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Sheep 11458 by Alice Robinson. I love it. Her Royal College of Art MA project focused on making as much as possible from just one sheep, numbered 11458. Alice made all sorts of stuff from this one sheep - knitwear, shoes, gloves and more. All from one sheep. https://www.rca.ac.uk/showcase/show-rca/alice-robinson/ This is the way to reduce livestock numbers and the blight of overgrazing. If we create more value from everything nature gives us, then there's no need to have so much intensity and so many animals. Less overgrazing, more room for nature to rebound. It's the economic side of 'wilder farming' Value chains that work for the benefit of nature, not for extractors. This is essential for restoring the rangelands - we have to change the economics for herders so they can make more from less. Very smart stuff. We need much more of this. #sheep11458 #goodgrowth #alicerobinson #wilderfarming #keppelandco

Fast Company on cashmere and Mongolia. Grateful for the shout out for Good Growth. Our perspective comes from seeing the apparel chains through the lens of the landscape. Unfortunately it's really very hard for supply chain owners to see that end of the chain. So the landscape impact is shrouded in opacity. There's so much good the apparel industry could do for the regeneration of landscapes - not just by relieving volume pressure and raising prices, but also by recognising and working with all the other fabulous (and diverse) materials in the landscape - from sheep, camels, horses, yaks...diverse chains to foster and encourage biodiversity. #cashmere #goodgrowth #fastcompany #biodiversity #sustainability

The word of brand is terrible at dealing with sustainability. Google "sustainable brands" or "sustainable branding" and you'll be met by an incoherent mishmash of tactics. It is a massive miss from the "brand" industry - where I have spent a good part of my life. Grappling with sustainability is complex and important for us all. So it *should* be the perfect platform for the people in brand to help steer organisations to a brighter future. Because that is what brand strategies do: cut through complexity to get to the core of what really matters and specifically how an organisation relates to the rest of the world. Sustainability ought to be brand strategy on steroids. But instead brand world has comprehensively failed to pick up the ball. There are 3 areas where it's going wrong. Treating sustainability as a marketing task; overhyping damage reduction as 'sustainable' production; running scared of risk. 1. Parking "sustainability" in the marketing function is a cop out Any effective sustainability strategy has to address, at a bare minimum, how the organisation makes stuff and what it makes. Even better it should encompass how resources, especially finance, are deployed. And best of all it ought to focus on the impact the organisation has on the outside world. Marketers aren't allowed near *any* of that. So if you don't give a crap about sustainability make it the responsibility of the marketers. Then make the brand look even more out of touch by compelling your marketers to go find good things to say at the periphery that demonstrates some kind of progress. So, for example, despite aviation contributing 2% of global warming and being light years away from getting its act together we get to see this kind of nonsense: 2. Hyping supply chain actions as "sustainable" when they aren't In generations to come the misuse of language in sustainability world is going to be a big part of the post-mortem (assuming we get to have one). Top of the nonsense tree are "sustainable production" and its cursed child "sustainable consumption". There is nothing wrong in cleaning and greening up supply chains. Our globalised system has made them so opaque that all sorts of nasty things have wormed their way into them - from excessive use of chemicals to exploitation of workers to polluting factories to large scale money laundering (really). But 'cleaning stuff up' is not the same as 'sustainable'. And because a lot of the supply chain is out of reach and out of sight for most brands they rely on 3rd party certification of what goes on at the 'other' end. That's where it goes wrong. The supply chain improvement work that is - at best - work-in-progress get translated into hyperbolic kite-marks that hoodwink consumers into thinking what they are buying is "sustainable", when it isn't. It might be "less bad" but that does not equal "sustainable". There's a huge amount of effort going into establishing a set of market facing certifications that are simply not good enough. As an example take a look at this: Read down the list of recommendations. There is a blizzard of different certifications and self audited or just plain asserted promises. Then look at the prices for most of them. Raw cashmere is around $35 per KG, washed and initially processed between $80 and $100 per KG. A $50 cashmere sweater is either a miracle or someone is getting thoroughly exploited. So let's be clear. Adding a bit of circularity and recycling to your process is a good thing. Removing some chemicals and nasties from the grubby bit of the chain is a good thing. But...if your business model is "make large volumes of stuff as cheaply as possible" no amount of recycling is going to undo the damage your supply chains wreak on the landscape. Production systems are extraction systems. Mass production systems are mass extraction systems. There is no such thing as "sustainable production" unless it is governed by and within the constraints of nature. And arguing (as some of these brands do) that flogging mass extractive cheap cashmere is "democratising luxury" is not only lazy, it's offensive. If the price of democratising luxury is the desertification of the rangelands through overgrazing then let's not democratise it. Also - a major bugbear of mine - check out the language. Goats are "hand combed" - sounds lovely doesn't it? Sounds like a massage? But do it too early and it's painful. The cashmere isn't ready to come away. So click on this to see (and hear) what hand combing in action is really like. (Do not click on this if you are sensitive). 3. ESG, risk minimisation and compliance The clearest sign that brand world hasn't got its act together on sustainability is the capture of the topic by reporting and finance. Somewhere along the line sustainability has become a compliance issue. A risk to be dealt with. "ESG" (a mini industry now with multiple factions) is not about fixing problems but reducing bottom line risk. This is wrong for all sorts of reasons - it seeks to standardise something that cannot and should not be standardised; it subordinates sustainability (and especially nature) to finance; it isn't embedded - so when push comes to shove missing your financial goal will get you fired, missing your sustainability goal won't. Producing (admittedly) very beautiful impact reports every year is a lovely thing - but we need the people in brand world to do a heck of a lot more than that. Otherwise what are they for? This is all a massive miss. First up - don't get me wrong. Greening up supply chains and making your impact transparent is all a good thing. I'm just saying that now - a decade or so on - it's not nearly enough. Second - brand people need to stop screwing around trying to turn sustainability into a branch of marketing. Do what you do best and get back to fundamentals. If brand is going to be at all useful in the next few crucial decades it needs to get into the weeds of the whole business from end to end and start with how that business impacts the outside world. (And 'sustainability branding' needs to be hurled out of the window.) Third - and most important. Stop treating "sustainability" like an unexploded bomb. Yes it's hard and yes it's systemic and yes it's important. But it is NOT simply a risk to be managed. It is a once in a generation chance to reset and to get on the front foot. Sustainability is an opportunity Because brands are running scared of sustainability they are missing all sorts of opportunities to do good. Not by treating sustainability as a product feature but by treating it as the foundation for the whole brand. A reset in how the brand - the whole brand - interacts with the world. Take my cashmere example for instance. The goats are getting combed at the wrong time. The cashmere isn't ready to fall off their skin yet because they still need it. It's still cold. But global cashmere operates on fashion cycles not natural cycles. So supply chains need that unwashed cashmere to be washed a good couple of months before the goats are ready to shed. So they get combed at the wrong time. And it hurts. Now - it takes no effort at all (but a major mind shift) for a cashmere brand to say that they will time their season for when nature makes it best for the goats. This would be a major shift - pioneering, market leading - and good for everyone. Seasons dictated by nature not whim. Then applying this across the whole business becomes an operating principle. Do no harm. Brands can do this if, and only if, they look at the whole process from the landscape out. Doing what's right for nature and the landscape and flexing their processes to fit those priorities. That's real sustainability. Doing the right thing for the planet. Value - at an enterprise level. What I'm talking about here is whole organisation brand strategy. Not treating sustainability as a production challenge or a product feature but as an operating principle. Being prepared to change how we do things, how we make stuff - and crucially - being prepared to change what we make - for the good of the planet. That's the future. It means brands defining themselves not by the products they make but by their relationship with the world. Taking a landscape approach is the next frontier. It lifts organisations out of their world, which is their chain, and puts them out in THE world. Which is what we all now need to take care of. The brands that do so will find myriad opportunities to do good. Doing simple things that make everyone's lives, and their own brand story, better. #brands #sustainability #greenwash #goodgrowth

