Nature on the Board of Directors — Living Between Worlds 5.9

Hello everybody, I'm Gil Friend and this is Living between Worlds for September 2024. Really glad to have you all here. We opened with that because I've been invited to do a keynote at Climate Week next week in New York City for a day long show being put on by Capgemini, the French consultancy on business to planet. And this is the theme they've asked me to address. You saw Apple do a beautifully creative and kind of fanciful interpretation of Mother Nature in the boardroom, but the question is, what if Mother Nature, what if nature, what if Living World were on the board of directors of companies, governments, cities, you name the institution, what if we change the way that we think about this issue? And so what I'd like to do today, this is kind of a, you know, trying out a Broadway show in Philadelphia before it go live, goes live on Broadway. My presentation will be a few blocks west of Broadway, but I like the metaphor. So I want to do a dry run with you today kind of walk, you know, do the presentation live with you. Not to get feedback so much as to try it out and see how it lands with you, what it provokes for you, and invite you into a breakout conversation about some specific questions that we have for you that'll help enrich the conversation for us and hopefully for you and the networks that you're involved in. So there's the question on the table. I, I usually focus on the business case for sustainability. For the last 30 years, I've been working with companies about, excuse me, how do you use the commitment of sustainability to drive innovation and profit and brand, brand value and customer and employee allegiance and all the traditional business measures. But I'd like to focus on something more fundamental today. We've made enormous progress in the last 30 years of sustainable business initiatives. I've contributed in a small way with my team at Natural Logic as an early and fervent advocate for the business case for sustainability, with clients ranging from HP and Levi's to Odwalla and Steelcase, and the words of one of our clients generating massive value from this perspective. But we're headed for trouble. And you all know this. You know the, the, the climate crisis is around us. Flooding in Italy, oceans rising, soil depletion, biodiversity degradation. A future with hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people on the move because of climate disruption. You all know this. That's why we're here at Climate. But you know, it's a time for asking different questions than we've been asking because, you know, because we're the Progress isn't enough by any means. So instead of the usual questions that businesses ask of how do we maximize return to shareholders? Or maybe a little better, how do we maximize return to shareholders while doing the least damage to the environment? Or how do we maximize return to shareholders by being more responsible stewards, all in the context of growing faster, extracting faster, building higher sea walls, changing without change. What if we asked a different question? What if we asked what might it be like if we did business and if we did everything else, as though we actually belonged to the living world? Bruno Latour provoked this question for me in his wonderful little book called down to Earth, speculating that we could consider ourselves as Terrans, residents of the planet Terra, with all the other terrestrial creatures, us among them, all not at the top of the pyramid, but in the mix. Bucky Fuller, who, as many of you know inspired me and Jane 52 years ago, used to offer as a thought experiment, hold, hold a Imagine holding a ball the size of a basketball in your hands. That's polished stainless steel. Can you visualize that the surface of that stainless steel ball is rougher than the surface of this planet to scale? If you hold that ball in your hand and breathe on it and fog it with your breath, that film of water vapor is thicker than the biosphere, the zone in which all life lives and in which everything we value comes from. So what might it be like if we did business with that in mind? Bucky used to ask if the fate of the universe depended on how I am and what I do, how would I be and what would I do? What's interesting to me, as I've thought about this presentation, is that we've done this. We've done this for thousands of years, if not tens of thousand years, in traditional or what we call indigenous or Aboriginal cultures around the world. We see it present today in such moves as Ecuador and New Zealand giving legal standing to rivers that can stand in court and in legislatures and hold legal force. We see this with first nations in California incorporating traditional ecological knowledge into their governance practices. We see this with the Aboriginal Australian Dreamtime Law, which is a complex and multifaceted systems of beliefs and practices and laws and stories that guide many aspects of traditional Aboriginal life and its interface with the industrial Western Australian culture. We see it evoked in Starhawk's book the Fifth, the Fifth sacred Thing in which designated people stand for redwood and wolf and eagle and soil and river in council in the decision making bodies that the community ran itself with. We see a perspective. We see practices in traditional societies and also something embedded in the culture of these societies, not just in the techniques and the protocols. And, you know, even in our more familiar text, we see and hinted at in Deuteronomy, where we're told, therefore choose life so that you and your seed may live. So what could we do? What could we do to mobilize and manage and measure and manifest that sense of belonging? How could you, as a director, as an executive, as a manager, as an employee, as a customer, as a supplier, an investor, a regulator, how could you know that that was happening and that it was happening? Well, some of the elements are straightforward operations that don't waste materials and energy or ecological or human potential management systems that disclose reality and disclose risk. An organizational cult, organizational culture that brings everyone to the same page. So it's not just about what we could do, but also how we could be not just the specific practices that we undertake, but the pervasive background, the culture, the norms, the story. What do we care about? How, where do we orient ourselves to? What's the premise that we stand in? How do we engender a premise that we're. That we are part of a living world to be lived with and danced with? Not a dead. Not a dead warehouse that's filled with dead resources waiting to be extracted and used and thrown somewhere. Gia Bastida, Mexican Chilean climate activist and member of the indigenous Otomie Toltec nation, asked at the UN a few years ago, when did it become a movement to take care of each other and the earth? That should just be our culture. We know this as human beings. We don't seem to know it as well in our organizations, and it's a great mystery to ponder. It's hard enough to think about changing practices. How do norms change? How do cultures shift? We've all of us seen this in our lives, in matters as maybe trivial. Trivial, if you would, of smoking being normal and to smoking being rare and aberrant. When I was a kid, it was considered cool to be able to drive while drunk and hold your liquor. That's, you know, it's. It's. It's social anathema now. But, you know, it strikes me that there's the mystery of how cultures change, but there's also the very practical measure of it goes both ways. Changing culture changes practices. Changing practices change cultures. Aristotle reportedly said something a couple of thousand years ago, approximately like. This is not the exact quote, of course, because no one reported him, but we are what we repeatedly do. What we do shifts who we are what we think, what we believe in, and where we stand when we think about the role of a board. You know, the phrase that comes to mind is fiduciary duty. But fiduciary duty does not equal maximize profit. It does not equal maximize return to shareholders. The word fiduciary has nothing to do with money. It has to do with trust. Trust and care for those you represent. It's a fundamental legal principle in this country and in most others. Even stronger in other countries than in the United States. Fiduciaries have the obligation for the consideration of all relevant information. Do our boards do that today? They have the duty to reasonably inform themselves of alternatives. Do they do that today? Do you do that today? What we see instead, I would say, is a willful blindness to relevant information as well as willful disregard of consequences and possibilities. Sounds to me like right on the edge of dereliction of fiduciary duty, which is one of the biggest risks that any board member can face. When I was CSO for the city of Palo Alto, every staff memo that went to the city council carried a paragraph at the end summarizing the potential financial and resources impact of the proposed action. I proposed that we add a paragraph stating the potential climate impact of every action to at least pierce the blindness, to at least have everyone thinking about climate impact at every turn. The city didn't adopt that yet, but we're seeing that kind of move is one that many boards could make to say at least. At least ask the question. At least think about it. At least presence it. So my question for you is, what might you do to bring fiduciary duty, the fiduciary duty of belonging to the living world, belonging to nature, to mind and to life in every moment of the life of your organization. I've given you. I've given you a lot to chew on here. Some of these steps won't be easy. On the other hand, easy and hard are opinions. They're opinions that stop some people and inspire other people. So there'll be more talk about these ideas today than in the work you're doing with Capgemini and with the Net Positive Initiative. But now let me hand it back to Bill Wheel of Climate Voice, who will offer one clear, specific step in this direction that you can take right now. So let me ask you, what did that provoke for you? Please raise your hand if you'd like to be called on. Shell, Please go