I was introduced to environmentalist Sarah Lazarovic in the pages of Yes! magazine, an inspiring publication of solutions journalism from the Positive 
Futures Network. (Their website alone is worth a weekly visit.) Sarah is an award-winning artist, creative director, freelance animator and filmmaker, and journalist, who covers news and cultural events in comic form. After six years of contributing to Yes! magazine, Sarah has published her last piece for them, “Drawing a Path to Action,” and it runs in the current issue. Click on the image to read it.
Sarah’s images and messages are clever, quirky, informative, inspiring, and charmingly self-deprecating. Her work in Yes! was presented in a comic format, but she melds single panel images and traditional writing in her free weekly newsletter More Viable Planet (MVP) on the Substack platform. She explores household choices, environmental trends, climate data, and eco-anxiety in highly readable and often humorous bites. Her links to the work of scientists, writers, artists, and activists are always worth the click, making her one of my favorite curators of valuable green content. Sarah offers insightful critiques of the failings of climate crisis communication and provides viable alternatives. Her weekly newsletters help me re-orient my own thinking away from doomsday-ism and the urgent, emergency! language that characterizes the emails of groups I support and wreaks havoc on the sympathetic nervous system.
To give you a taste, here’s an excerpt from her Feb. 11 newsletter:
In 2013 my favourite professor, environmental psychologist Dan Dolderman, gave a TED Talk in which he said the climate crisis was about Everything You Love. This phrase, which I fell in love with has hummed in my brain for nearly a decade. I wrote about it in my newsletter a few years ago, And I think everything I said, and Dan preached, still holds up, with one absolutely key change – It’s not Everything You Love, It’s Something You Love. Everything you love is a vaseline-lensed montage of the greatest hits of your life that you can’t grab onto. It’s a hyperobject itself, too big to comprehend. Something you love is a moment, a conversation, a party, a game, an embrace that you call up with a vivid clarity that sticks. It’s that singular love, situated in, but not secondary to “nature,” that motivates the action we need to inspire climate care.
Sarah has made her helpful (and fun to look at) 11×14″ poster 100 things you can do to help in the climate crisis available for free because, as she says, she’s “too lazy to sell things.” I hope this creative environmentalist motivates you to reflect on your choices, to expand your activism, and to smile while you save and savor the Earth!
Whose art or writing or other creative expression inspires you to stay strong in your commitment to mitigating climate change? We’d like to know and to share it in this blog! Email me at reeseindecatur@gmail.com.