Entry 031: The Silence of the Brands
If you watched Game of Thrones, you know how it went. The great houses spent years at each other's throats. Stark against Lannister. Baratheon against Targaryen. Betrayals, weddings that ended in blood, a chair made of swords that everyone wanted and nobody could hold. Season after season of brilliant, vicious infighting.
And the whole time, in the north, something else was coming.
The Night King. The Army of the Dead. A threat that did not care which house sat the throne, because it intended to bury them all under the same ice. A few people saw it. Almost nobody listened. They were too busy fighting each other to look up. The threat was real, it was growing, and it had the decency to announce itself for years before it arrived. Still they argued about the throne.
We are living in that show. Not the dragons. The distraction.
Look at what we fight about. Left against right. One faith against another. One identity against the next. Every day a fresh outrage, a new side to pick, a reason to be furious with the other half of the country. We are the squabbling houses, certain that the most important thing in the world is winning the argument in front of us.
And in the north, the real thing keeps coming. It does not care who wins the argument. It intends to bury us under the same water.
I have spent eight months thinking about this, because I spent eight months on the small, strange end of it. I wrote to around twenty companies asking for help with a climate art project. Almost none of them wrote back.
Here is the part that matters. It was not personal.
There is a word for the moment we are in. Greenhushing. Companies are still doing the climate work, some of them, and they have gone quiet about it on purpose. The weather changed. Not the weather outside. The weather in the room. In the United States it turned hard in 2025. The EPA moved to roll back more than thirty environmental rules in a single day. The country left the Paris Agreement again. Every major American bank walked out of its climate alliance. Goldman Sachs. JPMorgan. Bank of America. Morgan Stanley. Wells Fargo. Citi. Gone.
The outdoor industry is having its own hard year. REI cut jobs. Patagonia trimmed its workforce. The big trade show shrank because the crowds stopped coming. Brands that built their whole identity on climate two years ago now file the same programs under operational resilience and energy security, because those words do not draw fire. The word climate has become the word nobody wants their name beside.
So when I sent twenty careful emails about ice and disappearance and art, I was not writing into a void. I was writing into a flinch. The subject itself had become radioactive. It is a hard time to ask anyone to stand next to the one thing the room has agreed to stop talking about.
I felt it anyway. You write to a brand you love. Not a brand you use. A brand you love. You wear the jacket. You know the founder's name. You read the page on the website about protecting the planet and you believed it. You write as a fan. You are clear, you are specific, you ask for nothing unreasonable. You read the email four times because you want it to be good.
And then nothing. Not a no. Nothing. You wait a week. You follow up. You find a second contact. You write again. You are, by now, the man in the movie the whole audience can see coming. Still nothing. Not even the automatic kind, the one that says we got your message, the courtesy a vending machine manages when it takes your dollar.
And sure, it could be me. I am one person with a small audience and a strange idea. No viral video. No hundred thousand followers. If I were sitting at a brand looking at a spreadsheet, I might slide the cursor past me too. The reach is small, the odds are bad, the return is hard to model. I would have understood a no.
But I do not think it was only me. I think it was the subject. I think a lot of good people, at a lot of good companies, have quietly decided that the safest thing to do about climate right now is to say nothing about climate right now. Which is exactly how the houses lost. Not through one villain. Through a thousand small choices to look away from the thing in the north because the thing in front of them felt more urgent and less dangerous to name.
One company answered like the whole flinch did not exist. Julbo. They wrote back. They supported the project, no fuss, no committee, like it was the most natural thing in the world to help someone trying to do something. That small thing stands out so far against the rest that it has earned its name here. Julbo.
So why keep going. Why go at all, if the room has decided this subject is too hot to touch.
Because the work is real, and because the numbers alone have not moved anyone. We have had the data for decades. The graphs go up, the ice goes down, people nod and scroll. The whole project is a wager that art can carry what a chart cannot. Each one carries two dates, the year it was made and the year it was lost, and between those dates you can read how much ice went with it.
Will it work. Will it touch one person, change one mind. I do not know. Maybe it changes no one. But almost everything that ever mattered started exactly here. One person. Unsure. No proof it would land. Going anyway. Nobody knew in advance. They went.
So I stopped waiting for the houses to notice me, and I built something smaller. Something real.
I built Arctic Ally. It lives on my site. Anyone can back the Ghosts of the Ice mission, starting at eight dollars for a sticker, with a few tiers above it. No algorithm. No follower count. Just people who want the work to exist, putting a little behind it.
People showed up. They have names. Ines. Eva. Gina. Maria. Carin. Nikolas. Hope. Mollie. Leena. Four of them went past the sticker and became Arctic Fox supporters. None of them run a marketing department. None of them asked what the return would be. They read what I make and decided it was worth something.
One of them is my son. He bought a sticker with his own money. Chipotle money, the kind you earn on your feet. He did not have to. He did it anyway. Around twenty companies could not find a reply. My son found eight dollars.
The grassroots way is slower. It does not buy plane tickets or camera batteries. But it is clean. Nobody buys a sticker for the optics. Nobody runs it past a committee. They do it because the work means something to them.
I am still going. I am still making the paintings. I am still writing this. The houses can keep fighting over the throne. I am walking north, with my own hands and my own money and a small wall of people who decided it was worth eight dollars.
And if the brands turn up later, after the ice, after the paintings, after the work has proven itself without them, it will be up to me. Whether I still need them. Whether I let them through the easy door. But I will even reply to their email. I won’t stay silent as they are now.
That is what decent people do.
“The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.”
