9 Principles for Bank of Nature
A path to endgame sustainability
As we go through the design phase of Bank of Nature and engage with more transdisciplinary thinkers, we’ve developed nine principles that we hope will guide us to launch and beyond toward endgame sustainability.
Endgame sustainability, by the way, is the term we’ve adopted to capture not just climate security, but also all planet-scale crises made worse by human enterprise, such as security for human dignity and non-human vitality.
Your input is welcome.
Give nature agency
Establish Nature as “the Commons” – an independent proxy for nature and legally recognized peer to international governments and industries.
Restructure the economy
Include nature as a substantive factor in economic theory and practice and, through a proxy, name it as the planet-scale agent responsible for climate and future security.
Engage climate security heroes
Partner with the financial organizations that have both the mission and scale to fully engage in the stewardship of endgame sustainability.
Pay nature rent
Make good on what we owe for the extraction from nature to make our society and move towards the true costs of our society by internalizing externalities.
Embrace money as a tool
Acknowledge that money and capitalism will be protected through a climate-changed future, but that money can be a unifying tool for change at scale.
Make more nature
Invest directly in nature building, innovation, detoxification, capacity and reversing “overshoot” along with improved equity for humans and non-humans.
Protect future generations
Enforce existing intergenerational fiduciary duties responsibilities and build new law that gives future generations a legal foothold in today’s decision making.
Make dignity matter
Imagine a new human excellence narrative that gives future generations a chance to take us forward and embraces culturally relevant dignity as a metric for humans and non-humans.
Define endgame sustainability
Imagine a world made sustainable and initiate the necessary moves to realize that time when humanity and nature thrive and the climate challenge is resolved.
Thank you for synthesizing what I imagine is a multi-year set of experiences in what a Bank of Nature might look like.
Wondering how this might resonate from diverse perspectives, I shared this in several boots on the ground communities. Mostly, with the admittedly limited engagement for virtual communities, it did.
That said, I wonder at the sense that this came out of whole cloth in a specific moment from a specific (or two) individual (s). I sense that a bank operating at the scale of nature should have a larger context.
Seven generations?
One remedy, note this is a living document that will continue to grow and iterate through lived experience. This leaves the door open for future understanding of our ability to serve as stewards for nature.
I am conscious of a conservative audience looking for some certainty in an uncertain world, but this is a radical idea that should reflect the greater truth of respectful, responsive interventions.
I also wonder at giving your ideas context with a preamble that recognizes history (even Ian’s personal history with Sustain Cape Cod would help). Or, more broadly, an understanding of the contributions from our indigenous communities regarding nature’s agency.
And, the role of law to hold context for finance. — 7 countries have laws to pave the way for a nature w/ agency approach, notably Ecuador, New Zealand, and even the US.
Might this bigger context recognize the many elements that went into this thoughtful set of principles?
Nice principles, but the earth can still be out voted, or out maneuvered. It will still take a transformation of people, a revolution or sorts to create the 'climate' and the infrastructure for the will power to structurally cohere and implement change.