We can learn a lot if we listen to the trees—and pay attention to the party going on underneath! Nature has much to say about how to realign our industrial value chains, embrace biodiversity, and maintain soil microbiology. The question is, are we smart enough to listen and move toward a regenerative economy?
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by Nori, the world’s first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospe.
Ross Kenyon: Say hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon, here with Christophe Jospe and Paul Gambill. We are in New York City right now. We’re in our Airbnb in Brooklyn. We are happy to be here. We have seemingly nothing but meetings, running around the city the entire time. Christophe, are you happy to be back in your — in your homeland?
Christophe Jospe: I am. But I think I no longer feel like a New Yorker. I feel like an ex-New Yorker. I jaywalked this morning on the way to the bodega. It felt amazing. No one looked, no one judged.
Ross Kenyon: They judge in Seattle, do they? I’ve never noticed.
Christophe Jospe: They do judge. They judge really hard. And in New York it’s expected to jaywalk. We judge you especially hard for running stop signs on your bike.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s just in my blood. I have seen people — it’s always in Midtown where the tourists come — but I see people will walk in front of cabs, and the cabs will keep going, just lay on the horn, be like, this is your choice. Do you want to die or no? Yeah. Well, okay, let’s get going.
Christophe Jospe: I’m really excited to have our guest today. It is another validation of just how amazing the connection economy is. Like, people are out there wanting to make [unclear] — you could do a TED Talk on that, someone else can — it’s just about, like, people are out there wanting to make the world a better place, wanting to know about each other. And then once they do the sort of flash of, hey, let’s get things done as quickly as possible, it just gets that much stronger.
And I forget how, but I’d seen this one woman’s profile. Her name is Maggie [unclear]. That’s not our guest, but she had something that — well, so, first of all, she was saying really smart things about sustainability and energy. I only add people on LinkedIn who give specific reasons as to why they should add me, and I looked at her profile and I just gave her a number of reasons, and Maggie and I hit it off. And then Maggie joined something called the Future-Fit Foundation. And there was a presentation from John Elkington and Lorraine Smith about Volans and various elements of sustainability.
And this is the group that — they’re not the cookie-cutter sustainability. They are thinking on the edge and looking at where the world is going. You know, very much the Wayne Gretzky, skate to where the puck is — or, skate to where the puck is going, not to where the puck is, right? And so Maggie connected us to Lorraine, and we’re just sort of reminiscing — both Lorraine and I were getting chills on that call, because we were realizing so many of the connections. And so, of the many hats that Lorraine wears as an independent consultant, one of them is Volans. I’m sure we’ll learn about a number of the other hats as well. Lorraine is also a podcast listener, so again, she knows what she’s getting into. Do feel free to listen — more flattery on us, it’s welcome.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’ve got it in my hopper here. We don’t invite people who would disagree with us. Kidding.
Christophe Jospe: Without any further ado — Lorraine, you are an amazing person, I think, and I think you also have a fascinating story, and so we’d love for you to start with telling your story. Why is sustainability, and working on reversing climate change, something that you care so deeply about?
B. Lorraine Smith: Wow. Well, thank you, and it’s really fun to be here. It’s actually more fun, I think, to just keep listening to your podcast, but I’ll try to contribute to the fun. I’m delighted to be here, and my story probably has too many twists and turns to make any sense of in a brief podcast, but I’ll cherry-pick a couple of spots. And I’ve heard a lot of your guests talk about their different pathways into the sustainability conversation, the regenerative agriculture conversation, etc. And I think one of the things I love most about that is that there are just infinite doorways. So I’ll point to doors number one and two, and leave the infinite ones for future conversations.
I think the first one really happened in a recess playground fight in grade [unclear], when I was probably about seven. Two of my friends at the time were debating religion, of all things. And one was from a Catholic family and the other was from a Protestant family, and they were arguing about which one had figured God out. And I was raised as a religious mutt, no access to any one pathway or the other. And I remember later that night thinking about the fight and thinking, you know, that didn’t make a lot of sense to me, because everything we need, we can see when we look sideways, because we can see all the forests and the gardens and the flowers and the people. And I was just totally puzzled by this argument about who had figured God out better. So that was probably the beginning of my thinking about how we interpret ourselves within the wider world, and what nature has to do with it.
Ross Kenyon: This is clearly in Canada.
B. Lorraine Smith: Yes, it was. I did grow up in Toronto, actually, as quite a city mouse, although also lots of access to nature, partly because Toronto is built on three beautiful riverbeds. There are three rivers that run through Toronto, and I played a lot in the ravines — probably more than would be deemed safe today. But I also spent a lot of time in farmland and in forest land in Northern Ontario.
But fast forward to around the year 2000. Before I knew what sustainability was, or corporate responsibility, or all of the synonyms we throw around, I found myself working in a financial services institution. I was in this episode of trying to have a proper job and be a normal person, and I remember the themes I talked about at the time were greed and vanity. It was like, why don’t I just try those and see what they’re like, because they seem to be kind of normal and people seem to be thriving with those. So I’ll check it out.
Ross Kenyon: As one does in New York City, right?
B. Lorraine Smith: At the time I was still in Toronto, and a number of my friends — wonderful people, whom I respect — are lawyers, bankers, you know, leading those normal lives. And so I sort of got recruited into a financial services role. Lots of things I could say about that role, but one of the things I recall very distinctly was being in a meeting. This was in a company that, although it’s Canadian, its bread and butter is the 401(k) industry in the US, which is essentially retirement savings.
Ross Kenyon: Maple syrup portfolios, right?
B. Lorraine Smith: Yes, that’s right. It was almost 90% invested in maple syrup, and then a few other things like hedge funds and other financial instruments. And one of the meetings that we had — my role was to bridge between the IT group and the marketing group. Of course, the marketing group wants to say invest more money, and the IT group needed to figure out how to do that legally and manage all their fiduciary responsibilities. And I had a kind of translator role, which is something I find myself in a lot.
And I asked, in this group of about 15 people — a few VPs from different parts of the business and some of the coders and some of the marketers — why don’t we include in our messaging, you know, along with showing older people in hammocks and sailing and holding their grandchildren’s hands, why don’t we include in the messaging information about what the money is doing while it’s invested over these 20, 30 years? And everybody turned and looked at me and said, who cares how the money is invested? It’s just that they have money at the end of the day when they retire. And I remember a penny sort of dropped for me. Really? That’s how global investing works? Who cares how the money is invested and whether or not it’s creating value?
So I ran away for three months and traveled across Canada, and I basically put my name on to what was then a bulletin board on the World Wide Web, through my spinning and weaving and textile artisan group, to see if any farmers needed volunteers on their farms. And I was handed from farm to farm — heritage breeders of this and that, and different agricultural fairs — and offered wools to spin, either [unclear], sheep’s wool, mohair, rabbit. Some were growing flax, all kinds of good stuff. So I learned a lot about farming, about life, about people, about women entrepreneurs. And when I came back to Toronto, a friend of mine called me and was like, have you spent all your money yet? You need a proper job. And the answer was yes, and yes. And so I got hired on to work at Canadian Business for Social Responsibility. That was 2004. Fast forward to today, I’m still in that field. I’m now a board member of CBSR, and I’m making trouble in a few related ways.
Ross Kenyon: That’s amazing. What a great story. You definitely fit in around here. We all sort of have weird paths that led us here, and that’s part of what makes this space dynamic and fun. I’m curious: how do you make trouble these days, Lorraine?
B. Lorraine Smith: Yeah, I can actually organize it into two neat categories, but they interact with one another quite a bit. I say, in simple terms, I write and I lend a hand. So I write a blog that’s on my website, and then I also write content — I contribute to reports, some of which I’ve co-authored with John Elkington and his team, that explore the themes related to a regenerative economy. And of course regenerative agriculture sits very happily in that space, so that writing takes a number of different forms. I’m also working on my first nonfiction book that explores the relationship between trees and people, and that writing is something I’ve been exploring for a very, very long time — long before I knew about this form of making trouble.
And the lending-a-hand part is, I contribute to a number of different teams. So Volans, and John Elkington’s team based in London, is a group that I spend a lot of time working with. I think of them as thought partners and instigators. And I also contribute on a couple of other teams, or directly to clients. So one quite tied to this agriculture and soil carbon conversation: I sit on the sustainability advisory board of a large forest products company based in Brazil called Fibria. And that would be an example of me sort of lending a hand to an executive team to think about how they can contribute to the sustainable economy of the future.
Ross Kenyon: It’s quite a story. You have a hard time coming up against John Elkington, though, whose story began — well, it starts with me looking at thousands of eels. So, one of the greatest intrigue comments that have been dropped on the show. I want to hear about this book. What’s the relationship between humans and trees?
B. Lorraine Smith: Oh gosh. [unclear]. I’ve had the very good fortune of living in a number of different places — sometimes for work, sometimes for school, sometimes just because I had a really interesting conversation with a taxi driver followed by another interesting conversation with another taxi driver, that made me spend some time in Ethiopia. And so, long ago I lived in Brazil as a teenager, and then I’ve gone back a fair bit for work because I speak Portuguese.
Ross Kenyon: But you were — were you in São Paulo? Were you just sort of at the American school there?
B. Lorraine Smith: No, I was in a regular Brazilian high school.
Ross Kenyon: My dad went to that school, and I was wondering.
B. Lorraine Smith: Yeah, no. I was fully immersed in Brazilian culture, which was an incredible gift, in 1989 — the year of the first democratic election. And of course there’s a very interesting election playing out right now. Maybe we have time for that here, maybe we don’t. But all to say: living in Brazil, being from Canada — and I’ve lived in many parts of Canada, I now live in New York, also spent some time in East Africa and Ethiopia, and a couple of episodes I lived in Germany on exchange as well — through these periods of my life of almost half a century, I’ve started to notice a pattern: that trees, and I think you could insert nature or biology for trees in all of these sentences I’m about to say, but I’ll use trees as a sort of handy visible proxy, they’ve been telling us things forever, and it’s my interpretation that we’ve just not been picking up the instruction manual.