But where are you really from? This now infamous question caused a kerfuffle late in 2022 in the UK. An elderly lady-in-waiting and Godmother to Prince William asked it insistently of a visitor to Buckingham Palace. The woman was British born and of some kind of mixed Caribbean and African heritage. She lived in Hackney. Whilst the row was all about implicit racism being institutionalised in the Royal family/Britain the question is actually one that a lot of people find hard to answer. Me included. I get asked it a lot - I live in Somerset UK, was born in Windsor, but grew up in Sydney before going to various schools. I'm have NO IDEA where I am from. We lived in all sorts of different places. When we get asked this question it is some kind of inquiry into "who you are" - with the idea that "who you are" is somehow inextricably linked to both the place you grew up and the DNA of your ancestors. But more than that it helps us categorise - we love putting people in boxes and a super quick way to do that is to link someone to a place. At Anthropy I saw David Goodhart talking about "somewheres" and "anywheres" which is an interesting tribal split. People who have depth of roots attached to places vs people who don't, the latter seeing themselves as more cosmopolitan. David argues that a lot of what lies behind cultural schisms such as Brexit can be correlated to 'somewheres' vs 'anywheres'. On his read I think I'm an "anywhere". Place really matters Despite my inability to answer the question with any conviction - I do see roots as being important. Part of the logic of moving down here to the countryside was for our kids to have a sense of "being from somewhere". A lot of the value we see as central to Good Growth - value creation for nature - is anchored in place. Reinforcing and articulating place value all through the chain is a way to avoid the commodity chains that are so destructive for nature. Conversely place is a means to reconnect us humans back to nature. Most products don't pay much attention to origin, and in some sectors product brands are very disconnected from place of origin (only 14% of clothing companies know which country their raw materials come from). Check out "radically low priced" clothing company Quince for example - their explanation of the supply chain *starts* in the factory..... Introducing place of origin into chains is a way to square the circle of disconnection, reconnect consumers to nature. Telling stories of place In 2022 we worked with Wissol Group in Georgia to create a new residential business. At the heart of the proposition is the creation of new communities within the city. Most Georgians have an incredibly strong sense of identity that is drawn on where they originate from. Origin affects how they talk, their names, the food they like, the way they behave, the stories they tell. As people move from the regions into the city this sense of identity gets lost, and can get extinguished within the anonymous 'could be anywhere' apartment buildings. Wissol will build community spaces and more importantly bring stories together in each place so that everyone can bring their identity with them whilst building a new community together. (This place making proposition is ground breaking and a game changer for a people that thrive on connection). Stories matter in Georgia. Through centuries of occupation and incursions the Georgian identity has survived and thrived through story telling. Every statue in Tbilisi is a poet. And every poet is a rebel. To develop the brand we did incredibly deep diving into the way stories are told. In Georgia most stories are not written - there is an oral tradition, songs and also visual story telling through colours, motifs and patterns. I've talked before about the amazing power of collaboration in developing brands for Georgia - this would not have been possible without a ton of detective work from Rusa Shamugia of Wissol working closely with Charlotte from the Modern Studio. Working together we unearthed the stories of each of the places, the long history and cultural significance, as well as the symbolism and visual cues that underpin Georgian identity and the specific regions within Georgia. One of the places had a spooky leitmotif connection to Abkhazia, the northern breakaway region that is under Russian occupation and a source of immense emotion to many Georgians. It is an incredibly complex and multilayered story that has resonance to a lot of what's going on today. In many ways the Abkhazia story is a story of regional identity subjugated to but never defeated. There are specific colours and legends that belong to that part of the northern Caucasus that do belong nowhere else. Visual storytelling I am very excited for this brand, which will launch during 2023. Layering stories into places and building places through stories is exactly what we need to be doing across all the brands we build. Too often origin is ignored or treated as an afterthought, whereas it really matters for identity and value creation. Stories matter. Maybe the question should never be "where are you from" but "tell me your story" #wissol #storytelling #brandstrategy

The critical challenge for the Good Growth Company in delivering on our vision of environmental regeneration has finally come into view: we've got to deal with the humans. That means finding a way to integrate planetary health with human prosperity - because the way we humans have evolved to prosper is fundamentally at odds with a healthy planet. We prospering from the planet, not with it. Our way of living is killing millions of animals This morning we were on a call talking about the latest Zud - the occasional severe Mongolian winter event that wipes out a lot of livestock. In one particular region the local NGO reckons that out of 4.9m animals 3m will die this winter - with a devastating impact on incomes and livelihoods. (And that's before any Covid effect). But here's the thing - that region shouldn't have nearly so many animals. The herds have grown bigger as the relentless and inevitable consequence of a cashmere industry that can't get enough, itself a product of a market driven, growth obsessed economic model that can't get enough. So when the cold comes, there's not nearly enough food, so millions of animals die and the primary income stream for the herders in that place is wiped out. And - of course - they then feel compelled to start again and to rebuild the herds. There wouldn't be so many animals if nature had been left to do its thing. And if nature had been left to its thing the death and damage would be minimal. But we humans came and dumped our economic model onto that place to stretch it beyond its capacity to support so many animals - so this massacre is on us. (But of course the vast majority of us have no idea that it has even happened). So if we want to fix the environment (and we do) why not ignore the humans? "Alcohol - the cause of and the solution to all of life's problems" - H.Simpson It is very tempting to think (and I know many people who do) that we should keep humans out of any environmental restoration program, to think that one of the first steps to take in cleaning the place up is (and I quote) "to get the people out of the f***ing place and let nature recover". The lovely "Rewilding" (or better "Wilding") movement demonstrates what can be done when a distinct piece of land can be hived off and fenced off from human activity and - pretty much - given back to nature. And yet....it's kind of no coincidence that most rewilding projects are on land that really does belong to someone quite far sighted (and normally rich) so is land that can be 'reclaimed' from humans without too much disruption. And for sure such projects are a heck of lot easier for not having to worry too much about the people who live in (and from) the place. But.....these are exceptional places and not the commons. If we're going to restore the planet we have to restore the commons, and that means we cannot ignore (tragically) the way in which we the people make a living from the commons. So even if human activity screwed it up in the first place, Homer's right, humans must be central to the solution. We're not going to reverse climate change and species loss without addressing how we reintegrate and reconnect the way we live to nature. But how? Integrating human wellbeing and environmental health is the critical challenge for the regenerative age. This is not an exaggeration - I think this is the toughest and most crucial challenge in fixing the planet. We have to find a way - at both ends of the chain - of switching our mode of behaviour so that we are no longer consuming and producing at the expense of the planet. So what we mean by 'integrating human wellbeing with environmental health' is way, way beyond what most environmental programs call "community engagement". If you've ever been on a management training course you'll know what 'community engagement' feels like - turning up to the course is what counts most. Scandalously, several "sustainable" certification schemes lean heavily on participation statistics as a proxy for *actually* doing something about restoring the environment. (One "sustainable" badging outfit even promotes its program as a "sustainability standard" despite a self reported 13% attendance score for its training programs. And that's just attendance - not compliance). So if we're going to do it we should do it properly - and that means getting to the bottom of the 3 big issues that shape how humans end up screwing up the environment (even if they don't want to). 