Asparagus Magazine: Amplifying Sustainable Living

Sustainable living helps fight climate change and build a better world, but the journey can often feel overwhelming and discouraging. To keep people motivated, it’s important to apply a creative, intersectional lens, providing encouragement, expertise, and a touch of levity, so everyone can make big and small changes in their lives.

We spoke with Jessie Johnston, Founder, Publisher, and Editrix-in-Chief of Asparagus Magazine, about how this publication is using storytelling to inspire and support a community of readers determined to live sustainably.

What was the “spark” that inspired you to start creating Asparagus Magazine content?

I founded Asparagus in 2018 because it was the magazine I wanted to read but just couldn’t find. Despite my passion for the environment and social justice, I mostly read magazines focused on other subjects. My favourite was Wired, a publication that brings together in-depth reporting, excellent writing, practical tips, and big-picture thinking, all woven through with a refreshing thread of irreverence.

When I first dreamed up Asparagus, there seemed to be two major trends in storytelling about sustainability: articles were either focused on small consumer choices, with guidance that was easy to digest but often not backed up by reliable evidence, or they were evidence-based examinations of big issues that were heavy and depressing to read.

Sometimes people want to understand a complex systemic issue, and sometimes they just need help picking toilet paper. My goal was to create a place where skilled writers could tell both the large and small stories of how we can live sustainably and tell them in a way that took the issues seriously without taking ourselves too seriously. The “Wired of green,” as it were.

Readers can care about the environment and social justice, and also want a break from the dread of 21st century living. So, from the very beginning, Asparagus has been a publication that values humour and creativity as highly as we value rigorous fact-checking and an intersectional worldview.

What do you consider to be your biggest success?

Our biggest success was winning the award for British Columbia Magazine of the Year at the 2022 Alberta Magazine Awards. For a publication as small as ours, receiving that recognition from our peers was meaningful and inspiring. We’re also thrilled that an initiative we’re a collaborator on — the Climate Disaster Project — has been nominated in the Engagement category of the 2023 Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards. It’s pretty incredible to be part of a finalists list with international heavy hitters like The Guardian and Al Jazeera.

How do you feel having a platform and community help to make the world better?

The cover story of our most recent issue was called “We’re All in This Together,” and that’s as true of the climate crisis as it was of the COVID-19 pandemic. So many of the world’s problems arise from people’s failure to recognize our deep interconnectedness with each other and the rest of life on Earth.

Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools humans have to bridge those divides. By publishing stories that connect our readers to their neighbours, to people continents away, and to the ecosystems we’re all part of, Asparagus can strengthen those readers’ resolve — and capacity — to take action in their own lives that can impact the planet as a whole.

Stories not only help people better understand each other and the world around us, but they also bring people together. Our journalism has enabled us to create a community of readers who gather around issues they care about and want to understand better. 

Since 2018, we’ve presented virtual and in-person documentary screenings and discussions, and in August 2022, we held our first in-person event in over two years. That sold-out gathering — co-hosted with EartHand Gleaners Society — was a joyful opportunity for us to share the sustainable textile expertise of EartHand’s artists with some of our longtime readers and welcome EartHand fans to our community. These kinds of opportunities to learn and connect are critical to building the informed coalitions we need to make things better for all life on Earth.

What are some of the challenges you typically face in creating content or building out your audience?

We are a tiny organization with an even tinier budget. It’s important to us to always pay contributors, even if we can’t pay them as much as we think they deserve. As such, we’re only able to publish as many stories as we can afford to pay for, which, these days, is not very many. But without new content, it’s hard to grow our audience to the size that could support us. It’s a vicious circle we’re trying hard to break out of so we can create award-winning, thought-provoking journalism for years to come.

And, as of this August, we’ve been hit with a new challenge to growing our audience: having all our posts and links to our website blocked in Canada on both Facebook and Instagram as a result of Meta’s punitive response to recent federal legislation.

Are there any upcoming initiatives or projects you’d like to share?

We are working on building partnerships that will help us get back to publishing online and in print with the frequency of past years. If you work with or know of an organization looking to collaborate on high-quality journalism about how we can live sustainably, we’d love to connect. Our next exciting initiative could be a partnership with you!

How can people help support your mission? 

Having the COVID-19 pandemic start just as we celebrated publishing our second issue meant we weren’t able to build our audience the way we had planned at a time when our young organization really needed to grow. As a result, we don’t have the number of readers or financial supporters that we need to sustainably support the work we created Asparagus to do.

People who believe in our mission can best support us by subscribing to the print magazine and/or by making a financial donation. Those who can’t contribute financially can still help by spreading the word about our work to their communities, whether by posting on social media, requesting that their local library or newsstand stock the magazine, or, most impactful of all, making individual recommendations to family, friends, and co-workers who want to build a just society on a healthy planet.

This story was featured in the Make The World Better Magazine: