Lucy Johnson

Lucy Johnson is the founder and CEO of Green Salon, the UK’s first sustainable lifestyle consultancy. She is also one of Britain’s first sustainability coaches, working with companies and individuals to help them make more informed, ethical choices.

Green Salon offers unique and tailored guidance to businesses looking to go greener and supports them in transforming eco-overwhelm into a sense of personal agency and optimism about tackling the climate crisis. In 2023, Lucy launched the country’s first green agony aunt column in Country & Town House magazine.

Her work is pioneering a drive to transition away from a carbon-intensive, throw-away lifestyle to a chic, conscious lifestyle, focusing on quality over quantity, through talks, coaching, workshops, articles and a curated collection of gorgeous and truly sustainable brands.

Before starting Green Salon, Lucy was a television journalist for 16 years, covering the environment, politics and foreign affairs for broadcasters including ITN, APTN and the BBC. She spent her early journalistic career looking at the politics of the global energy supply.

In 2006, Lucy launched the ‘prototype’ Green Salon, a monthly networking event bringing together eco-entrepreneurs and investors to speed up money flows into green businesses, which ran until 2008 when she trained to become a psychotherapist. She continues to run her own private psychotherapy practice.

Lucy has studied the circular economy at the Ellen McArthur Foundation and holds a Certificate in Sustainable Business Strategy from Harvard Business School. She has spent the last two decades reading widely and deeply about sustainability, eco-brands and human psychology. She also lives a low-waste and lower-carbon life herself and has a wealth of personal experience to share with others.

Suggested Talks:

How to become a net zero citizen: As a company, it’s likely you’ll be in the process of making plans to reach net zero by 2050, or sooner. You’ll be looking at energy sources and supply chains – but have you thought about your employees’ carbon footprints? Before the pandemic, companies could measure much of their employees’ carbon emissions at work through their in-house energy use, but the trend towards working from home has changed that equation. This comes as it’s increasingly clear that the sooner everyone reaches net zero, the better.

Luckily, there is now an eco-system of companies making the journey to net zero not only easier, but increasingly alluring. In her talk, Lucy Johnson shows your team their carbon footprint and explains the most convenient, cost-effective and exciting ways to reduce their footprints. She describes a fast-approaching future of night trains, solar panelled cars and shows how, increasingly, our rubbish is becoming our treasure.

How to green your life: In the face of the looming environmental crisis, people often wonder: what difference can I as just one person make? Lucy talks about collective action, consumer power and how a new generation of stylish, conscious brands is making a sustainable lifestyle an increasingly attractive option. She drills down into what changes matter: how to reduce your carbon footprint by 30%, and the principles of the 4Cs of success in transitioning to a greener life: conservation; circularity; certification and curation, looking in depth at how we can apply these principles to our lives. Habits only stick if we enjoy them, so she looks at how to use the brain’s reward system to reinforce new sustainable habits that enhance a feeling of agency and inspire us to play our part in repairing the planet.

How to transform environmental shame into potency: Walking into a shop in the 2020s is not as simple as it once was: you ask yourself, is this coffee Fairtrade? What’s the carbon footprint of this banana? Even going on holiday is complicated: is it OK if I fly? Anxiety-inducing moral quandaries at the check-out cause us stress and often emotional shut down. But we can be left with a nagging guilt that we’re not doing enough, which taps into a deeper sense of environmental shame. In this talk, Lucy teaches us how we can transform this shame into action by setting measurable and achievable “green” goals, developing a “good enough” mindset, creating systems and networks and remembering our sense of fun. She talks about the two vital ingredients in motivating ourselves as we shift our habits to adapt to our changing environment: celebration and compassion.

Image credit, headshot: Vicki Knights Photography