And the pattern I’ve noticed is one of essentially mass deforestation. That’s not a news headline, but deforestation in a way that’s been very subtle, and that we have the potential to hear and understand and come back to and basically heal. And I think if we listen to how nature is trying to get things done and get out of its way, we’ll do well. So the book is really a series of nonfiction stories. You could call them memoir or travelogue, but each one is me finally getting the message from trees. I worked as a tree planter in Northern Ontario to pay my way through a couple of years of school. And tree planting — I don’t know if you guys have ever met any tree planters, but it’s a pretty interesting summer job.
Ross Kenyon: Like the Lumberjack Song from Monty Python.
B. Lorraine Smith: Yes, except all day. And when you’re in the north, the day is long. So it starts very early and it ends very late. So you’re working 14-hour days planting a tree every six feet. You’re carrying those trees and you are physically creating the space to put them in the ground, day after day like that.
Ross Kenyon: Your core is probably pretty strong, huh?
B. Lorraine Smith: Yeah. Well, what I was — you know, I was 19, 20. And then other experiences with trees, working with forest products companies in Brazil, and listening to the dialogue between the FSC, the Forest Stewardship Council, which seeks to certify forest products with wonderful intentions around economic, social and environmental measurable impacts. And yet they face the same puzzles we do as humans, trying to function. So much more I could say on the book, but it’s trying to explore our relationship with trees and come out with a more hopeful set of possibilities for how we can be within the wider world.
Ross Kenyon: That’s fairly characteristic of your writing, too. Whenever I see a new blog post of yours go up, I always take a look. And that’s one reason I think that you and Nori have a connection: that we tend to look for the silver lining or the opportunity there, which is not always that common in the climate change space. I think it’s definitely more helpful for generating action and not feeling totally out of control and powerless.
B. Lorraine Smith: Yeah, I actually think that’s a really important point. And I didn’t say in my answer to how I make trouble, but I’ll add it in here: one of the things I try to infuse in everything I do, including my own conversations with myself, is this sense of where the mindset or the paradigm plays a role. And I’m sure you and most of your listeners could probably run circles around my technical knowledge of systems thinking, but I’ve spent a lot of time reading and exploring the work of Donella Meadows. I’ll just insert: she was a hand spinner and produced a lot of her own yarn. Little-known fact. And if you’ve ever spun yarn, you’ll quickly see that it’s a form of systems thinking and integration that kind of manifests in a way that’s kind of neat.
But all to say, I think that the notion of the silver lining comes from a mindset or a paradigm approach where — and I have some kind of awkward conversations with my so-called environmentalist peers, where I get the intention, you know, we want, I want a better world. I’m pretty sure everyone I meet wants a better world. But what do we mean by that? And people become so entrenched in their beliefs. I think one of the reasons the goosebumps happened for me on that initial call with you, Christophe, and with John Elkington, was that you are providing at least pieces of the pathway that help those die-hard environmentalists and people who are really concerned about climate broaden their mindset to recognize: this is not an emissions reduction conversation. This is not an energy transition. This is not a “coal is evil” conversation.
This is a conversation about realigning our industrial value chains and our human interactions with a natural process that has been underway and evolving for 3.8 billion years. You articulate it slightly differently, I think, in the Nori universe, but you offer a financial mechanism and a conversation that helps reorient that narrative. So I think it’s more than a silver lining. I think it’s a functional lining, and I’m kind of excited about that.
Ross Kenyon: That’s great. And thanks for all the nice things that we’re forcing you to say about Nori. It’s in the air.
B. Lorraine Smith: No forcing whatsoever. I was trying to think of a way to extend that metaphor, of course.
Ross Kenyon: You know how we do it.
B. Lorraine Smith: I know. I think we found each other in a metaphorical space, so I’m happy to keep playing there.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, well, it’s kind of like we’ve got this lining around this small, little piece of yarn or whatever, but we have to make it so much bigger and so much more inclusive.
B. Lorraine Smith: I’ve got to teach you guys to spin, because then you’ll know where to go with those metaphors.
Ross Kenyon: When I was a kid I remember doing the latch hook.
B. Lorraine Smith: Oh nice, rug hooking.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I don’t think I did much beyond that, though. Do you do it with, like, the knitting, with the needles?
B. Lorraine Smith: Well, I’ve got some knitting off to the side there. We can check it out a little later. But knitting is essentially just creating a continuous knot. If you take a look at the spelling, you see there’s an interesting little clue: knitting. We — let’s go there some other time, although I will say it’s a physical manifestation of taking something that has no integrity and giving it strength.