1 - "homo economicus" We have a couple of recovering economists in the Good Growth Company. It's not their fault but they do have a tendency to take a dim view of humanity - people only do what they do because they are fundamentally economic beings. This idea of humans as having no intrinsic motivations aside from moolah pervades our entire economics, business and government systems. We are "consumers" or "producers" - shopper-bots and producer-bots that sit at either end of economic chains. Defined not as humans but as economic inputs. The "homo economicus" dogma extends through the whole chain - processors will only process what pays them the most, herders will only engage with a program if you pay them. "Homo economicus" is nonsense of course as brave people like Kate Raworth are now pointing out - but the idea of us as only responding to economics has leached into every aspect of life, including sustainability programs and brands with their obsessions in linking behaviour to money or premiums. (For a take down of greenwash brands - and specifically in the case of Naadam the impossibility of their pricing - look at this article: https://shopvirtueandvice.com/blogs/conscious-shopping/ethical-sweaters) It is the casting of humans as economic beings that disconnects us (all) from nature. You don't know that millions of animals are dying - right now - in Mongolia because the brand selling you that sweater has no interest in you knowing that. They just want your money. This is a big problem. So if our version of fixing the environment starts with paying people to farm in a different way or to join our certification scheme then all we are doing is perpetuating the economic-human problem. For humans to prosper with nature as opposed to from nature we must not start with the money - we have to start with reinvigorating the relationship between humans and place. 2. Time Guess what - it turns out that nature doesn't run at the same pace as humanity. It takes an age to turn an environmental corner. Halting, then reversing degradation takes a timespan that is - in human terms - multi-generational. Changing and integrating the way humans prosper so that it's aligned with the health of the environment in which they live is not a quick fix - we reckon 3 or more likely 4 generations. There's a land future project in Australia that asked the current farmers on each piece of land what they hoped to leave for their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and - specifically - what they needed to do to their farm to achieve that aim. What they all wanted to leave was a "healthy" environment, abundant with good things. But when pressed for specifics about what that meant not one could answer - "healthy" in 100 years might mean all sorts of things. The place would have to adapt. How could anyone say that crop X or livestock Y was what would lead to "healthy"? What they needed was to become stewards of the place, to work with the place, to maintain and reinforce its health for generations to come. It's kind of obvious but of course the rhythm of business (5 year cycles if you are lucky) is nowhere near long term enough for this kind of endeavour. If we do ignore the long term realignment of humans in the place to prosper with that place, then the moment any conservation program ships out of any place all will revert to how it was before. Even philanthropy doesn't have the patience to fund programs for multiple generations. And of course this kind of long term view simply does not fit with the wham bam speed of equity investment cycles (of any investors - even impact investors). When "short term" in environmental terms means 3 or 4 decades then there is no prevailing equity model that has a long enough view to stay the course. Which is why we think the financing of the ecosystem work we are undertaking requires a financing model that is geared to the rhythm of nature. More on this soon. 3. Identity - the big one But scratch away at the root cause of the problem and something else comes into view. We humans, at a very deep level, consider ourselves to be "other" from nature. And not just "other" - fundamentally we believe ourselves superior to the natural world. We believe that we have sentience at a level no other species has. We believe (therefore) that it is OK for us to see other living things as existing for our benefit. This "otherness" is all pervasive. It is so deeply ingrained that we barely notice. In our language we use animal terms as pejorative ("pig"). We have religions that reinforce the idea that Man has "dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth" (page 1 of the Bible). This "otherness" is explored brilliantly in this WWF paper from 2009 (on eco-campaigning - but the analysis applies beyond communication). These three issues - that our economics compel us to extract from nature, that short-termism only exacerbates this, and that deep down we really do believe that nature exists for us and that we are somehow not part of it but above it - cannot be ignored. Love is all we need (plus a new economic model) Here's the good news - we absolutely can do this. We can do this because we are not actually economic beings (as Rutger Bregman points out in Humankind) more big soppy and sentimental love machines. When we fall in love with something we do all we can for it. The flipside of this is that when we don't love something - or feel "other" from it - we tend to treat it badly. And that's what's happened to nature. Our in built otherness and our miserable economic system has pushed us out of love for the planet. That we can fix - with a new economic system that operates at the rhythm of and for nature, and with a new relationship that makes us part of, not distant from, nature. So how? Here's the sketchy beginnings of an answer Any approach to integrating the wellbeing of humans in the place to the health of the place must: shift the economics away from extraction and turn them to regeneration be long term in scope - 3 or 4 generations, probably 100 years or so address the identity of the humans in the place to the place - undo the "otherness" We think we can use the business to align the interests of the humans in the place with the health of the place, and that this system can be designed to create a perpetual virtuous cycle between environment and human. It's complex and adaptive - and uses brands in a completely different way to change the consumer/market driven dynamic that has plagued us for so long. So instead of brands that forge an identity between buyer and product but at the expense of planet, we design brands that first and foremost forge an identity between producer and planet which then extend to buyer. From the ecosystem out. And then instead of seeing these brands as just ideas (or worse - marketing devices) we give them real form that can encompass the humans. We turn them into place companies that belong to the people in the place, where the strength of the brand and the prosperity of the people who own that company hang on the strength of the place the brand represents. How might that work? We make a brand company for the place Chigertei. That company is co-developed and co-owned with the herders in Chigertei and the Good Growth Company. It develops a place brand for Chigertei that tells the story of the people in that place, their love for the place and what they are doing to restore the place. We make products that carry the brand and the story of Chigertei - scarves and blankets through Khunu, jumpers with Navygrey, maybe a couple of special "Chigertei" lines with friendly brands who want to do good. A percentage of the final selling price (NB NOT the wholesale price or the raw material price) of the end product is returned to the Chigertei company in the form of a licence/royalty. The result is more income for the herders but crucially income which is tied to and derived from the strength of their ongoing relationship with the place - the stronger the regeneration story the stronger the brand We believe that these place brand companies can become the vehicle that reconnects buyers (let's please stop saying "consumer") back to nature through the story of origin owned by the humans in each place. And that this shifts the pricing dynamics for herders to the other end of the chain - the stronger the regeneration story, the stronger the connection with the buyer. Brand as identity - not as a marketing gimmick. Now that's an interesting thought. #regenerative #regenerativebusiness #goodgrowth #rewilding #mongolia #sustainability #identity

Good Growth is one of 7 projects under the "Fund for Nature" which is administered through Conservation International. As part of my work on Good Growth I spent a week in Ghana with some of the Conservation International crew and a bunch of other 'pro-nature' projects. A lot to learn. Not just from the experiences of all the conservation folk but also by seeing first hand some of the stuff that was going on in Ghana. This is NGO world. Tamale, where we were based, is NGO central*: high density Land Cruisers, Graham Greene bars, people with colourful pasts and dark secrets. NGO world is not my world - but I really like being amongst so many people doing so many good things. And of course there were elephants. The effort that goes into conservation is immense - and the issues are complex, whether it's protecting sea turtles in Colombia or finding a future for the rangelands in Botswana. Making conservation sustainable is hard We were in Ghana looking at how to put in place effective 'conservation agreements' - a mechanism that binds communities to specific conservation activities in return for a package of benefits. So it might constitute an agreement not to poach in return for several valuable things for that community such as funding a school teacher for example. Getting a conservation agreement in place is a tricky thing anyways. But it's made harder because of the donor funding that goes into making such an agreement in the first place - which is finite. There's a process to conservation agreements that looks a bit like this: do a feasibility assessment design the conservation agreement and get it in place and agreed implement monitor seek financial sustainability...... This is an uncomfortable sequence. Bolting in financial sustainability later on is always going to be hard. If, like me, you're focused on how regeneration can be 'scaled' (wrong word but "done in many places" is what I mean) then replicability and viability are key factors upfront. Not later. The commodity trap The pursuit of financial sustainability normally leads to some kind of product, which needs to be "linked" to market in order to establish some kind of income certainty. And 9 times out of 10 that means some form of commodity chain.** Which is where trouble starts. Commodity markets look like big and attractive. Big yes, but good for nature they are not. Shea butter We spent a day in a community that has started a shea nut butter processing enterprise that is linked to their conservation activity. Shea butter is normally a cosmetic - but (I didn't know before) you can also eat it (apparently it's good for malaria). Shea butter is sold by people like Space NK and Lush. They sell it for a lot of $. Before we went around the plant there was a meeting with the villagers who make the butter. There was a bit of a formal discussion and then at some point one of the women who makes the butter stood up and said "we're not being paid enough". It was all a bit uncomfortable. We were told that she probably didn't fully understand the 'factory model' on which payments were based, and that she was not paid for her time, but for her output, i.e. by the kilo. But she was right. Not only are they not being paid enough, but the payment mechanism is contradictory to the conservation aim. An output based mechanism incentivises more output. Grow more shea trees, harvest more shea, produce more stuff. The shea butter process is troubling. All the hard manual work is done by women. Men seem to be either supervising or involved in the other business of the village. The end to end process of making the butter (and soaps) is all there. Growing the trees, harvesting the fruits, drying, roasting, sorting, mashing, stirring, separating, cooling, bagging. This is end to end processing. Finished product. For which they get $1 a kilo. Yet brands like SpaceNK and Lush are selling it for $26 for 120ML: $208 a kilo. Boots are selling non organic generic shea for £8/250ml: £32 a kilo. Either end that's a jaw dropping mark up. The Ghanaian shea is organic, high end. Even if you take into account logistics and packaging and branding and store rental costs. Each woman has "her" batch of nuts. So not only is there origin value coming from that particular village, but with a few tweaks you could pretty much associate finished product with a named person. All that story value is all lost though. By the time the product is boxed up all that remains is batch numbers and certification. These people deserve a lot more than a dollar - a chain designed to amplify and reinforce origin value would be a very good start. Tell their story through the product. That's not a commodity chain - that's a value chain. Production vs sustainability The introduction of a single commodity supply chain is a threat to the landscape. There's no cap on how many shea trees they plant. Without any checks or balances this could end up as a monoculture. The payment system is output based. Transactional. The more you make the more you get. So the incentive is to plant and harvest more and more. And if you're only paying a dollar they are going to need a lot more trees. This highlights a critical issue - the 'production' contract and the 'sustainability' contract are not integrated. This is a problem everywhere - the people who sign up to the conservation agreement and the people who sign up to the production agreement are not the same people. There's also too much income risk for the community. There is no commitment to buy for the long term. This is exposing a fragile community to the vagaries of single commodity supply chains. See what happened when Green and Blacks wound up in Cadburys, then Kraft..... "we've got to balance production and conservation" It's an expression I really don't like. This gets back to the fundamental issue of human disconnection from nature, the idea that nature is a resource that we can use at will and without consequence. This notion leads to my bugbear - the idea of "sustainable production" - which is massively comforting to procuring businesses. But if you stop to think about it for even a second.. It's hard to confront this, especially for the conservation organisations who rely on the donor funding that often comes from those very same procuring businesses. With money comes great power. And speaking truth to power ain't easy. (For what it's worth there's not enough confidence in conservation world in articulating the value they deliver - these people do very good things). We can't keep giving business a pass if we're going to fix the planet. Too many animals or too little grazing? Balancing production and conservation changes the lens we use. Back to Botswana who have a degraded rangeland (just as we do in Mongolia). In the same story as we have heard in many places, farmed animal numbers have grown by a lot, which has put more and more pressure on the landscape. So now there's not enough grazing for the livestock. Bush has encroached onto grasslands. To help make sure there's enough food for all the livestock a massive program of bush cutting needs to be put into place and funded. But if you look at it the other way round - not through the production lens, there's too much livestock for the grazing. We're over exploiting the landscape. That's the real problem. Value chain design needs more creativity and resource Of course a big part of the answer is in designing value chains specifically for nature. Diverse, integrated with environmental imperatives hard wired in, built on reciprocal long term commitments and not on transactional fragility. Production subordinated to nature. But these kinds of value chains are not where attention and resources are focused. Donor money goes into the landscapes, and investor money goes into brands and products, but the bit in the middle, the bit that is transformative for nature - and for value creation - gets zip. What's needed for successful value chain design is not pushing all the responsibility onto the overworked conservation people - what's needed is for finance and business to get involved. Get collaborating. Stuff I take out from all this: value chain design is the key to delivering sustainable environmental restoration. - but designing chains specifically to create value for nature is not easy. Directing the right funding - and people - at this crucial bit of the system would be transformational for nature, and us all. conservation is intrinsically valuable but a) doesn't articulate that value strongly enough (this is an emergency) and b) shouldn't be left to deal with the 'sustainable finance' part of the problem people living in fragile ecosystems need to be protected from commodity chains not pushed into dependency on them. This last one bothers me most - we can't be happy in a world where all the effort and risk earns just a single dollar on a product selling for $200. #goodgrowth #conservation #regenerativebusiness *According to Google there are 32 NGO's operating there but I'm guessing that this is an underestimate as the one that was hosting us - noe.org - is not on the list. **there's also a bit of wishful thinking on carbon offsets, but that's a whole other story

The way we design supply chains has to change - a lot It's been a while, apologies. We've been busy in Mongolia on our quest to find a way to restore nature systematically. In a way we've come full circle. When we started Good Growth we were convinced that the structure of business was at the very least problematic for nature. And now we know it's worse than that. The industrial design of super efficient supply chains is not just incompatible with nature, it destroys it. We've gone into the forces that are driving environmental degradation in the rangelands. And yes it's complicated. There are the effects of climate, the incursion of extractive industry, socio-economic and demographic changes, hearts and minds issues, difficult science. But the foundation of all the problems in the landscape is human. It's not just that we became disconnected from nature; we designed our business systems to treat nature as a resource we could exploit without consequence. We were wrong. It's a system flaw - all the 'good' things about the industrial business model we have relied on for so long, such as scale and efficiency are really not so 'good' when they penetrate, and then dominate, a landscape. So now we really do need to redesign business for nature. Single commodity supply chains wreak havoc on the landscape. There is a not-so-white lie peddled in environmental world - that there is such a thing as 'sustainable production'. It's a comforting idea for brands who operate traditional sourcing chains - they can pick and choose raw materials that are somehow 'sustainably produced'. It's nonsense. 