Katie Patrick Teaches ‘How To Save The World’ with Optimism and Imagination

October 20, 2023 Impact, Business, Design, Science, Technology, Environment

Words: Daniel Simons

When it comes to tackling society’s most wicked challenges, some people are ‘dreamers’ and some people are ‘doers.’ For Katie Patrick, the author of ‘How to Save The World,’ dreaming, is doing. The Melbourne-born, San Francisco-based changemaker combines the powers of creativity, sustainability, psychology, optimism, and imagination, to inspire us all to save the planet.

One of Katie’s earliest childhood memories was of driving to the city with her mother. She would look out of the back window and be shocked by the gritty ugliness of the inner city with its grimy buildings, and barren industrial wastelands. Every time she looked out that window, she wondered why the grownups hadn’t covered up all the nasty junk with ferns or flowers or beautiful green gardens. Even at four years old, she knew that was the solution.

Fast forward a few decades and she’s now living out her childhood dreams by running workshops and inspiring global communities to embrace biophilic architecture and ecotopian futures. Her ‘Imagine Project’ uses design springs, drawings, generative AI art and augmented reality to empower individuals across the planet to imagine - and create - a greener world.

In her life as an entrepreneur, Katie combines her background in psychology with her creative prowess to design ‘Fitbit for the planet’ apps that empower businesses and sustainability professionals to create real-world environmental impact. Her pioneering work in the field of gamification has seen her work with world-changing organisations like the UNEP, NASA, Stanford University, The US State Department, Magic Leap, Google, and The Institute for The Future.

She’s also founded a few of her own sweet companies and projects including Energy Lollipop, which shows the electric grid’s CO2 emissions in real-time, a zero-waste game called ‘Detrashed,’ and Urban Canopy, a map-based app that uses satellite images of urban heat islands to inspire urban greening and cooling initiatives.

Katie first became an environmentalist when she was just 4 years old. After being distressed by confronting Greenpeace images of whales and dolphins mangled in fishing nets, she embarked on a lifelong journey of environmental activism and action.

Shortly after Katie graduated from RMIT with a bachelor of Environmental Engineering, she developed a fascination with environmental psychology research. It was immersing herself in the treasure trove of academic literature that led her to three life-changing epiphanies.

The first thing she realised was that simply knowing about environmental challenges was not enough to drive change. The second was that she’d discovered an enormous, insightful, empowering body of knowledge that nobody seemed to know about or be putting it into practice in the real world. The third was that to create real, meaningful change we need creativity and vision.

Inspired by the Antoine de Saint-Exupery quote ‘if you want to build a ship, do not drum up the men to gather wood, divide the world and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea,’ Katie began to share her leanings with a global audience.

In her 2020 TED talk, Katie declared that she was ‘done with doom.’ The talk, titled ‘Why Optimism and Creativity (not Doom) Will Save the Planet,’ resonated so much with audiences around the world that Katie was invited to speak about the power of environmental imagination at the United Nations General Assembly.

Katie has been driving change and sharing optimistic visions of the future for decades. She founded a Green Magazine that was described as the ‘Wired of sustainability,’ sat on the boards of Good Environmental Choice Australia (GECA) been a spokesperson for Volkswagen and Lipton tea, and she was named by Cosmopolitan as Woman of The Year in 2008.

Her book ‘How to Save the World’ was ranked by Forbes as a top 5 book for social entrepreneurs and described by global marketing guru Seth Godan as ‘An urgent and useful guide for anyone who seeks to make a difference.’

Today Katie continues to serve the world as a creative force for good via her YouTube channel, her From the Heart and How To Save The World podcasts, and her global community-driven movement, The Imagine Project.

Matters sat down with Katie to find out how we can all harness the power of optimism and imagination to save the planet.

Your TED talk was titled, ‘Optimism and creativity (not doom) will save the planet.’ How do you define optimism in the context of climate change and environmental uncertainty?

When I talk about optimism, I am not talking about predicting the future. I think that's what a lot of people think optimism is. When they hear the word ‘optimism,’ they think it's just a prediction that everything's going to be great.

I'm talking about setting a goal, something in the future that is a specific positive event and place, that is both qualitative and quantitative - and the optimism is in believing that we are able to achieve that goal.

Some people use the word hope with me sometimes, but I personally never, ever use the word hope. It's nothing to do with that. It's all about very structured dopamine-driven design, and reverse engineering.

In the same talk you say we should think of optimism ‘like a vitamin’ and you point to positive psychology research that suggested that optimistic people work harder, make more money, are healthier, live longer and achieve their goals because they don’t give up. How can optimism help bring about a better world and why is it so important for environmentalists?

People need a vision of an alternative world that can happen, that can come true. If you don’t believe in that change, or if you think there is no way for anything to change then why would you even bother? If you’re going to be a change agent then you have to believe that the system can change, and that is essentially something that is optimistic.

There are a lot of people, when they think about the environment, who think that everyone is just greedy or selfish and everything is about capitalism or consumerism. They’re cynical and defeated.

They don't even know that sustainability is a big profession and thousands of people specialise in it. If they’re missing that whole piece, why would they try? They’d think it is hopeless.

Also, when people have a goal that they believe can happen, that’s how they get activated and inspired to act. That’s why the ‘I have a dream’ speech was so powerful.

Some people have argued that your optimism equates to a naive, Pollyanna, ‘eyes-closed’ approach to global challenges. How do you respond to them?

There are a lot of people, when they think about the environment, who think that everyone is just greedy or selfish and everything is about capitalism or consumerism. They’re cynical and defeated.