Christophe Jospe: So I’d like to go in a different direction other than knitting, but perhaps the weaving that you do in the boardrooms is relevant here. You know, you’re working with companies sometimes which have been demonized. You know, we’d look at deforestation as a major cause for climate change, and forestry companies can be the quote-unquote bad guys, but they’re not necessarily the bad guys per se. And so I’m curious, the experience that you find when you’re in boardrooms, and innocent people who have always sort of seen the world in one way, just trying to squeeze them to see it in a slightly different way that might actually impact their bottom line in a beneficial way, and most certainly impact the environmental bottom line. What do you see working most effectively, and what do you see not working?
B. Lorraine Smith: Yeah, that’s a — that’s a really good bundle of questions, and I’m going to turn some of them around. And, with respect, I’m going to challenge some of the mindset that brings those questions forward, because I’ve had a lot of sort of a-has going through my work over the years with forest products companies. So where to start? First, I’ll just say it’s my personal belief that I can’t convince anyone of anything. So as soon as the word “convince” is part of the project, I accept defeat and I stop that pathway. Likewise, it’s very difficult to convince me of something. I’ve changed things, and I’ve spent a fair bit of time and done a bit of writing exploring why have I changed things. But it’s pretty much never because somebody sat me down and convinced me.
So when I am in the privileged position of being paid to share what I think with somebody who works internally at a company, or a group of people, or executives or other stakeholders, I first try to understand what the current circumstances are. And so in the case of this company that I do a fair bit of work within and have known for a number of years — so hopefully I’m not telling tales out of school, and Fibria is incredibly transparent about what they do — I think we quickly see that what the man on the street, or even the deeply knowledgeable climate professionals that I spend time speaking with, don’t realize, is a forest products company from Brazil is not cutting rainforest. They’re not deforesting.
In fact, unlike a lot of parts of the world — say, Texas, no offense — Texas companies… in Brazil are required to protect almost a third of their land as native forest. Imagine telling a Texas rancher, you need to put aside a third of your land for native forest. That would be a sort of non-starter conversation. In Brazil it is legally required and upheld, and certainly upheld by publicly listed companies who are, you know, carefully regulated and very public about what they do. So to begin with, Fibria and all of its forest products company peers in Brazil are not deforesting. It’s just a basic reality.
What are they doing? They’re growing trees on plantations. So that is a monospecies conversation. It’s a lot more similar to soy production or corn production. I call it slow-growing corn. These are closer to agriculture companies than the lumberjacks of yesterday. But they have a very interesting conversation that I think there’s a future opportunity in, and this is where our conversations tend to hover. It’s why, when they asked me to join their advisory board, I said, can I be me? You know, because I’m a bit weird, and I’m going to say some things that maybe don’t show up in every conversation. I’m going to talk about biomimicry. I’m going to talk about regenerative agriculture.
I’m going to talk about why creating shared value doesn’t mean giving permission to communities to have rights. It means the knowledge is in your communities. They know the forest, they know the soil, they know the hydrological cycles better than anyone. That’s where the value is. So it isn’t about allowing them to function, it’s about enabling them to thrive, and maybe you’ll generate some value through that. So I’m not really convincing anybody of anything, but I may be a bit of a spore-based actor within a corporation, where I’m trying to sort of sneeze a few spores on to people. And some — [unclear], Christophe, I like you guys — some will take purchase and evolve. Some may just, you know, cause infections and harm.
But I do think it’s important — and I mean this with all sincerity and respect, and challenging myself as well — that we check our assumptions at the door, that we let go of “Brazil, forest company, deforestation,” and we try to understand what is the status of deforestation in Brazil right now, and how does it relate to that of Indonesia, which is also globally relevant and very different. And by the way, how does that relate to Canada or the United States? And the simplest pattern, which I learned in my travels and which I seek to express through some of my writing, is that the biggest difference is we just deforested a long time ago.
So, like, we’re sitting on one big deforested patch right now and we don’t call this deforestation, but we’re pretty quick to, you know, retweet memes that trash a company tied to deforestation in their supply chain, without understanding that, you know, the house you own, that you’re generating personal equity from, that you’re proud of — and good for you — is part of a deforestation supply chain. But come on.
Ross Kenyon: You’re shattering my — my sense of — no, you’re absolutely right. I looked at a picture the other day of Seattle in 1880, and I saw the old-growth trees. Very few still standing there, over 200 feet tall. But, you know, they’re all gone, like, in Seattle proper.
B. Lorraine Smith: In Seattle proper, right?
Ross Kenyon: And it was quite interesting just to think, yeah, we used to have enormous forest in the Pacific Northwest and they’re all gone, because we deforested and we built cities with them that burned down, and then we built them again. Oh great, more lumber, right?
B. Lorraine Smith: And I don’t — I don’t mean to disparage progress or home ownership or urban development. I mean, it’s simply a plea to cast light on my understanding of reality. And one of the other things I do in making trouble — and a lot of this has come from listening and learning to your guests, and interacting with, I think, people who are doing great things in the regenerative ag space, and so I bring this into my little spore-sneezing events — we even have a metaphor, to see the forest for the trees, and that’s a handy meme and we throw that around. But if we break that down a little bit, we see forests, and within forests we see trees. But what we can’t see with our human eyes is the soil microbiology, right?