'Sustainable production' is an oxymoron. It's the picking and choosing that causes the natural landscape to degrade. Time to spell out the reality. There is no such thing as 'sustainable production' - only 'sustainable landscapes'. It doesn't matter how certified, how organic, how carefully produced something is. If a single commodity supply chain penetrates a landscape it creates a massive environmental and economic distortion. Pineapples in Costa Rica, cotton in India, cashmere in Mongolia. The Environmental Damage In Mongolia, since the end of the Soviet era, market forces have driven goat numbers up and up. Progressively goats have become the dominant commodity in the landscape. More goats equals more money. At the same time the disappearance of alternative jobs has pushed more and more Mongolians into herding, with herder numbers estimated to have doubled from 90,000 to 180,000. Herd numbers and herd sizes are growing. But the goats eat everything. So the rangelands are being eroded and turned into desert. Larger herds don't just eat everything, they also are less mobile so congregate in one place 'like locusts'. It's a massive problem - but the root cause is the other end of the chain. The Economic Trap What's stopping the 60 to 70% reduction in goat numbers that's necessary to start bringing the rangelands back into balance? Money. More specifically income dependence on cashmere. In the 3 areas in Mongolia where we're focused the herding households are disproportionately dependent on cashmere for income. Over 170,000 hectares 75 families between them have around 5 tons of de-haired cashmere wool and another 10 tons of sheep wool, horse hair and camel wool. The cashmere is worth $500k to them, the rest $20k. Cashmere is the only game in town. The price of cashmere paid to herders doesn't change if their wool ends up in a luxury jumper selling for $1000 or a chemically coloured cheap sweater selling for a (mendaciously miraculous) $75. The only way to earn more money is to have more goats. The only way to insure against catastrophic weather events is to have more goats. The only way to protect against fickle buyers is to have more goats. Herding in Mongolia is a difficult way to make a living. Winters can be harsh, killing many animals. It costs money to send kids to school. Cashflow is always a problem - there are big gaps between paying out for livestock and earning money from sales of fibre. Herders need cash - which is why they are often at the mercy of cash buyers. They have an expression which is something like "better cash today than a higher price tomorrow". Single commodity chains create monocultures Cashmere has driven out all the diversity of value in the landscape. Healthy natural environments are diverse - yet human economic systems create monocultures. The camel, the sheep, the horsehair - all worth nothing compared to cashmere. So the number of goats keeps going up. No attempt can be made at regeneration without addressing this problem first. If we're not reducing the goat numbers we haven't got a hope of restoring nature. The only way to reduce goat numbers is to switch the herders away from an income dependence on cashmere. Their incomes need to be diverse to reflect the diversity of nature. Value needs to be diverse to sustain the diversity of nature. We need to be creating value for all of the natural materials in the landscape, not just a tiny selective bit of it. I am yet to see a sustainability program that even makes a decent attempt to address this problem. No amount of training and traceability and monitoring and capacity building is going to make any difference if we don't reverse the monoculture. "Sustainable production" has zero impact at landscape level. Millions of well looked after goats are still too many goats. Injecting a bit of green into your supply chain does not solve the problem. Unfortunately - despite all the good stuff they do - conservation programs often exacerbate the monoculture problem in the way they seek financial longevity by "linking" to (always) a commodity market - i.e. exposing the landscape to the ravages of single supply chains. It's a trap which they need to break out of - more on this shortly. And ESG - if we're being kind - just keeps score. Mostly it just points out "risks" to the current business model. The ONLY way to address this problem is to change the way supply chains act on the landscape. To reverse the picture above - create value out from and for the landscape not extract value from it. Pay more for less - in Mongolia that means pay more for fewer goats. Buy all the wool from all the animals and create diversity of value. Pay the herders upfront - shift the income risk from them to us. Link payments to herder directly to delivery of landscape stewardship. Create new value for the natural materials that are currently ignored. Long term commitment to the landscape. Diversifying value creation is crucial - and the fun bit. It means shifting product innovation into and driven from the landscape. So for us creating yak wool blankets, acoustic ceiling panels from camel wool, fertiliser pellets from - um - sheep dung. A bunch of products from one place in a value chain designed to create maximum value for that place. If we do all that we have a chance to convey place value all the way through the product value chain to the end buyer. Which would go a long way to reconnecting people back to nature - helping them to identify again with nature. One of the casualties of industrial chains is our sense of place and our sense of origin. (Those of you who were at Anthropy will know I am kind of obsessed with this - and think the world would be a much better place if all products retained the same kind of source of origin we get in wine. Come to think of it - supply chains would be a heack of a lot less destructive if they were modelled on the wine value chain which retains place value whilst delivering economy of scope). All of this adds up to brands shifting from off takers - buyers of (how they wish) "sustainable fibre" - to catalysts for regeneration. But to do that they have to change the way they buy - pay against environmental outcomes, and - crucially - collaborate with others at a landscape level. It's what we call 'collaborative landscape action'. Why does it have to be collaborative? Because there is no "sustainable production" - only "products from sustainable landscapes". And for a landscape to become sustainable all the value creation needs to be aligned to natural diversity. The opposite of a monoculture. The other thing I love about this reversal, is that it changes the role of the people who live in the landscape. No longer seen as simply "producers" they become stewards, custodians of the landscape. Regeneration requires a marriage I've come to think of successful landscape regeneration as a marriage between the people in the landscape and the brands that make stuff out of the materials in that landscape. There needs to be a reciprocal commitment from both parties to do everything they can to restore that landscape - which means the herders becoming stewards of the landscape and the brands committing - long term - to buy differently. The thing that makes the marriage work - and the bit which until now has been overlooked - is a new design of value chain. Landscape out, diverse, with place value reinforced and amplified throughout. It starts with a commitment to buy differently - but this is unbelievably hard. For a start most clothing brands have *no idea* what is really going on at the other end of the chain. Only 14% of clothing companies know even the country where their raw materials are produced or grown. That's really not OK. (Great report here). Then the big ones split their sustainability function from their procurement arm. These are two completely different worlds which desperately need to come together. A re-booted sourcing department that really is focused on sustainable landscapes would behave in a completely different way - collaborative, obsessed by value for the landscape - not from it, disdainful of certification programs that are input based, and above all paying more for hard reductions in livestock numbers. Perhaps the biggest shift would be long term commitment to place - multi-year commitments to the stewards of the landscape. No brand can do that on their own. But in aggregate they can. Roll on the revolution. Watch this space. #regenerativebusiness #goodgrowth

We forgot not just who we were, but where we were The past year or so has been like waking from a dream. Once we started building the Good Growth Company we began to realise that pretty much everything we'd been taught - about economics and brands - was wrong. Good Growth means human wellbeing integrated with the health of the planet. Living with nature, not from it. The Good Growth system requires a reordering of priorities - relegating pursuit of profit (and scale) to a supporting role in the big game, the challenge of integrating human wellbeing with the health of the planet. For far too long the system we humans have developed for ourselves - irrespective of whether it got labelled as capitalist or communist or something in between - has pursued human wellbeing in a way that is disconnected from nature. We became compelled to extract - as producers and as consumers our system is hardwired for "more" - more stuff at lower prices, more volume at lower input. The moment we viewed the world through industrial eyes - as a supply chain with raw materials at one end and value added products at the other - was the same moment we severed our relationship with nature. But we did not notice. We forgot about place We moved our work out of homes and into factories. What had been done by hand was done by machine. Pursuit of economies of scale became a game without end. Globalisation prized efficiency of supply chain (a euphemism for low cost) and cared not one jot where stuff came from. The same thing happened in the Capitalist west and the Communist east. Industrialisation severed the connection to place and recast humans as in a machine. "Under Soviet rule, weaving families...joined the masses in collectivised co-operatives, or left their profession entirely. Weaving skills were lost under pressure from Moscow to mechanise and economise" - Caroline Eden, in (the excellent) Red Sands, writing about the artisans of East Uzbekistan. Each step taking us further from places, and further from nature. Until we came to live in a world where we were fully disconnected from places to become consumers and producers. What mattered above all was the product and how much it cost. Where it came from and how it got there was subsumed in the pursuit of efficient supply chains. And brands - which used to be a symbol of origin - changed to be primarily about consumers and products, about "growth" in the economic sense. This aberration subordinates brands to nothing more than a means to a financial end, brand merely as a mechanism to drive profit. And despite having peddled this professionally for a decade or more I now have to confess that it is a corruption. Place really matters - especially if we want