The story of Green Salon.
Read on to discover the story behind Green Salon Sustainable Lifestyle Consultancy, written by our CEO and Sustainable Lifestyle Consultant, Lucy Johnson.
I have loved nature for as long as I can remember. I grew up in an old house in the Essex countryside, surrounded by groves of trees, an over-flowing vegetable garden and flowerbeds spilling over with roses, agapanthus, fritilia and lilies. My dad wrote books about wine so holidays were spent running around French vineyards, and looking back, I realise that the smell of rich, damp soil was a constant refrain of my childhood. I took its fecundity as a given, and, in my child’s mind, saw the plentifulness of Nature stretching on forever.
It wasn’t until I started reporting on the environment as part of my beat as a political journalist for ITN in the early 2000s that I gave it a second thought. It was then that I started interviewing scientists who were deeply alarmed by the trajectory of carbon emissions entering the atmosphere, and by the rate at which we were depleting Nature’s eco-systems. I remember a particular despatch in which the scientist was talking about tipping points that could lead to irreversible damage to the earth’s climate.
It began to dawn on me that the eternally regenerative Nature of my childhood was in serious trouble.
I remember that evening sitting down to do a meditation and, as I closed my eyes, I saw an extraordinarily vivid image of a shimmering, iridescent purple-green butterfly. I remember how its beauty and fragility took my breath away. And how I was suddenly flooded with grief, as the enormity of the destruction that was unfolding on our planet, broke through. I felt an overwhelming sense of powerlessness, despair and hopelessness.
As I sat in this despair, I watched as the butterfly very slowly, almost shyly, flapped its wings. I remembered how in chaos theory the flap of a butterfly’s wing is said to be capable of causing a hurricane on the other side of the planet. And I resolved to be like a butterfly when it comes to the crisis in the natural world. I knew that I was one small person but I started to believe that I had more power than I realised.
The original Green Salon
That butterfly inspired the original Green Salon, a monthly networking event that I ran for two years out of Home House Club in central London while I was still working for ITN. The event drew together eco-entrepreneurs and investors. It was a place for green entrepreneurs to network, and find the funding they needed to start their new business, and for two years it helped speed up money flows into green start ups.
When I left television to retrain as a psychotherapist and bring up a young family, my focus switched, but I kept an eye on the unfolding environmental situation. Like many, I breathed a sigh of relief when a deal was done to hold global warming to below 2*C, with an ambition of 1.5*C, in the UN’s Paris Agreement of 2015.
But, it was when I read the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report of 2018, that I felt my physical alarm bells ringing again. It concluded that the world needed to move much faster if it was to hold the planet at a stable temperature for human civilisation. I felt the earlier sense of dread creep back into my life, and this time, I had two young children whose futures began to look more uncertain.
Greening my own life
I knew that green businesses needed green consumers and so I began to research how we as a family could live a more low-waste, low-carbon life. I soon realised it was far more complicated than I had bargained for. I spent hundreds of hours researching companies, trawling through their websites to understand how they operated, what their carbon footprint was, whether they embedded circularity, reusability and durability into their business models.
But it was hard to juggle a busy psychotherapy practice, motherhood, friendships, family, a social life and everything else that makes up a busy life, with sourcing eco-friendly make up, shampoos, washing up liquids and clothes. I also came up against the inevitable reluctance of children to try anything new, and a husband who wasn’t much keener!
Becoming a sustainability coach
The idea of being a sustainability coach seemed to drop on my head on a walk one day, when I had just gone on sabbatical from my private psychotherapy practice. I thought about all the knowledge I had gleaned from several years of searching for good sustainable alternatives in my home. And I realised that lots of women, and men, who would like to live a more sustainable life must be wrestling with the same difficulties. How to tell if an eco-brand really is eco? Is the “green” alternative actually any good?
In a world of rampant “greenwashing”, I knew I couldn’t just “decide” if a brand was sustainable or not, I would have to research the brands to find out. So, with the help of a sustainability consultancy, I drew up a list of 30 criteria, which in the 2020s we determined were the hallmarks of calling yourself a sustainable company. And so the idea of the Green Salon Directory was born.
To work out how to be a sustainability coach, I set about practicing on my friends. A good friend pointed out that while I could helpfully work out how she could shop in a more sustainable way, she wasn’t convinced I was qualified to go through her wardrobe. And so an old friend and talented stylist, Rosanna, joined me to do the wardrobe styling.
It is now almost exactly a year since I typed the words “sustainability coach” into my search engine, and could find none in the UK at that time working with individuals. A lot has changed in that time. The forest fires have spread further across the world, and the flooding too. The latest UN IPCC report has concluded that these weather events are “unequivocally” the result of our heating planet. We have been living in a pandemic for longer than any of us wanted to. But in that time, thousands of new sustainable brands have popped up in this country, and around the world. Sustainability has become not just a buzzword but a fashion statement.
As we launch Green Salon, my hope is that it will play its small part in supporting people who wish to make that transition to a more sustainable life. My experience is that the transition has made our family life not only more sustainable, but prettier, and healthier. We are not perfect in our sustainability but it does feel good to be taking small steps into a potential future, full of the rich, dark soil and abundant Nature of my childhood.
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