[00:00:00] Crystal: I am Crystal DiMiceli and welcome to the Forces for Nature Show.

Do you find yourself overwhelmed with all the doom and gloom you hear of these days? Do you feel like you as just one person, can’t really make a difference? Forces for nature cuts through that negativity. In each episode, I interview somebody who’s doing great things for animals and the environment. We talk about the challenge they’re addressing the solution they have found what keeps them.

And we’ll leave you with practical action tips so that you YouTube can become a force for nature. Today’s guest is Grant Brown. He’s the founder of the website and newsletter. Happy Eco News, which personally helps me to start my week off on a good note. He left a successful corporate job after a once in a lifetime trip, made him realize that despite there being so much environmental devastation in the places he had been, There were so many individuals doing their part to make positive change.

He wanted to give them a platform to help them to share their stories and successes, and it has actually even changed some people’s lives.

Hi Grant. Thank you so much for joining me today. I’m forces for nature. It’s so great to have you.

[00:01:20] Grant: Thank you, crystal. It’s very nice to be here, and thank you for having.

[00:01:24] Crystal: So I’m excited to chat with you today because of your background and also then what you’re doing now. Let’s start off with, tell me a little bit about yourself.

[00:01:35] Grant: Sure. So my name is Grant. I’m a Canadian citizen, originally from the Vancouver area. I’m a, I guess you could say a reformed tech entrepreneur, retired a couple years ago, actually in the middle of Covid, so I’m probably one of the great resignation, I guess you could say. Have traveled all over the world, have lived in a variety of different places.

I had a ton of wonderful experiences. You know, done, done so much with my life up until this point, that was all corporate and in, I think it was 2021. I’m losing track of the time already. It’s part of what they call early retirement. I, I left a really lucrative job and decided to, I guess I decided to just try and do right in the world as opposed to contributing to.

Some of the problems that I could see in front of me. And uh, so that brings us to today where I am now the founder of Happy Eco News.

[00:02:32] Crystal: Well, I do wanna just touch upon what you used to do, which Sure was actually quite helpful in in what we’re working on today. You were in clean technology, right?

[00:02:43] Grant: That’s right, yeah.

In 2009, we started a company called, Corvus Energy and Corvus energy built very large lithium ion batteries that were used to hybridize and electrify heavy industrial equipment, primarily in the maritime sector. So we were responsible for building some of the first electric vessels, commercial vessels in the world.

And um, we did some really neat stuff. We worked with. A couple of really interesting American companies that were building on-road vehicles. So we did the Walmart super truck that President Obama unveiled. We did a couple of other really interesting on-road vehicles. We’ve done the first hybrid tugboats, the first full electric tugboats, first hybrid fairies, first full electric fer.

And uh, a lot of that was American, but you know, they didn’t have the same pressure for, from government to reduce emissions. As did the Europeans. So we quickly found that Europeans and primarily in Northern Europe, were really focused on reducing emissions in that sector. So our products found a home, a lot of them in Norway, Scandinavia generally, and into uk, Germany.

Holland or the Netherlands rather. Um, and, and so many other European places that were oriented around port and maritime traffic. We did lunar rover. We’ve done, I mean, we did so many really cool things that I’m, I’m super proud of the fact that as the, I was the head of marketing for the company and so I, I, I just have this long list of industry firsts that we were a part of.

You know, I, it, it’s been an amazing. Wild ride and it was all for the betterment of the planet. And, and you know, bring it back to what you, what you’re asking me. I can be really proud of the changes that were made as a result of my efforts and the efforts of the rest of the team at, at my company. And you know, we went, I went from Corvis and then we started another one, and then now another one.

So, you know, I’ve been involved in three of these technology startups that are all doing great things and. The interesting thing about that business is not that, I mean, it’s interesting that we did these hybrid vehicles, right? I mean, it’s the amount of carbon that has been reduced outta the atmosphere as a result of our efforts is it’s really significant.

And we started a, an industry, so I, as the marketing guy, got to define an industry that’s now multi-billion dollars and it was. Like when we needed a glossary, I just started making stuff up and

[00:05:20] Crystal: now literally define like how, what things

[00:05:23] Grant: mean industry. Yeah. Like Google had our definitions, glossary as their reference.

And you know, that was pretty amazing. You know, at the time I just kind of went, oh, okay, whatever. Right? And on we go. But looking back it’s, it’s pretty cool. But the other interesting thing about that is that our technology was really effective. In two ways. It not only reduced emissions, which is why I was so, you know, so happy to be a part of it.

But it also reduced the cost. And so when a ship owner is looking at, you know, an annual budget of say, $4 million a year, just for example of fuel. So just fuel, it’s non-fixed. So they, they don’t know they have to buy futures. They’re buying oil futures or fuel futures 10 years out. Sometimes these big.

But it’s non-fixed. And so it can fluctuate rapidly if the, if the company’s small, it can be a huge part of their operating expenditure. But what we did was we, in some case, reduced that to zero. So in Norway for example, they have so much hydroelectricity that they were giving it to the ferry companies for free.

So they went from having a polluting fuel-based. A fluctuating cost that was reduced to zero. If they could store the energy from the government and from these hydroelectric projects. Store it overnight. Use it during the day, store it overnight, use it during the day. Their zero their, their fuel costs went to zero.

So we had a lineup of companies wanting to work with us. Now contrast that to some of the other technologies that are intended to reduce emissions. They would basically have to practically beg, they would have to rely on subsidies and grants and all kinds of other sort of schemes to make it economically viable, whereas, It just worked and it just paid for itself.

So you can imagine a company going from a 4 million spend to zero and you know, of course not zero. There’s certain maintenance costs and all of those things, but in comparison it was, it was dramatic. And so, you know, we had companies that were spending a million dollars with us and before the first vessel was even a month old, they were lining up and signing contracts for three.

So, you know, it was, it was a wild ride and we actually had that hockey stick growth that tech companies dream about. And of course, me being naive and not really knowing, I, I mean, I came from the action sports industry. I was the guy that used to hook myself off cliffs for fun off on a pair of skis or mountain bike or whatever.

But you know, I came from that to this and I enjoy, always was environmentally aware, but I had no idea that that was something that was really exceptional. And looking back, I’m very, very grateful and, and proud of the experience. Mm-hmm.

[00:08:09] Crystal: And it’s such a cool story and to know that it’s, this company you said started in 2009, right?

2009, yeah. I feel like we, in general, people aren’t hearing that like maybe just now. In the last couple of years, people are hearing about, you know, all of these electric companies and electric mandates and, and what have you. I don’t think many people know that this kind of stuff has been around and has been succeeding the way it has been for the past 10 plus years.

And that kind of brings us to, brings us to where you are today. And like you are helping tell people these things. You’re helping to spread the good news stories and try to shadow out on all of the bad that we tend to hear so often.

[00:09:01] Grant: Yeah. Well, you know the genesis of Happy Eco News, so basically Happy Eco News exists for two purposes, and the first one is to help people understand that there is.

Good stuff happening in the world. I have two young adults as children now, and they are, they’re Gen Z and they are often overwhelmed with the negative news and rightfully so, right? They’ve been handed a pretty, pretty bad deck to start playing with. And, um, the reasons for that re rest squarely on.

Previous generations. And so I always wanted to be part of the solution, not the problem. And I wanted to leave a legacy that was positive rather than negative, and I wanted to be on the right side of history. So I wanted to help my kids understand that there’s hope for the future and that, but inspire them to not give up to.

Take action. The second part of that is that I could also see that there were a lot of people doing good things in the world, working tirelessly. You know, people all over the world that just don’t give up, right? They just keep going. They’re in their parks, in the rivers, picking up trash. They’re restoring wetlands.

They’re, they’re doing all these wonderful things and they don’t get a lot of. Coverage, I guess you could say. So my, my thoughts were, okay, so first I can, I can spread the word and I can make sure that everybody hears that there are good people doing good things, and hopefully inspire them to take action.

But then secondly, I wanted to help the people that were actually doing the good work because they deserve it. They deserve it more than a multi-billionaire that is doing performative activism. You know, like honestly, With the billionaires in the world today, and it’s, you know, it’s outrageous how much money is in this top sort of 0.01%, but they could just write a check and they could make all this stuff go away.

Right. I mean that, that is a fact, but they don’t yet. They get all of the press when they drop the equivalent of what it would cost to buy a candy bar on an environmental project. They get press coming out everywhere. So I wanted to try and counteract that with, okay, the people that are really doing the hard work, let’s get them.

On the front page in some way. And so I started Happy Eco News, and that’s the story in itself. How I actually came to, came to start that and if, if, if you’ll that to me, I, I would talk for hours, but please do share it. Okay. So, and so, I’m very fortunate and I, I am very grateful for having the experiences that I’ve had.

I’m not a highly educated person. I got this wonderful opportunity with this company and I started working, traveling around the world and educated myself on the fact that there are other cultures and other ways of living other than what I grew up in. And I grew up in Vancouver, Canada. It’s a relatively affluent existence, you know, not that I was, it was born with the silver spoon, but you know, when you compare it to how other people live, we had a pretty darn good.

I was raising my kids in the same way. My wife is a also a business person, and so she had done quite well and we had decided that our kids needed a little bit of a wake up call. And so, you know, I think it came from one of the two, just almost demanding that they get the new iPhone like it. Everybody had one at school, so therefore they had, and if they didn’t, they weren’t like they were not gonna be part of the in crowd.

And it is like this peak consumerism. That I knew was really not good. So what I, what we did was we decided to take them outta school for a year and travel and, oh man, that’s,

[00:12:41] Crystal: it was magical.

[00:12:43] Grant: No, we didn’t, we didn’t, we’re not traveling like Club Med. We’re not traveling at five star resorts. We were living in the communities where the people lived.

So we rented our house out and for the, The cost of the rental. That was what we had to live on. And I was working, so I was, luckily I was able to work remotely. My wife had left her job so she could help educate the kids. Okay. So they weren’t really missing much. They were homeschooled. But if you ask my home daughter at age 14, she was like, We were practically doing the worst thing we could possibly do to her.

Um,

[00:13:16] Crystal: good point. Like you say it to me, and it sounds like the best year ever, but as a 14 year old, I, yeah, I would 14 old push year

[00:13:23] Grant: back to 14 year old. She was very involved with her, her, her community. So we, anyway, we pulled them outta school and we went and lived in places like Cambodia, Bali, Malaysia, South Africa, you know, all through Europe and, and living in the communities where we wanted to see the sites and.

So the first inflection point for me came in Cambodia and I was sitting there in a tuk tuk crossing this R ravine on my way to the hotel. And I saw this what I, what looked to me like a garbage dump. And it was basically just waste from the community, dumped in this massive pile in a, in a ravine. And it was season.

So you know, a couple of days later we went back the same way. I think we’re going to a restaurant or something, and it was all. It had all been flushed out into the local rivers through the wetland where probably got hung up a lot of it. And then out to the Ang River, then out to the South China Sea, and in its place was this beautiful little ravine with a small stream.

There were egrets and other wild birds sit, standing, fishing in the place where a day earlier it had been, you know, I. 10, 15 feet deep with waste plastic. So it was really an eye-opener and that, and I took pictures of it. I, I could probably send them to you. But then we went on to Bali, and Bali was the sort of, we had been looking forward to Bali.

We were about halfway through our trip. And we’re looking forward to Chango Beach where we were going to go surfing. It was one of the most famous surf breaks in the world, had been popularized, I think in the early seventies as sort of this pristine, amazing surf beach. So we flew in in the evening in a rainstorm, got to our accommodations, woke up, grabbed a coffee, walked down to the beach, glimpsing the sparkling ocean through the palm trees.

As we get closer, walk through the trail and walk out. Beautiful. Perfect surf and the beach was absolutely covered in plastic, and I’m not, when I say covered, I’m not kidding in the fact that it was, I mean, you couldn’t find a square foot. He couldn’t find a square foot of sand that didn’t have a piece of plastic on it in some way, and it was extremely disheartening.

I have a picture of my son. I’ve talked about this in the past. I’ve written about it, but I have a picture of my son getting up on his surfboard, standing up for the first time in in Bali, and he is got a big piece of plastic film draped over his. And then we all got rashes from the water. So, I mean, I don’t know what that was about, but it was pretty harsh.

So you know what a letdown, right? But more to that, it was just about the sheer devastation that some areas of the world, Are experiencing from plastic waste, and it has become, you know, a, an an existential problem for the world because this plastic is breaking down and it’s, you know, we, I can go into all the negatives, right?

And we all know that I don’t need to do that. So I, at that moment decide, okay, I have to stop. Right? Because, you know, Donald Trump had been. He was rolling back all of the environmental protections he was extracting the US out of, of the climate accords. You know, all this stuff was happening and yet he and all of those billionaires were getting the, the press, right?

None of the activists were getting the press. So I thought, okay, you know what? That’s it. I’m gonna stop. Cause I’d been sharing. The horror stories on my social feed, right? Like, wake up people, we have to do something. We can’t have people like this in power anymore. On and on and on. I was, you know, I was like screaming into the wind.

So I just decided to start sharing the positive stories. And it was small, you know, it was just me sharing a story on social media, one story, and then it just kept going. And then I had a couple people said, Hey, could you email those to me? And so I started a email list and then I started a website. And five years later I’ve shared close to 10,000 stories.