They don't even know that sustainability is a big profession and thousands of people specialise in it. If they’re missing that whole piece, why would they try? They’d think it is hopeless.

Also, when people have a goal that they believe can happen, that’s how they get activated and inspired to act. That’s why the ‘I have a dream’ speech was so powerful.

In your podcast ‘How to Save The World’ you’ve interviewed an enormous range of environmental and behaviour change researchers, what are some key insights that you wish everyone knew about?

I like to summarise all of them down to three mistakes. The three mistakes are: the mistake that thinking knowledge gets people to change, the mistake that thinking caring makes people change, and the mistake that thinking money makes people change. These are often the weakest ways to get people to change. It’s not that they don’t impact people, they do, but there are at least 30 things that work better.

What are the things that work better?

I like to imagine a brain that has five big levers on it. The first lever is goals and rewards. That’s the dopamine-driven brain that is really responsive to rewards. The second lever is social comparison, so where we think we fit in a social hierarchy and how we compare ourselves to the people around us. The third one is group identity. Then there is social imitation, which is basically how we copy people around us, and the final one is trust - if I make a promise to another person, I want to keep my promise.

How would you describe your own theory of change?

I'm all about the feedback loop. Everything comes down to the feedback loop. You measure it, you bring it into a feedback loop, and then you monitor your progress on that feedback loop. This is painfully missing from all our environmental work.

Even the Ecotopia future artwork stems from the feedback loop, because we're trying to answer questions like: What would a zero-air pollution, zero-waste, zero-cars city, or world look like? Then we reverse engineer back from that.

Once you can measure what you want to change, you're tracking progress towards your goal. Then you're just basically looking at it and asking, ‘how do I make this feedback loop go faster?’

The feedback loop is God in the way I approach any problem.

Speaking of God, you’ve often referenced ‘The God metric’ in your work. What is the God metric?

The God metric is just the one environmental number that you want to change in real-world matter. It can't be likes or clicks or impressions or money or signatures. It has to be real matter, like trees or oceans or air - and it has to be one metric. A lot of environmental groups like to do 10 or more at a time, and they always fail when they try to do too many. So just coming up with one single number, and that's the core of your feedback loop.

You need to really study and understand what you are trying to change and then figure out a way to understand and change it. How is it measured? How often it is measured? Who measures it? What is the organisation that measures it? How do you show it to people? How do you develop groups and players and teams and rank the organisations?

Then you just start thinking out from that one feedback loop of data, ‘How would I change this data?’

Part of your work deals with gamification and behaviour change, but a lot of it is also centred around vision and imagination. What is the connection between vision and impact?

I was reading a manifesting book recently. It said one thing that really hit me, which was that everything in the physical world now is a manifestation of the historical consciousness that it took to get there.

We are used to thinking about ‘manifesting’ in our personal life: your house, your relationships, money - are all basically the symptoms of where your consciousness has been at basically your whole life. If you want anything to be different moving forward, you have to sort of ‘up-level’ your consciousness, ‘up-level’ your energy, your vibration, and then the physical manifestation of that will happen.

But when I think about that in terms of the whole world and I think about the whole planet's physical infrastructure, we can look at it like its a hangover from where our consciousness was at 50, 100, 200 years ago - because once you build something, it lasts for a long time.

So if we're up-leveling our consciousness now, uplifting our vision, then this is what is going to enable all of a whole new era of creative solutions to come forth. When we look now 50, 100, 200 years in the future, that physical world will be a manifestation of our consciousness right now.

We need to use our creativity, have a vision and then come up with creative solutions to get there, and then work to physically manifest them, and physically implement them from mind to world.

Your global, community-led movement, ‘The Imagine Project’ uses the power of visioning, design thinking, digital art and augmented reality to inspire people to dream up new versions of utopia. How have people been influenced by the project?

I host a ‘before and after’ workshop where I ask people to take a picture of something in their neighbourhood - like a decrepit urban piece of land, or something that needs improving - and then we use photoshop to greenify it.

A week after one of those workshops, two of the participants emailed me back to tell me how they were turning their creative exercise into real-world impact.

One of the women called up her local city and got involved with a group of 14 people. They go out and find concrete or barren parts of LA and figure out how to regenerate them. The other women ended up using her pictures to give a presentation to her local government’s environmental commission.

The workshop was just a creative exercise, but both of the women ended up getting inspired to go out of their way and make stuff happen. There have been many other people who email me afterwards saying how inspired and transformed they felt.

So that's, I think, an incredibly exciting example of how just doing a little bit of ecotopia art can really lead people to getting in touch with their own sense of agency - which I honestly was not expecting and was amazing.

You have a young daughter. How do you educate her about climate change and environmental challenges while ensuring that she stays optimistic about the future?

I don’t think she has any sense that there is a negative future. I tell her the earth is getting hot and she has to be careful, but she doesn’t see a ‘doomy’ future. I just teach her about everything all the time. Science, education, we just talk about it.

She doesn’t understand what an ‘environmental engineer’ is, so I started to use the word ‘Earth Doctor.’ Kids always get little doctor kits and nurse kits and they’re used to caring for creatures and for people, it’s in their nature, so I think when you say earth doctor, the idea that you’re caring for the earth as a whole really extends into the child’s psychology. So when she’s doing things like the ecotopia visioning exercises, she’s being an earth doctor.

Imagine how quickly we could get to ecotopia if everyone was an earth doctor.

To stay connected with Katie’s work, grab a copy of her book, subscribe to her YouTube channel, or tune in to her podcasts.