4. Money: In Service of Nature?

With Lorenzo de Rosensweig & Eric Smith.

This week we’re asking whether it’s possible to support the lifeworlds of nature with the very same tools that have caused them harm. We’ll be joined by Lorenzo de Rosenzweig, who has headed Latin America’s largest nature conservation trusts for over three decades. And Eric Smith, from the Grantham Neglected Climate Opportunities Fund and Edacious, will talk about venture capital investing in nature based solutions.

I’m interested in this topic because I invest capital in projects that regenerate nature through my vehicle Ground Effect. In that work I constantly encounter philosophical and practical tensions – namely that complex natural systems and the trillions of processes that enable life to exist can never be fully translated and priced by markets. Numbers and metrics can’t tell us about the touch of rough bark or the flutter of a beetle’s wing against our skin. And because money is fungible, it can often efface all distinctions and trigger the further commodification and abstraction of a living ecology. 

And yet finance can be used beneficially on behalf of nature. We can look at the maturing industry of biodiversity markets which attempt to move beyond single metrics like carbon, or debt for nature swaps, blue bonds, true cost accounting, payments for ecosystem services, and even more radical ideas like DAOs where nature owns itself. I’ve uploaded resources on the Lifeworlds library for those who want to go deeper on these innovations. Perhaps then, the conversation of “finance for nature” is about finding the right balance of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and acknowledging where the role of markets begins and ends in the wider spectrum of systems change.

Show Links:

• Finance for Nature: Lifeworlds Resource
• Regenerative Economics: Lifeworlds Resource
• Terra Habitus
• Mexican Fund for the Conservation of Nature
• Conservation Finance Alliance
• Grantham Trust: Neglected Climate Opportunities
• Edacious
• Payments for Environmental Services Program | Costa Rica
• Steward
• SPUN fungi
• Ground Effect

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock, Ellie Kidd & The Rising by Tryad CCPL

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