to restore nature Place is a powerful concept. Place binds us together. In these pandemic times many of us have been forcefully reminded that what we share is the place we live. And that our wellbeing is bound up with the wellbeing of that place. (If you want to see what a shared love of place can do to unite a community check out the Isle of Bute and what's happened since the Syrian refugees arrived. Or the work of Sergei Shubin in Cardiff on the relationship between geography and the integration of migrants.) Restoring nature - and doing so in a systematic way - requires us to revive the concept of place and put it back where it belongs. Not something to be obscured in an opaque cost-myopic supply chain but as the force that binds human communities to nature. It is - when you stop to think about it - impossible to get to any kind of sustainable way of living on this planet unless we become much more aware and connected to the specific contexts and needs of each place. Places are not the same. The natural balance in each place is not the same. What is sustainable in one place is not the same as what is sustainable in another. This simple yet utterly forgotten fact makes a nonsense out of all our attempts to create "sustainable" standards for products. You cannot standardize sustainability. Yet our industrialised selves cannot help but try. Instead of trying to integrate nature into our globalised supply chains we need to realise that we need to integrate the way we do business into nature. And that means recognising the importance of place - and the imperative to restore and enhance the health of each place. Brands as expression of origin - time for the revival The Mongolians used brands on horses. They have done hundreds of years. The symbol signified where the horse came from and who had reared it. Over centuries these symbols persisted (and still persist to this day) to communicate the relationship between the producer and place. Not an expression of product and consumer, but of producer and place. An expression of origin. We used to know where stuff came from. It used to matter. But somewhere along the line we lost our way. Across pretty much every category you can think of "origin" has got lost. In clothing it is almost impossible to find out where the fibre came from before it got to the factory. The exception to this is wine (and some food - like cheese). Wine is pretty much all about story of origin. With the exception of the mega industrial brands there is an explicit understanding that the wine comes from place X, and that there is only so much of it to be had. Scarcity and place are central. If anything wine should make much more of place - the story behind wine is one of passion between people and the place where the vines grow. The health of the place and the prospects of the winemakers are intertwined. The wine is made in a way which helps them to look after that place. It is this kind of symbiotic story that we need now to weave (literally sometimes - check out Prickly Thistle) into other products that are restorative of nature. Places, people and products - the new role for brands in the regenerative world We have written about the necessity to reintegrate humans - and human wellbeing - into the places where they live. That means tackling not just the economic incentives that drive producers to become extractors, but also the timespan for enterprises and above all the degree to which we humans identify with our natural environment. (We are wired to believe that we're not only "other" from nature but above it). Every place is different. Every place has its own story. Each of those stories weaves a rich tapestry - of the natural environment in the place, and all the wonderful life that lives in each place. Above all each story can tell of people's love for the place and what they do to make it healthy - the regenerative story. So we are now creating not just place brands, but place brand companies that can act as the vehicles of integration. Community owned, these entities own the regeneration story of the place, carrying that story through as the central pillar of the final product. The business aligns and integrates the needs of the place (restore nature) with the needs of the people in the place (wellbeing). This transforms (say) the herders in the Chigertei valley from transactional sellers of raw materials to the centre of the end product story. The place brand company earns from the final sale of product - which completely changes the pricing dynamics. The stronger the regeneration story the stronger the brand. Reconnecting products to place is the job for brands and brand strategy now - done well it will restore human relationships to nature and give us a shot at combatting climate change and species extinction. But to continue to conceive of brands as mechanisms to flog stuff with no provenance would be to perpetuate the great mistake. We in the brand world have a lot of atonement ahead of us - time to start paying. #goodgrowth #chigertei #brands #placebrands #regenerativebusiness #regenerativeeconomics

I never thought about water much But I should have been paying more attention. It's at the forefront of how we have to rewire the way we think about - and brand - resources. We've been developing brand strategy for water in a region where it's scarce (the desert) and getting scarcer. And where demand for the stuff is on an ever increasing trajectory as population grows, industry develops and domestic agriculture becomes more strategically important. Water is said to be the most important resource on the planet in this century. But we tend to take it for granted. Turn the tap, there it is. But that miracle - fresh and abundant clean water for all - is getting ever harder to deliver. Especially in the desert. Brand and water The role of a brand for water (at a country level - I'm not talking about Evian) is fascinating - the opposite of the brand-to-flog-stuff. There is a globally widespread misconception that water - and the delivery of it - is somehow a "utility". That water is a "commodity" and that what matters for a water business is unobtrusive and fault free service for all at modest and uncontroversial pricing. But in a world of 8 billion people, where most of the population growth is in hot places, coupled with climate change and energy intensive industry and agriculture that "utility" version of water won't (um) wash. Water matters - a lot. So the job for brand in water is going to be the job for brand in all sustainability. And it's groundbreaking (but also really tough). Why? Because if you're responsible for water you don't want people to consume more, you want them to use less. And if you're in water starved places - of which there are many, especially around the Gulf region and Africa - then you need people to "value" water so that they pay enough for it. Which in most water starved places is a LOT more, maybe 10X or 20X current pricing. But....for pretty much all of us in every country on the planet we are somehow attuned to the idea that water is not only abundant (it won't run out) but also that it is more or less free. It falls from the sky and comes up from the ground. We even "spend money like water". But water isn't limitless and it isn't "free" - getting clean water to people costs money and requires ever more ingenuity and investment in technology. So how do you get people to value - more - something they already have? By a very long measure we don't pay enough for water. In some of these water starved countries (Kuwait for example) water is so heavily subsidised that the revenue barely covers 8% of the cost. And if the price of something is too low then it tends to get used unsparingly. Whilst there's a lot of angst about the vast quantities of water consumer by agriculture, it's also true that per capita usage of water in hot places with low water tariffs is super high. So paying too little for water means that it gets used not as a scarce resource but as an abundant one. Walk the pavements of Riyadh or Dubai (if you can find a pavement) and you'll see cafes with water misters where in cold countries you'd see outdoor heaters. You'll see pricey water being sprayed around and instantly evaporated. In places like Qatar this leads to per capita daily consumption numbers around 500 litres per person per day. In Saudi Arabia maybe 250. In Scotland maybe 150. The target level should be closer to 110 litres per person per day (if you are building a house in the UK it has to be designed for that level of usage). This doesn't mean every Qatari is having a bath in a swimming pool every day - these numbers mask other ills such as leaky pipes in water networks as well as water leakage inside houses which were never constructed with pipework to cope with 24 hours every day of constant water pressure. But water still gets sprayed around as if it doesn't matter. If it has been piped several hundred kilometres and then desalinated that's some expensive car wash. This isn't just a public attitude - it's institutional. In Morocco Government attempts to get locals to use water sparingly are completely undermined by the liberal drenching of golf courses in the hope of attracting tourists. So the role for the national water brand is to get people - everyone - to value something they more or less take for granted. And that they believe is already freely available to them. And that they already have. That's tough. The politics of pricing Policymakers are rightly a little bit scared about charging more. Water is a fundamental and for many seen as a right, something they are entitled to. Part of life. Being asked to pay a heck of a lot more for something you kind of believe you already own can quickly lead to unrest. So raising tariffs without a lot of disquiet is an extremely delicate trick. Look a bit further and it's easy to see how water (or its scarcity) could lead to conflict between countries. Groundwater, rivers and lakes cross national boundaries. So when water starts to run out countries start wondering how they