We do have some duplicates. You know, we have hundreds of thousands of visitors to the website each month we have a mailing list that keeps growing. And, uh, I get these people on occasion that send me emails that are extremely poignant and heartfelt and thanking me and my team for what we’re doing. And then, you know, that’s, that’s why we do it.

It’s, it’s. I have to keep reminding myself because it’s not easy, right? It’s all coming outta my pocket right now. And there’s, you know, as a businessman, that’s not a really a sustainable business model, but, but it’s about helping people and trying to do the right thing and, and helping my kids and their friends and all the people around me that I know that, that are having a tough time right now.

[00:18:19] Crystal: Can you tell me about a moment when you said this, this is why I.

[00:18:26] Grant: Yeah, there’s one that comes to mind, and it was last year actually a young woman, a school teacher, elementary school, I think she, uh, she, she wrote, she reached out to me just to send me an email to say Thank you for what we do at Happy Eco News.

And, uh, she had, uh, she said she had been suicidal and she was actually thinking about ending her life and it was a result of her eco anxiety basically been taken to. You know, the next level. And that was that the logical conclusion was we don’t need more people. And that every time she did any action at all, even her very existence was more hard on the planet than it would be without her.

And so she had seriously, she was seriously considering like, why would I continue going on? And then somehow she stumbled across Happy Eco. And did a deep dive on all of the stories. She said she spent hours reading it and then hours the next day, and gradually it shifted how she was thinking about herself as somebody who was part of the continued exploitation of the planet towards somebody that could do some positive change and or make positive change.

And she didn’t. She actually. Wrote a guest blog for us. I’m not gonna say her name because it’s, she’s read under a pseudonym, but that one individual as, especially as a school teacher, has such a huge potential to change the lives of her students. And you know, she’s maybe too young to realize or she doesn’t know, but one teacher can make such a huge differe.

In so many people’s lives. Oh my goodness, yes. Right. She has a, she has a unique opportunity to, to do good for the planet. Mm-hmm. And for her students. So thankfully she has chosen to live and to take action, and so my hat’s off to her, and I’m very grateful for that because that is exactly why I started.

In its most extreme, but certainly that was the proud moment. If

[00:20:40] Crystal: that doesn’t fuel your work to keep going, I don’t know what does. That’s so touching. So to wrap up with all the good news stories that you get to see, what would you tell the listener to do if they wanna make change?

[00:20:55] Grant: I would like to encourage people to.

Is to, if you wanna figure out how to take action, if you really want to start making a difference, three things. The first one is to find the others. So, well, actually, the first thing is to find out what you’re interested in and identify that. And, and that’ll be where you want to be. That’s your passion.

So that’s your passion. It’s what you know you really get excited about and that you really, really want. You not gonna lose track of. You can’t do everything. So pick one, I can speak and I can write, and so that’s what I do. Other people can build, other people can do any variety of other things, right?

Make movies. They can design, they can podcast, they can do all kinds. Things to help, right? And, and then find the other people that are also doing that or that wanna do that and join them. And then the third thing is then decide what you’re gonna do together. And then together you can make a big impact.

And you know, that’s kind of what I’m doing with Happy News. I’m trying to keep people. Of all ages.

[00:22:04] Crystal: Yeah, it’s such a great newsletter, email, website, all of the above. And anyone listening, go check out happy eco news.com to to get your daily or weekly dose of something. Feel good and helpful and inspiring just to counteract and counterbalance all the negative you might be hearing out there.

Grant, thank you so much for joining me today. You’re making a difference.

[00:22:34] Grant: Thank you so much and you, you know, we all have to work together and, and like you said, we all do our thing. I can, I can talk, I can write. That’s so I do. You do your thing. Everybody needs to do their thing. Everybody needs to take part

[00:22:56] Crystal: passion, tribe purpose. As humans, we all want those things, and they’re key ingredients to making collective shifts that the world needs, nature, the environment, animals, people, they, we all need you. This Earth Day join us by figuring out what unique gift you can bring to the table and helping to make the world a more humane and healthier place for all.

Don’t forget to go to forces for nature.com and sign up to receive emailed show notes, action tips, and a free checklist to help you start taking practical actions today. Do you know someone else who would enjoy this episode? I would be so grateful if you would share it with them. Hit me up on Instagram and Facebook at Becoming Forces for Nature, and let me know what actions you have been taking.

Adopting just one habit can be a game changer because imagine if a million people also adopted that. What difference for the world are you going to make today?