We know it’s there. You guys know it’s there, and a lot of your stakeholders are pretty solid on what goes on in soil, although it’s an emerging scientific space. But most people have absolutely no idea the degree to which soil microbiology is what has essentially maintained our lives on Earth through time. And so we don’t recognize what we’ve lost. You know, the Joni Mitchell — fellow Canadian — really just sums it all up: we don’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone. And we’re still trying to figure out that Big Yellow Taxi of our lives. And we’re running to keep up with the soil science, and yet we’re bashing companies for deforesting, not realizing we already did that, and we have a lot of healing and learning to do to bring that back.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I can see it being a bit of a problem to be the beneficiary of those past actions, but then also casting aspersions to others who are trying to develop, much less wealthy than the person criticizing. That probably justifiably rubs you the wrong way.
B. Lorraine Smith: Well, I try not to judge, because I’m the benefactor of that as well. You know, I’m a middle-class white lady from Canada living in a small but perfectly comfortable apartment in New York City. I’m not suffering as a result of that deforestation. If I stand back a little bit further, I’d say, you know — and hopefully this veers us into the silver lining — well, maybe I’m not suffering today, and I have many great choices and I’m excited about my life, and I feel very engaged. I’m aware that collectively we have some work to do.
And I promise there’s a silver lining at the end of the sentence, but the not-so-silver lining is, if we keep going where we’re headed we’ll end up where we’re headed, right? Like, it’s not pretty, and I’d rather avoid catastrophe. I’d rather avoid a mass human failing, and some of the biological systems that we’ll take down with us. And I think we’re perfectly capable. I think we have incredible knowledge and will and capacity. And so I’m excited about leveraging that. It’s less about being rubbed the wrong way and more an awareness of, there’s a way better way to be, and I’d rather be that.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Well, what is that? What do we do? So tell me the answers.
B. Lorraine Smith: We invest in Nori tokens and we amplify what we know. I mean, nature has given us an incredible instruction book, right? We’ve got those who understand far better than I — I’m very much a layperson getting sneezed on on this one — but we have the instructions for how networks work, for how soil dynamics are able to communicate. We have so much information about how this works. I think what you guys are doing is an example of sort of imitating nature, right? You’re a piece of a network. You are, or even multiple nodes of, a network. And so I think what we do is we amplify the pieces of the network that work.
And I mean, I love a mighty oak tree. I love seeing old growth in the rare instances where I get to see those big trees. They’re just staggeringly beautiful. But more and more lately I’m like, okay, tree, you’re pretty awesome, but what’s going on underneath you is where the real party is. So I think it’s, how do we incentivize through financial mechanisms and inspire people to understand that party underneath? I think that’s the path forward. I’ve heard people call it the underground economy. I like, what is the party underneath?
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, that’s — the reaction is, that’s where all the information’s being transferred and the carbon’s being exchanged, and they’re talking to each other. And it’s really crazy to think about the web of interconnectivity and the way that the mycorrhizal fungi — or sort of, Ross, you’re learning all about this through —
Paul Gambill: Is this like a tree mullet? It’s business up top, but the party —
Ross Kenyon: Nice. Paul for the win.
B. Lorraine Smith: Yes, it does. Well done.
Christophe Jospe: Well, we’re sort of burying the lede a little bit. I think there’s an exciting announcement that I’d like to put on the air. You know, Nori has done webinars on our own, and that has had some success and we’ve shared some knowledge. But I just got off the phone with one of your colleagues who gave me permission to say this: so Nori and Volans will be working together to help share knowledge about much of what we’re talking about in the new carbon economy, in the carbon drawdown economy, and, like, how might all this work, and how can we educate and share knowledge so that the world is even more interconnected and has the agency to do something and really create change. So that makes me excited.
I kind of want to put it back to you in terms of, you’re a changemaker whether you like it or not, Lorraine. You’re a troublemaker, but you’re really a changemaker. And you’re totally right to call me out and say, no, it’s not about convincing, it’s about guiding in some way. And so, that said — okay, we don’t need to use the word “convince,” but I’m furious that the rate of change is not happening quickly enough. We really need to move the needle, like, now. How do we do it?
B. Lorraine Smith: Yeah, I’m right there with you. You know, I had a really heartwarming but also challenging conversation with a good friend of mine. I don’t know if you guys know Nick Parker, who’s sort of the grandfather of the cleantech movement, based in Toronto. Toronto has, like, a weird vortex of really neat folks doing amazing stuff, including Nick. And he was asking me, so what are you doing for a living these days? And the first thing that came to mind, really unthought-through, was, I worry. And, you know, I didn’t lead with that when you asked me what I do, but I feel like in a way I totally got it. I’ve got that fire in my belly, and it’s on a cellular level, right? Like, I feel like — this may sound drastic and irritating, but I feel deeply concerned about where we are and how we shift.
