Warming the room:
getting people off the fence.
For thirty years I made films and campaigns that moved millions for the world’s largest brands. Now I put that craft to work for the next level of sustainability, in business and beyond: the story that moves people, and the strategy that makes it land.
One inquiry, three media
My work is one question asked three ways: how we see, tell, and govern our relationship with nature.
Think
The Guilt Machine: sixty essays on the mechanisms that keep us stuck.
Go deeper
The Guilt Machine is bigger than the environment. It is how those with the power and the profit, the extractive industries, offload the guilt for what they break, the living world and the social fabric alike, onto everyone who cares. The trick is a false „we are all in the same boat“: we are not, because they hold the power and make the money while everyone else carries the blame and the cost. The essays are where I take that machine apart, piece by piece.
Apply
Strategy and campaigns that change what people do.
Go deeper
Messaging about any hard change tends to fail exactly when it matters most, because facts inform but rarely move, and guilt and fear move people the wrong way. My work, in conservation and well beyond it, is to find the story that is both true and persuasive, then build the campaign, film, or proposal that carries it. And I keep in view the fact most people prefer to avoid: lasting change is almost always a change in how money is made, so the narrative carries the financial case, not only the moral one.
See
Fine-art photography of the habitats the arguments are about.
Go deeper
The camera is how I learn to see what the essays are about. It works like a polygraph, always turning up the truth hidden in plain sight, the meaning the eye had stopped seeing. I photograph habitats that refuse the easy beauty of landscape photography and look for the imbalance beneath, the unease in how we and nature share the same ground.
Read: The Pitfalls of Idyll in Art and Conservation → (opens in a new tab)
The essays test the ideas, the camera trains the eye, and the consultancy puts both to work.
The Guilt Machine
From extraction to extinction to guilt.
Sixty essays on the system that turns living things into assets, turns crises into guilt, and turns the people who care into people who burn out. I write it to see the machine clearly. I consult to help you move people in spite of it.
Strategy & Storytelling
Restoring a habitat and remaking a business are the same work, and the story tends to fail at the moment it matters most. Facts do not move people, and guilt and fear move them the wrong way. Fixing that is the work.
I work with companies, institutions, NGOs and campaigns, anyone ready to move to the next level of sustainability.
Narrative & messaging strategy
The story that is both true and persuasive, and the frame that survives a real audience.
Campaign creative & direction
Turning that story into work people notice and act on.
Proposals, partnerships & advisory
Building the case and the coalition.
Track record
Thirty years behind the camera and in the edit: director, cinematographer and producer of films and campaigns for Volkswagen, Bayer, Henkel, Ford, Mercedes, Procter & Gamble and Sony, with ADC, Eurobest, Spotlight and Klappe awards. On 9 November 1989 I filmed the fall of the Berlin Wall for RIAS TV. Since 2019 I have aimed the same craft at climate and habitat restoration.
Selected clients & projects
- Interreg Wetlanders — peatland rewetting across Europe, with Natuurpunt and partner NGOs.
- Eurosite — advisory for the European conservation network.
- UNEP — Restore Peatlands campaign for COP26.
- Greifswald Mire Centre / Rockefeller Foundation — Peatlands Matters campaign.
- Deutscher Naturschutzring — European-elections campaign.
Selected writing
If the message isn’t landing
If you are trying to make people care about something that matters, and the message is not landing, that is the work I do.
Enquire
Tell me what you’re trying to change.
A line about your project is enough to start. I read every message.