidly approaching its goal of measurable, verifiable carbon reduction.

The mechanism is complex, and involves many moving parts, but every week ticks new boxes, fills in empty spaces, passes new milestones, and attracts more participants and volunteers.

In less than four years, See Through has grown from a single newsletter to a global network of hundreds of experts and activists. Its social media reach is on track to pass a million by early 2025, in service of See Through’s laser focus on practical, measurable carbon reduction.

It’s combination of sophisticated storytelling, hard data and social media smarts, will soon be tested to see if it’s possible to measurably reduce carbon without the mediation of money.

See Through’s output metric remains the same unit used by climate scientists, i.e. tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent reduced or sequestered (CO₂e).

To join, take a look at available IT/Tech, Admin/Management and Creative roles, and email: volunteer@seethroughnews.org