I do think it’s worth, as a sort of not just a coping mechanism but a progress mechanism, it’s worth focusing on where knowledge is emerging that can help. So for — I mean, definitely what you guys are doing, and listening to you and following some of the trails you’ve pointed to, has been helpful. A few come to mind. For example, you know, there’s an amazing book called The Soil Will Save Us by an author named Kristin Ohlson. I know that some of your people are familiar with her people. And, you know, that book puts in such accessible terms really basic soil science, and why the sequestration of carbon in soil is a key piece of the solution. And I think of work by people like that, and I think that’s part of where we need to go.
We need — it’s not sexy. It’s not, you know, the greatest TED Talk in the world. It’s not, I don’t know, I guess there’s stuff on Netflix or whatever it may be. It’s not that, and that’s not how people want to spend their time. But if we’re serious about getting where we’d rather be, I think we need to energize the stuff that’s working and stop energizing the stuff that’s not. I also think there’s some hidden pathways. Like, I think one of the fun things I remember about field trips as a kid, you know, where you went on these neat field trips, whatever — the greatest parts were the things you didn’t know were going to happen. And I feel like that’s part of our path forward, is like, what am I not thinking of?
So I’ll give an example of something I wasn’t thinking of that just fell into my lap and made me feel really encouraged. I was in São Paulo for the last two weeks. I was there for a committee meeting with Fibria. I had a chance to present at the stock exchange. They’re doing some really interesting things. They have a carbon index — by the way, we should put a link to that on your site. Really interesting conversations, leading conversations that get missed because they’re in Portuguese. But then I had a chance to hang around a little bit and catch up with a few other folks that I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know.
And then, since I had some time, I went with some friends to a musical performance at this really neat theater, sort of music theater, quite a small venue, maybe 100 people, that was restored through a crowdfunding effort, called Casa de Francisca. And there was a cover — there was a band, not a cover band, a band, [unclear]. The lead singer happens to be the daughter-in-law of Gilberto Gil. Amazing voice, kind of reminds me of Feist, just absolutely wonderful. And she was covering Xuxa songs. I don’t know if you guys know Xuxa. Xuxa was a megastar when I lived in Brazil in the late 80s, continues to be a megastar, sort of known for her cheerful singing and dancing and engaging everyone. Kind of a Brazilian thing, hard to translate, but just a marvel of a human.
And in a way I credit her with teaching me Portuguese, because I watched the Xuxa show when I was there. And when [unclear] did these cover tunes of Xuxa, I realized that along with being, like, crazy kids’ show and retro and a little bit wacky and over the top, the songs are about love and about looking after each other and about wanting to live on Earth and making sure we get it right. Because Xuxa, at the beginning of every show, would arrive from another planet. So she arrives from this other planet, but it’s like, you know, Earth is kind of awesome, I like it around here, and we should be good to each other.
So what does that have to do with the path forward? I was reminded, for the millionth time, of the value of art, and creating things with another and in collaboration with people, and sharing the beautiful parts of it, and inspiring one another to recognize the good parts that matter. And that wasn’t just a sort of fun show, although it was fun. Like, you should have seen — these were, you know, as I mentioned, I’m almost a half a century old, most of the people in the room were about my age. So these are, like, you know, not the hipster crowd, mostly men but lots of women as well, and they were so into it. They looked like five-year-olds. They were bouncing up and down, they were having such a good time singing songs about being good to one another.
And this is at a time when — I’ll just veer into the dark side for a moment — this is at a time when in Brazil, like in other parts of the world, there are some really, really populist, fascist, not-okay forces getting a lot of airtime. And those run counter to what we’re trying to do, right? Those run against being kind and inclusive. They run against what nature has taught us. Nature has explained very well that biodiversity is resilience. It is a form of efficiency. It is a form of a future insurance policy. And so inching towards sameness is a dangerous, dangerous prospect. That’s not just a political point of view. It’s what nature has been building into her instruction manual for 3.8 billion years.
So hearing that from an unbelievably talented vocalist wearing the kookiest outfit you’ve ever seen, looking really sexy, and just having all these people bouncing up and down with joy — it was a reminder that part of the path on this field trip of life isn’t just climate science and policy. It’s just reveling in what feels good and right.
Ross Kenyon: I have a bumper sticker that I bought on the lot at a Phish show that says, save the Earth so we have someplace to boogie.
B. Lorraine Smith: Nice. Exactly. [unclear] would be right there with you. I’ll send you the link to her — parts of her shows just mind-bending and heartwarming. I think that’s part of the path.
Christophe Jospe: It really speaks to a lot of the things that we think about — the interconnectivity, this sort of, we’re all in this together. We have this moment to bend the curve. I mean, we’re talking about reversing climate change, which sort of looks at it from a very carbon-centric point of view, and Nori stays laser-focused on the carbon removal, but we know that’s just one piece. So I would be interested to sort of hear from you, Lorraine, to paint this back to how you see carbon fitting into the broader sustainability [unclear], and specifically — because we know Nori is just one piece of it, and obviously we’re not hubristic enough to say we’re reversing climate change alone. No, we’re just trying to push along in this direction by starting a new market. So how do you see kind of the whole carbon story fitting together?
