Earth Month Is Important, But What We Need Is A Great Awakening | The Compass (April 2024)
The first Earth Month commemoration was more than 50 years ago, in 1970. At the time, it was consequential – a meaningful acknowledgement of the beautiful planet we inhabit and the criticality of protecting it.
As a firm, we’re relentlessly passionate and dedicated to the cause of healing and restoring our earth’s natural systems. So as one could imagine, we respect the sentiment – and many of the well-intended activities and engagements – around Earth Month.
That said, we do fear there’s a danger of performative gestures and green-washing this time of year. And even those organizations with the best intentions and a desire to make changes will often only commit to small, narrow sustainability pledges.
But over the last 50+ years, we’ve seen a profound transformation between humans’ relationship with our natural world. We’ve reached a rapid level of prosperity and population that continues to accelerate, and our human behaviors are now clearly discernible and reverberating at the Earth system level in all parts of the global environment – oceans, coastal zone, freshwater, atmosphere, land, and our living biosphere.
So while much of our society's environmental efforts have been about trying to keep things static and stable by doing things "better" – incrementalism is no longer a luxury we can afford. We can’t assume that our planet will provide us with a never-ending supply of habitable resources.
It’s time to usher in a new era – a Great Awakening from our species sleepwalking through the extractive and exploitative practices and behaviors that have led to nearly every corner of our home planet being negatively impacted. One-off pledges and limited SDG goals are insufficient. We must fundamentally replace and redesign the incumbent systems that perpetuate current patterns, practices, and behaviors with new business models and structures built with a partnership with earth at their core. We must focus our attention on the interconnectedness of everything we produce, process, transport, and consume – to minimize the use of energy and materials and limit waste throughout the lifecycle.
This will be hard, trying work -- but also one that represents a $100 trillion market opportunity, and the chance to heal and honor our Earth in a way that really counts.
This is the work that underpins our mission and purpose at Third Nature, and we’re excited to be a part of this movement.
With gratitude,
Jason W. Ingle
Founder & Managing Partner
E hello@thirdnatureinvestments.com
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What We’re Reading
Why impact investors are embracing systems change
MIT SLOAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
Just a few decades ago, impact investing existed mainly on the fringes. Now it's a global market estimated at $30.3 trillion, and it isn’t unusual for investors to want to invest in companies that prioritize making progress on environment, social, or governance issues. But making isolated, company-by-company investments without looking at the broader context will make it a struggle to create lasting change. What’s needed is a more systems-based orientation – which has been coined “systemic investing” – a new approach that embraces systems transformation, deploys capital with a broader intent, and replaces a project-by-project mentality with new methodologies, structures, capabilities, and decision-making frameworks.
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Can we protect and profit from the oceans?
VOX
There’s a lot of money to be made in exploiting the ocean in the short term. But thinking solely of short-term profit will cost us more down the line, even in purely economic terms. The ocean economy — encompassing industries like fishing, maritime shipping, and oil drilling — generates nearly $3 trillion of global GDP every year, and its worth is estimated at $24 trillion. Its stability depends on making conservation a priority now, rather than extracting more from the ocean than it can bear.
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Detergent pods are only the start of clothing’s microplastic pollution problem
GRIST
The Pods Are Plastic bill faces uncertain prospects in the New York City Council. If it does pass, however, it will only go a short way toward mitigating laundry-related microplastic pollution. Research suggests that billions of plastic microfibers shear off of our clothing every day — when we wear them, when we wash and dry them. And even more microplastics are released upstream, when clothes are manufactured.
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Impact VC Shouldn’t Get Swept Into the ESG Brouhaha
INSTITUTIONAL INVESTOR
There is an outdated misperception that the outcome of impact funds is concessionary, meaning that financial returns take a back seat to environmental or social impact. But in fact, funds designed to solve some of society’s problems can produce returns comparable to non-impact funds and they can lower risks.
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Can we engineer our way out of the climate crisis?
THE NEW YORK TIMES
As the scale and urgency of the climate crisis has crystallized, “people have woken up and are looking to see if there’s any miraculous, deus ex machina that can help,” said Al Gore, the former vice president. Since the dawn of the industrial age, humans have pumped huge volumes of heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere in pursuit of industry and advancement. It amounted to a remaking of the planet’s delicately balanced atmosphere and biosphere that today has transformed the world, intensifying heat, worsening droughts and storms and threatening human progress.
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Third Nature News
Reflections From the Inaugural Systemic Investing Summit
JASON W. INGLE
I recently had the privilege of participating in the inaugural Systemic Investing Summit. In this burgeoning field, we recognize that systemic investing offers a more potent approach to impact investing in protecting human and natural systems, because we know that trying to make progress through narrow, isolated, or incremental moves isn’t enough. Time is of the essence, and we must embrace a more comprehensive approach for transformative change.
For my reflections and takeaways about the summit and how I think systemic investing will be successful moving forward, read my latest article here.
Our Companies in the News
Startup set to revolutionize consumer goods with plastic packaging alternative — here's what it's made of
THE COOL DOWN
Seaweed packaging startup Sway is making a splash in the fight against plastic pollution. This California-based company has launched the world's first scalable alternative to single-use plastics, using an unlikely hero: seaweed. Sway is tackling a tremendous problem. Retail bags and polybags used for shipping make up a whopping 30% of single-use plastics. These pesky plastics sit in landfills for years, emitting methane as they decompose, which causes temperatures to rise and hurts those with compromised respiratory systems.
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The problem with your sneakers? They’re built to last too long.
THE WASHINGTON POST
Though shoe brands have taken strides toward sustainability, from offsetting carbon emissions to swapping out materials in the upper sections of shoes, they have largely overlooked soles. Now a slew of companies are starting to focus underfoot by developing new plant-based soles that won’t leave plastics behind when they degrade. Bogle, who spent eight years working in product development at a footwear company, is now working on an outsole from plant byproducts, while Keel Labs, a sustainable materials company started by two fashion design students, is making soles out of seaweed-based fiber.
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Rite Aid Partners with Copia to Donate Surplus Food to California Nonprofits
RETAIL TOUCHPOINTS
Americans discard nearly 120 billion pounds of food every year — approximately 40% of the country’s food supply. Rite Aid is tackling this food waste issue head-on by partnering with Copia, a technology-enabled service that helps manage food surplus redistribution. The pharmacy retailer will use Copia’s platform to track inventory, prove compliance and record impact. The platform will then match Rite Aid with California-area nonprofit organizations focused on combating food insecurity so that surplus food is donated where it’s most needed.
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