can get hold of and keep hold of more of the stuff. It is often said that the next war will be fought over water, and it is easy to see in places like Jordan or Ethiopia how water (the absence of, or the hoarding of) could lead to a lot of trouble. At a rational level we do all know that water is not limitlessly abundant. And can not be free. We know that getting clean, sustainable water to everyone must cost a lot. It requires technology and networks that wear out. Some of the technologies (such as desalination) have environmental knock on effects (pumping brine back into the ocean screws up a lot of marine life) and are - long run - unsustainable. But we just don't think about it very much. Which is where the brand comes in. Water and sustainability brands The water brand has a whole different set of objectives: to help people not just value water more (and pay more for it), but also use less of it; to feel that to save water is for collective benefit of society, somehow a duty, and to overturn our very deep rooted ideas that water is somehow limitless and free forever. This challenge for water brands is we believe where "proper" sustainability branding is headed. As we develop Good Growth, I become more and more convinced that the business of brand has lost its way. Somewhere in the last 50 years it has become unquestioned that "brands" are simply about flogging stuff, and not a mark of origin. In the world of mainstream sustainability this idea (that brands are about flogging stuff) means that sustainability is treated as yet another marketing message - just another reason to buy more stuff. (This is why there's so much focus on nonsense certification schemes and recently a bandwagon of bullshit going into traceable supply chains). But injecting a bit of green into business as usual is not *proper* sustainability. It completely ducks the real challenge for sustainability brands: get people to use less and pay more Industrialised food is way too cheap (in price) and way too costly (to the planet). Fast fashion ravages the environment whilst flogging billions of throwaway t-shirts for pennies. But you will not see food brands saying food is too cheap, nor fashion brands saying that we really don't need 2 billion T-shirts a year (each requiring 766 gallons of water to make BTW) and priced in the single digit dollars. The language of brands in conventional "flog stuff" mode just won't allow for "use less and pay more" messaging. Which is why the sustainability brands of the near future will be incredibly disruptive - overturning pretty much every convention in brand world, lifting the lid on origin, where stuff comes from and how it gets to you, above all exposing the true cost of the product you buy. So I encourage you to think more about water - its value, its scarcity - even as you look out of the window and see it fall from the sky. Because how you get everyone everywhere to treat water as if it were money, to value it for its scarcity, is the kind of challenge that every serious sustainability brand is going to encounter. If brands are going to be a good thing - and not a relic of destructive rampant consumerism - this is the trick they have to learn. We have a long way to go. #goodgrowth #nwc #water #sustainability #brands

The pursuit of Silver Bullets and an obsession with standards are not helping with climate "What's the single most effective thing I can do to fight climate change?" This simple question was asked as we were planning, in our little village in Somerset, how we could collectively get together to make sure that the natural environment in this place was as enduringly healthy as possible, and that individually and together we were doing all we could to tread more lightly upon this earth. This effort has tapped into a wealth of enthusiasm to "DO SOMETHING" which seems to pervade every generation in the village. The urge to do that 'something' collectively, together, is a welcome legacy of the pandemic, during which we managed to do ourselves proud as a community. It felt good, we like doing things together, especially good things. But what things? What should we do? What should I do? The potential answers to this question - what's the single most effective thing I can do - are pretty much always (or should be) "it depends". But "it depends" is not clear cut. And boy do we like clear cut. Which is why the world of climate and sustainability suffers from excessive amounts of absolutism: we'd much prefer to seek out some climate change silver bullets: stop eating meat; switch all cars to electric; stick up millions of wind turbines*. Save the Silver Bullet Ben de Haldevang is a clever chap with lots of real world experience of trying to make transformations happen. His world of transformation mostly resides inside corporates, or more often when a couple of corporates are getting married or M&A'd. There is a "transformation" industry that loves nothing more than a framework and a process. A set of tools that can be applied anywhere and everywhere. But Ben has a written a book, Save the Silver Bullet, that is a compelling case for "it depends" being the right answer in any transformation. And with that to recognise that the context, the starting point, the framing circumstances, all come together to make a unique blend of challenges that every and any program manager needs to pay a lot of attention to, before deciding what the play looks like. You cannot know - a priori - what the best thing to do is. There is no simple, silver bullet answer. Read his book. It depends. Break out the livestream and the selfies - it's COP time. Whisper it quietly but COP has become a bit embarrassing. Not the proper COP full of big cheeses making pledges, but the army of COP groupies that have headed up to Glasgow to make their noise and to do their Ted Talks and to pronounce. The fringe COP. It's like Glastonbury met Davos for the TikTok age. My timeline is chock-a-block with the selfies and the livestreams of all the people who have decided to go up there, get on their soapbox, and to TELL US ALL WHAT TO DO. They are (for the most part) lovely and smart people who mistakenly have persuaded themselves that standing on a platform and exhorting everyone else to do things is a good use of their time. It isn't. I wish they'd use their collective energy and talent more productively. The time for platforms and soapboxes is over. It is super important that the politicos do their bit and sign their pledges and press hard on the legislative accelerator. Optimistic signs so far. But it is hard. We should leave them alone. An army of well meaning people banging their metaphorical drums we do not need. It's not simple and it's not standard As we've got further into Good Growth and setting up regeneration programs in different places, we have become acutely aware of the massive gulf between the pronouncements of this crowd and what is actually needed on the ground. Every place is different. What is needed in one place is not the same as what is needed in another. There are no simple solutions. It depends. But this version of sustainability - the one that has to adapt to circumstance, that eschews cookie cutter approaches, does not fit in a world that loves simplicity and standards and frameworks. In a world that loves a silver bullet. The sustainability industry (and it is fast becoming an industry) loves frameworks and standards. Convinced that we have to "make business greener". That the answer lies in "transforming" our current ways of doing business. That the power of business can cure all this. I used to believe the same, even made my living from it for a long time. But we've got it all wrong - we need a root and branch reset, not a bit of transformation. Crowbarring sustainability into the way we run business and finance is not going to work - business and finance thrives on standardisation, depends on standardisation. Accounting can be standardised all over the world. But you cannot standardise nature. Which is why ESG is so pointless. Which is why sustainability standards certification schemes are so worthless. Which is why our obsession with TELLING PEOPLE WHAT TO DO is so damaging. (Please, please someone just shut TED off until we've fixed the problems.) What we are trying to do in Good Growth is the opposite - to redesign business and finance to fit into nature. And that means we cannot standardise, we cannot silver bullet, we cannot "keep it simple". It depends. What is right for me is not what's right for you. My route to eliminating my impact on the planet is not the same as yours. What's right for the nature in this corner of Somerset is not the same as Somuncura in Patagonia is not the same as Khanghai in Mongolia is not the same as the Norfolk Coast is not the same as Lyme Bay etc etc etc. It depends. Always. #bendehaldevang #regenerativebusiness #goodgrowth #cop26 *everything in sustainability is a trade off and has a consequence. It always depends. Wind turbines use balsa wood in their sails. There isn't enough balsa wood. So it is being grown unsustainably to satisfy demand for wind turbines. Hooved animals are critical for biodiversity. When artificial meat companies make it their mission to "wipe the cow off the face of the earth" they are proposing a hyper-simplistic approach with pretty devastating consequences for the planet. Electric cars are better than others but that doesn't make them sustainable - for starters they require some rare metals to work. If everyone switched to an electric car (as opposed to say reducing overall journeys, leveraging different ways of moving around and radically reducing the number of cars on the road) we'd be swapping one form of unsustainable for another. Unfortunately lithium - which is what the batteries need (for now - lithium is the 8 track stereo of eco-tech) - is to be found in some pretty lovely places (as well as some pretty grim ones), which means that "in order to hit our sustainability targets" many of those lovely places now need to be dug up to sate the world's demands for battery cars.