B. Lorraine Smith: Yeah, I love that question, and I think it actually underscores some of where the conversations will go in those webinars that you reference with John Elkington and team. So I’m really excited that that’s going to unfold. I think there’s a few ways. One is in that broader narrative or paradigm, and I think you do contribute greatly to that, which is helping companies. So let’s talk about corporate sustainability for a moment, which is really where a lot of my focus has been. It’s helping companies recognize that as they do what they do, which is develop and implement strategies, sustainability, innovation, investment — all the things they do, as they go about their strategic ways — that they shift their understanding, and therefore their planning and implementation of their plans, to go well beyond emissions reduction.
Because what we’ve noticed so far is that companies have really focused on emissions reduction and energy, renewable energy. That’s where they go. So I think the opportunity here is to help every company across any value chain see that this is a story they are part of. Obviously you guys are really switched on to agriculture and other points of value chains that touch the soil, but there’s more. I’ll give a super quick example that’s been on my mind lately. Take, for example, automotive. They’ve been thinking about climate for a while. They’ve been looking at lightweighting and getting energy efficiency into their fuel and approach to moving cars forward. That’s great, and they need to do more of that, and, you know, thank you for doing that.
But what if we looked at how the cars were actually made, and looked at the materials that go into the interior of a car? We’ve got Interface making climate-positive carpet tiles. What if some of those climate-positive carpet components were on the interior of a car? We’ve got Covestro making industrial foams and other plastics and coatings using CO2 as a feedstock. What if some of those are in the interior of the car? It starts to get more interesting. But even then you’re still just looking at a piece of the puzzle. What if we go to the wider system, and we say, we know that vehicle electrification is happening — it’s happening more or less in some regions. What if we go to a region where the grid is still not very renewable?
So you’ve got an electric vehicle, you plug it in. And this is what a lot of people argue against electrification with, right? But they still burn coal here. Okay, no problem. Plug your car in, you’re charging — or plug in; the current, it might not be yours, you’re sharing it. And now that electricity is drawn on a grid that is not renewable. But the ten Carbon XPRIZE finalists, all of which are making products across different value chains — not all in energy, in many, many value chains — are using CO2 as feedstock for their products. So that non-renewable, whether it’s coal or gas energy generation, well, that’s what we’d like to transition off of in the long term, we know. The best-case energy scenarios include burning fossil fuels into the future, at least a couple of decades out. So as we’re doing that, we’re capturing that CO2 as feedstock.
So you plug in your EV, you capture that CO2, that goes into totally other value chains that have nothing to do with the car that you plugged in, which by the way is including climate-positive interior materials and very efficient. I think those kinds of system shifts, that touch multiple value chains, that draw on emergent [unclear], that rethink how we understood that waste CO2, that recognize the opportunities in many, many different ways, and by the way have the potential to be highly commercially viable — I think that’s how we shift and stop talking about emissions reduction only within the corporate strategy context.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, the Nori term around here that you’ve heard a million times by now is more shots on goal. I think it’s important that we have lots of different things going on. We get hung up sometimes with monetizing ecosystem services. Sometimes, if you isolate one variable in this complex system, you could overdo it too much. And we like carbon removal because it is relatively simple. But if you think about the entire climate space, and activism and economics, that make it up, it’s also a very complex ecosystem, and we do need all these different projects going on.
There’s also a line — I think John Stuart Mill has it in On Liberty — he says something like, there’s always a party of order and a party of progress. And if you only have one of them, they would just run. Like, it would either be pure status quo, or be like total Jacobin French Revolution style, do everything from scratch. You need both of them in relationship, to temper the worst elements of the other. So even sometimes if we’re criticizing people, that we don’t necessarily like their approach to climate change, in a weird way I’m almost grateful that they exist, no matter what, just for the example. Feel free — that was a tenuous one, but I wonder if you agree.
Christophe Jospe: That was beautiful, Ross. And I think, Lorraine, if you want to respond.
B. Lorraine Smith: Yeah. You know, you’ve touched on the language point in interesting ways. I know we don’t have all the time in the world, so I’ll try to bundle this one and put a bow on it. You referenced an author whose work I’m not familiar with, talking about order and progress, and that is eerily relevant to the conversation today. Those two words translated into Portuguese are the current official flag of Brazil: Ordem e Progresso.
Ross Kenyon: Exactly.
B. Lorraine Smith: And if you’re bored and looking for reading, my most recent blog post redrew the Brazilian flag. And what I did was, I’ve been having a lot of fun with Google Translate. It’s really fun. You can put a word in and translate it, but then you can see alternative translations, and some of them are just helpful synonyms and some of them verge on absurd. That’s a whole other fun conversation. But if you just take some time and think of a synonym for order, one of them is sequence. And another synonym for progress is evolution. And so I redrew the flag to think about sequence and evolution, which to me is just a reinterpretation of what nature is doing all the time. It’s sequencing our evolution. We may or may not understand it. We may or may not like it or benefit from it.
