Try to think of a brand with greater influence over your life than Apple. Most of us can’t get through the day without our iPhones or the multitude of apps they support, and our new #WFH reality has only reinforced just how much we rely on—no, need—our technology. Apple has reached near-mythical status as a result, representing the ne plus ultra of American innovation, progressive thought, and mind-boggling success: In January, weeks before the coronavirus had escalated to a pandemic, Apple reported the most profitable quarter of any corporation ever, a cool $22.2 billion. All to say: If any company can make a significant contribution to the fight against climate change, it’s Apple. Today, the company is releasing an ambitious road map to achieve true climate neutrality across its entire business by 2030. Its corporate operations are already neutral—meaning Apple offsets the carbon emissions it can’t avoid through investing in forests and nature-based solutions like mangrove restoration and regenerative agriculture. But by 2030 it will be carbon-neutral across its entire supply chain and products too. That means they’ll take the energy you use to charge your iPhone, MacBook, AirPods, and iPad into account then offset it responsibly. A common critique of carbon offsetting is that some companies use it as a get-out-of-jail-free card of sorts, simply paying to make up for their impacts rather than working to reduce them from the start. Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environment, policy, and social initiatives, recognizes the difference between performative and meaningful action—and that Apple plays a larger role in raising the bar for other companies’ climate strategies too. Before a brand considers carbon offsets, “an important thing they have to recognize first is the extraordinary opportunity in seeing sustainability in terms of efficiency,” she explains on a call from San Francisco. “If you can use less energy, less water, and less raw materials, that’s a good thing for the planet, and it’s usually a really good thing for your bottom line. Even today, a ton of the work we do is still making improvements in efficiency.” Case in point: Last year, Apple made energy-efficient upgrades to more than 6,400,000 square feet of its buildings, reducing electricity needs by nearly one-fifth and saving the company $27 million. Jackson also mentioned Dave, Apple’s latest robot that disassembles iPhones and recovers tungsten, steel, and rare earth magnets. What you might not know is that over the past year all of Apple’s products have been made with partly recycled content, including 100% recycled rare earth elements in the taptic engine (the mechanism responsible for vibrations). Other ambitious goals on Apple’s list include transitioning dozens of its suppliers to clean energy; incorporating more recycled plastic, tin, aluminum, and rare materials into Apple products; and sourcing paper only from responsibly managed forests. In the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, Apple is also unveiling a new racial equity and justice initiative to address the connections between climate change and racial inequity. “You can’t have justice if you don’t have environmental justice,” Jackson says. “The pandemic has brought environmental justice back up to the front [of the conversation]. There’s an imperative to our work that we don’t talk about enough, which is [the need to] help people who didn’t cause the problem but will be the victims of the problem because of where they live and their access to fresh water or food, which will both be challenged.” One of Jackson’s first projects is an accelerator program for Black- and brown-owned businesses working on climate-change solutions. “We’re bringing them some help by giving them the benefit of something Apple really knows, which is how to grow and scale from a supply chain perspective and a sales perspective,” she says. “I’m looking forward to telling the story of where Apple is making its mark in the racial equity and justice space, just as we’re making our mark in the environmental space.” Jackson is more than up to the task. She joined Apple in 2013 following a four-year term as President Obama’s administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, where she fought for clean-energy solutions and spoke out against America’s dependency on oil. Jackson was the first Black person to hold that position and is the only Black person on Apple’s executive leadership team. In an exclusive interview, Vogue spoke with Jackson to learn more about her career and her contributions at Apple; read the full Q&A below. What first inspired you to work in environmental science? I grew up in New Orleans, which is an area surrounded by petrochemical facilities—there’s a lot of oil and gas down there. So I grew up thinking that was the norm. I’d visit my relatives along the Mississippi River and see all of these chemical plants. I was in the Ninth Ward, which became important later because that’s where the levees broke during Hurricane Katrina. I really loved math and science, so my parents were like, ‘This is going to be our doctor!’ My dad was a mailman, and my mom sometimes worked as a secretary. A few things happened at the same time: There were studies that said the drinking water in the Mississippi River had hundreds of carcinogens in it by the time it reached New Orleans, and the science of that stuck with me. And then I entered a summer engineering program so I could win a programmable calculator because I was that girl in high school [laughs]. I started to understand what engineering meant and how important it could be in solving problems—engineers are problem solvers, and I really liked that. So when I left high school and went into college, I thought, instead of just doing pre-med, I’ll do engineering pre-med or biomedical engineering, which was just starting out then. Around that time, the Love Canal disaster happened, which showed that we had all these hazardous waste sites created by chemical engineering sitting around like time bombs. I decided I really wanted to work on that part of the job—not making the problem but cleaning it up. That’s how I got into the field. I studied engineering at Tulane and did my graduate work at Princeton, which was doing some of the early work on groundwater modeling. I was interested in that, so I decided to go work for the Environmental Protection Agency. This was in 1987, and I worked there for years, [eventually] in New York, but then September 11 happened. I had two young children and didn’t want to be working in New York when they were living in New Jersey, so I got a job at the New Jersey EPA and became head of enforcement for the state’s environmental programs. Later I became head of the whole commission. When did you meet President Obama, and what was it like working with him in Washington, D.C.? I first met [then] Senator Obama when I was the head of the commission in New Jersey and met him again later when he came to the state. When [the election] looked good, he formed his transition team, and he asked me to be the administrator of the agency. It was a huge honor. I started out as a wet-behind-the-ears young woman and grew to understand that agency, and then I got to lead it as a political appointee. Working on the political side of environmental issues, so many people told me that it would be the hardest job I’d ever have. And it was hard in ways that have nothing to do with your brain—it’s the way politics is played. You have to know how to rally support for your issue, how to have support from your own bosses and from the folks staffing the White House, and Congress, and constituents…. Probably my favorite part of the job was actually going out and meeting with the American people because no person I ever met told me, “We need more pollution.” They had a real concern for their communities and wanted us to understand the whole picture for them—their families, jobs, homes, air, water. Was the intersection of racial inequity and climate change a conversation at that time? We set priorities for the agency, and climate change was top of the list, but we also put environmental justice on there as well. In this moment, all of the things we said then are being repeated again, and it’s that you can’t have justice if you don’t have environmental justice. If certain communities are being picked out economically or racially to [deal with] the pollution, the dirty water…all of that matters. I remember being eight years old and writing a letter to President Nixon in 1970 saying, “You need to do something about all of this pollution.” There wasn’t an EPA yet, but I felt really passionately about it because I knew good and well that not everyone had access to the same clean air and water. We saw rivers catch on fire and the Santa Barbara oil spill, and there was everything I’d seen along the Mississippi River. The younger generations are more passionate about climate change than ever. How have you seen the movement grow and change over the past 30 years? I think it’s in kids to care about their environment and the planet. When you’re a child, some of the first science you learn is about the environment—you learn about the natural world and go out and study pools and water and animals. But what happens is that over time, we somehow buy into this false belief that you have to put that [interest] aside because we need to make money and have jobs. If you look at what happened when the EPA was formed in 1970, and the first Earth Day, it was led by young people who went to Washington and said, “We’re done; we want you to take our future seriously.” I think that’s happening again. It isn’t surprising that young people lead the revolutions because they’re able to look past that false choice [between planet and profit]. They’re standing in front of it and saying, “I don’t believe that we have to choose between having a healthy planet and an economy that works.” It’s not an either-or; you can’t win on the economy if you aren’t winning on the planet and people. Are you optimistic about the future? Is there anything that still frustrates you about people’s perceptions or misunderstandings of the climate crisis?
Sometimes what frustrates me is when I see people who think you can protect the planet and its biodiversity, but they forget how important people are in that equation. We are part of this ecosystem, and justice is important too.