A Good day for Good Growth We're thrilled that Kering and Conservation International's "Regenerative Fund for Nature" has chosen to support our model and our work in Mongolia. Today (3rd September 21) in Marseille, Kering announced the 7 projects the fund has chosen to support. It's a great honour for us especially as we know that in total the fund received 73 applications from 17 countries. It is also very pioneering for the Fund to support a new kind of enterprise such as Good Growth - a willingness and enthusiasm to break the mould is what we all need if we're going to restore nature. "A completely new paradigm" Together with our partners AVSF and WCS we proposed the development and rollout of a "regenerative toolkit" that brings together ecosystem science and community partnership under a unique “place-based” model. The project builds on the already successful work of our partners with herders in Mongolia’s South Gobi and Arkhangai. By integrating ecosystem regeneration, community partnership and product brands we create a unified system where every aspect is creating value for and from regeneration. Critical to the success of the model are the strong purpose driven brands who work with us to redesign the chains out from each place to be on a regenerative path from the get-go: navygrey and Khunu initially but more joining the fold soon. The teams at Kering and CI have been great at interrogating and getting behind this new model - we intend to make it replicable (so it can work in any ecosystem) and open to all. "The project was selected as it not only puts forth a completely new paradigm for fashion supply chains (based on regenerating a specific ‘place’), but also pairs this with rigorous rangeland monitoring and creating economic value for herding communities." We are convinced that to integrate business with the restoration of nature we have to redesign business completely. That means designing for place, and working with each place to create long term value for regeneration. The support of the fund helps us to develop and demonstrate the model in different ecosystems in Mongolia - we'll report all progress here. Good company It's also humbling to see the other projects that were selected. The full portfolio is here: The Good Growth Company (GGC): developing a toolkit that brings together ecosystem science and community partnership to support new approaches to building sustainable supply chains and sustainable grazing practices. The project builds on the work of its partnership with cashmere goat herders in Mongolia and covers 342,000 hectares of land. Organic Cotton Accelerator (OCA): transitioning conventional cotton farmers to regenerative as well as maximizing the adoption of regenerative practices by organic producers in India. An important part of OCA’s model helps to de-risk change on the ground for farmers through targeted payments. The project engages 50,000 smallholder farmers covering over 53,500 hectares of land. Fundación Solidaridad Latinoamericana: working with Creole and indigenous smallholder cattle producers in the Gran Chaco biome in Argentina to improve sustainable management of grazing lands while also restoring native forests and vegetation. The project covers 120,0000 hectares of land with the objective to improve 250 smallholder families' livelihoods. Fundación Global Nature: working with goat shepherds in Spain to restore traditional grazing systems and regenerate the environment covering 17,000 hectares. Initially, the program will focus on three regions where the restoration and conservation of high biodiversity value areas, including wetlands, is essential. The project will support producers in holistic grazing and biodiversity measurement tools. Additionally, funds will be made directly available to the most vulnerable farmers through a micro-grant program supported by the project. Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and The Wildlife-Friendly Enterprise Network (WFEN): bringing the power of regenerative grazing and holistic management approaches together with wildlife-friendly practices to enable co-existence with wildlife with sheep wool production in Patagonia. The project will cover 300,000 hectares of land across many different farms. Epiterre: focusing on increasing plant diversity in order to create positive ecological and social outcomes. The project targets extensive pasture-based systems covering 200 hectares of land in Southwestern France and features an innovative mechanism for payment for ecosystem services, with direct payments to small-scale producers. Conservation South Africa: aiming to enable 9 communal grazing associations, with approximately 280 people, to implement regenerative agricultural practices in the irreplaceable biodiversity of the Maluti Drakensberg Mountains on 11,000 hectares of land. The project will help restore and protect critical biodiversity, improve overall ecosystem function and enhance livelihood opportunities through improved market access to the wool industry in South Africa. It is also focused on empowering women who predominantly farm sheep with the potential for wool production, and yet are underrepresented in associations, trainings, and auctions. Link to the Regenerative Fund Link to CI/Kering press release Link to projects on a page #goodgrowth #regenerativebusiness #kering #conservationinternational #navygrey #khunu #wcs #avsf

Regenerative businesses don't have 'supply chains' Not in the conventional sense at least. As we start making our first products through Good Growth we've come to focus on what we really mean by "ecosystem out". A conventional supply chain sees an ecosystem - a place - at best as a "source of raw material". The design process starts at the other end of the chain, say in a studio in Milan, where the decision is made to make a wonderful cashmere cardy in beautiful colours. Then the search begins for the softest, whitest fine cashmere down. The supply chain takes that fine cashmere from the place, pays the market price (it makes no difference at all to the herder where their fibre ends up - they'll get paid the same), leaves everything else and moves on. They may come back next year, they may not. It depends on what happens in Milan. So....if we want to restore nature to places, to create value for regeneration, we really can't do this outside-in process. It is intrinsically extractive and wasteful. Instead we have to design for place, work with the natural balance (or better said the regenerative balance) within each place and create value for that balance. I love this part of Good Growth - it feels liberating to relocate design's position in the system from its currently - literally - dislocated position and instead put it into the ecosystem. The whole yak - and the goats, the camels, and the sheep The problem with the conventional supply chain is that it distorts nature - if the only thing that is valued in a place is cashmere wool, but the price is static irrespective of end product, then the only way the herders can increase income is by "raising output" i.e. having more goats. In some of the places we are working 90-95% of income comes from one commodity. Everything else has no financial value. The impact on the environment is devastating. So instead of focusing on just one 'commodity' we seek to work with everything there is in a place. If we can create value (financial and non-financial) for everything in the place then the pressure for herders to raise goats numbers falls away. The challenge becomes "what can we make with this?" Right now we have 270 KG of coarse yak fibre from one village in the Khangai Mountains to play with. This is the guard hair that is normally chucked away in the process of looking for the fine down. We know what we can make with superfine fibre, but the coarse stuff presents a big playground. Eco-wadding, big woven blankets, mix it with other fibres? For designers and textile innovators this is exciting. Whatever we make - however it gets sold - we will have created a financial return for the herders that wasn't there before. If we can make something place-identified and iconic (watch this space) then maybe we can make something very special for each place. The first products will be out in the world at the end of this year. But it goes further than that. The stories of regeneration and the origin of materials are in themselves valuable. So we're not just making place identified products, we're also establishing 'place brand companies' in each place that allow us to form a joint venture with the community in each place. A percentage of the selling price of each product gets returned to each place brand company - which transforms both the position of the herders in the system (from invisible providers of 'raw materials' to centre of the story) and their incomes. Relocating primary processing from monopoly (and monopsony) nodes in the system back into communities also generates new opportunities for livelihoods in each place. And beyond that....we're convinced there are even more ways to generate value for place, not just through products but through the telling of the stories themselves, through experience and relationships. Part of the investment thesis for the regeneration fund we are building is in these additional value add areas. And now for the camels Initially we are taking this design-for-place approach in a handful of places in Mongolia and Patagonia, focusing mostly on working with animal fibres spanning sheep, yaks, goats and guanacos. We've been asked to look at a new place for us, a big place, which doesn't offer a huge amount of opportunity for people needing to live there. Yet if the country is to avoid excessive migration from rural communities into the cities these kinds of places need to be attractive places to live and work. But one thing it does have is camels. Lots and lots of beautiful red Bactrian camels. So....in the next few weeks our designers and creators will be working out what we can do with the camel hair to create value for regeneration of that place. We'll ask the ecologists to advise on what other animals are critical to the ecosystem (there are goats and sheep too) and to start moving towards a view of what would be good to make. Once we have that (at least roughly - it will get more precise over time, this regeneration business is a long term endeavour) we can work out what the processing chain might look like, and what opportunities we have to locate small scale processing facilities in the place. (We have written elsewhere about how unhelpful "economies of scale" are when trying to regenerate). And if I get half a chance we will make those small scale processing facilities the eco-envy of the fibre world. Water and chemical free washing. We're pretty sure we can do it. A by product of this will be the creation of jobs in the place that just aren't there today - best of all jobs that create value for the restoration of nature in that place. None of this can happen without designing for place - it is, I am sure, one of the fundamentals of a regenerative business. A small change - but one that is almost impossible for a conventional product business to pull off. And of course it will manifest itself in place-identified product brands which will feel very different from the mass brands we are used to. Places. The foundation of regenerative business. #goodgrowth #regenerativebusiness #camels #yaks #productdesign #placebasedbusiness