I just throw that out there because it’s quite interesting you referenced order and progress. But more importantly, I believe language is important. I think there’s a reason to explore and test why different terms work, or how to improve a narrative with better language. The folks at Carbon XPRIZE released a really interesting report during Climate Week the other day around the language of carbon, and exploring, you know, carbon removal versus circular carbon, et cetera. So, good things to hone in on there.
But two points I want to make on this that I remind myself, and I try to do so respectfully, when I hear people demanding a certain form of language, which comes up more than I would like in our field and I’m not sure it’s always useful. The first is that there is not going to be one phrase, because we don’t all speak the same language. Like, even if we all decided carbon removal is the one, guess what — it doesn’t mean anything in Mandarin or Portuguese. So, you know, get over ourselves, North American white people speaking English. There’s a whole big world out there and they don’t all speak English, so we’re not going to find the right phrase. We don’t need the right phrase. Reminder: nature loves diversity.
But the second thing I remind myself is to check, what has the language done to my understanding over time? I first learned about climate change, also known as the greenhouse effect, in 1989, living in Brazil, on a field trip to the Amazon. It was called o efeito estufa — the greenhouse effect, or efeito estufa. Then it became global warming, and then it became climate change. It’s probably a whole other podcast to explore how and why that changed. But I really challenge us to think long and hard about how we understand the challenge when we call it global warming versus when we call it climate change, and look for those clues from language — or language [unclear], as I call them — because they give us a lot of information, not in an unequivocal way, but in a useful way.
Ross Kenyon: We’ve had that discussion internally. Alexsandra is definitely on team global warming. Other people have switched back and forth. I don’t want to put words in her mouth, but yeah, we have a — it’s hard to find the correct way to describe complex effects like that. But having those discussions — I was reading the other day something that was saying that the most vibrant ecosystems are all where they mesh up against each other. And I think that, like, we have strong opinions. Obviously, if you listen to the podcast, you can probably guess some of our leanings. But we’re friends with lots of people who disagree with us, and read a lot of things that people don’t. And I think we’re all better for that, rather than having to sort of, like, static approach, which — the worst crime of all is that of being boring, right? So I agree with you. Nature favors the diverse, and you should do the same thing, ideologically and in your space, when you’re thinking about how to think about climate and what to do about it. Would you say that’s a fair thing to say?
B. Lorraine Smith: Yeah, I would, absolutely. And the only line I would draw is recognizing where something really isn’t okay.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, that’s where I think we’re in an interesting space, including in the global warming, climate change, greenhouse effect space, where we need to be really honest and open to recognizing even genuinely uncomfortable truths, and ask ourselves tough questions, and come up with the most honest answers. Because the truth is, climate change has always been happening. It’s anthropogenic climate change that is part of the problem, right? The climate has always been changing, and that’s okay. And, you know, if we kind of think about what was the first climate change — well, it’s when this wonderful chemical reaction, photosynthesis, occurred, that changed the climate in a dramatic way. And then you kind of go back and there was a great oxidation event which killed off the majority of life on Earth. And all of these climate changes are things that are beyond our control.
But now we’re having this global awakening, us being humans, that we are causing it. And now that we have this recognition, it’s kind of this collective conversation we’re all having: well, what do we do about it? And there’s no one right solution. It’s kind of, yes and, yes and, all of the above, let’s move as quickly as possible. That said, we certainly have our biases about easier ways to cooperate, and they can make things happen. And obviously there should be a line. This came up on the podcast with John Elkington — [unclear] approach, where you’re trying to show them a better way of doing things, these big corporations, you don’t necessarily want to be harming the planet. And it’s like, well, yes, but you can’t just give them a free pass. Sometimes you also need to be ready to criticize, even publicly. And, like, being open to other ideas, or having a diverse set of ideas, does not mean that you give everyone a free pass.
Ross Kenyon: You shouldn’t be so open-minded your brain falls out, as the old skeptic’s joke goes. But, uh, yeah, we should do another one of these, because there’s literally too much content. It’s bursting out of the seams. There’s a — brains are falling out.
B. Lorraine Smith: No, it’s being hemmed in.
Ross Kenyon: And I was trying to do a little knitting. Knitting, I got? Yeah, I couldn’t.
B. Lorraine Smith: I don’t know the line. I’ll get you guys moving and spinning, and then you’ll be able to go there really easily. It’s just rife with metaphors.
Ross Kenyon: We’ll be the tech company with a knitting room.
B. Lorraine Smith: Gandhi had all these people spin every day.
Ross Kenyon: Every day. That’s amazing.
Christophe Jospe: Well, this has been a lot of fun. I look forward to the next time we have you back on, and to all the collaborations between Nori and Volans and the broader community that wants to reverse climate change.
B. Lorraine Smith: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you very much, guys.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you.