ahead. Okay. I really liked what you said near the end, Gil. What we do shifts who we are, and then you Went on to talk about how it shifts, what we think, blah, blah, blah. I thought that was very, very strong. I think if you are beta testing this before your talk, you might want to look at how you're using and not using the slides. I don't think, first of all, some of them came out too far to the left on my screen, so I could only. Shell. Let me. Let me interrupt you there. This is. The slides aren't done. Slides are placeholders. You'll have graphics. It won't be on zoom. It's gonna be a live presentation on screen. Okay, great. None of the technical concerns there. So I'm asking you not for a. For a critique of the presentation, although I'm happy to hear that offline if you'd like. But here in this discussion, I'd like to hear what happened in you as you listen to this. Well, what happened for me is that it just reinforced a speech that I gave on Monday to the New York Public Library, which had some of the same themes in it. It was focused more on how business could actually profit by doing the right thing. But it definitely. It actually included the term the earth is your fiduciary. Okay, cool. Thank you, Philip. What came up in me was the sense that when I think of myself, a person, as a person, then all of the insight we have about culture and norms and the impact of our behavior and all this seems fully relevant. But when I think about myself as a person, as a board member, as a director, I'm not really a full person anymore. I'm a person constrained by the explicit terms of the agreements I have with my shareholders. And I am now just a sort of peculiar transistor within a larger system, and I have limited inputs and outputs that I can do. And so it took my head to what. Where are those constraints that are limiting my ability to be a full human as a representative on a board? And seems like the explicit terms of the agreements with shareholders is really what underlies the sense of what fiduciary means in an operational sense for me. Thank you for pointing that out. Yeah. The agreement with shareholders is key. There's a lot that's assumed there, a lot that's taken for granted there, and some that is shifting. Apple, notably, is one of a very small list of companies that told Wall street, we're not going to dance to the quarterly returns game anymore. We're playing a longer game. Apple, Jones language, Sal and a number of others said that. So the terms of the relation to shareholders can maybe be shifted. Certainly an area for us to look at more. George. And then Alan. Yeah, I dropped two references that came up when you were speaking in the chat. One is in Nupiac values from Gary Snyder, Inuit people, and how a poster on, on the wall of a classroom that he observed probably back in the early 1990s or late 1980s. And the other is an article that just came out today from Cory Doctorow on shareholder supremacy, sort of the history, little thumbnail history of shareholder supremacy. And against that I've got a, a piece that I've been working on for a while. Companies that have pledged, as in the Apple video, to go to net zero, and some of them are, are 20. We pledged by 2025 to do this. And so I have to go back and look and see whether they actually have done that. Very few have. Yeah. And, and you know, for me, the, the biggest example is interface. And it's, it's odd to me that that hasn't come up. That doesn't come up as much as it should. But there are companies that are trying to do this stuff, and to have examples of companies that have done it or have fallen short might be useful in the talk. Thank you, Alan. And then Herb. Hello, everyone. Again. You pose the question, so where does this leave you, this discussion? Or what do I feel? It was so on the point of exactly what I was feeling, having just been in the encampment at the University of Michigan of the Palestinians, saying to the regents, the board of regents, that fiduciary involves moral questions as well as economic questions, and the regions would not hear it. They would not talk to the citizens, which you want to say, students in some sense are shareholders in the corporation of which the regents are the directors. But it was, it was very refreshing that you took fiduciary and you made it into a framework of trust, more than a framework of money. Yeah. Love about money, let me say, Alan, I, I didn't do that. Wikipedia did that. Investopedia did that. The Latin language did that. That's there. Yeah. In the meaning of the word. It's the meaning of the word. In law, the application tends to focus more on the money. Yeah. Because what. It's what fiduciary duty is saying and saying, being responsible to the cares of the people that you are representing. If their cares, if you're share back to Philip's point, if your shareholders cares are only maximal return on investment in the near term in financial terms, well, that's your agreement with them. If that agreement about what people care about is broadened and expanded, as we're seeing happening in law and in culture and in regulation and in investment protocols, then that meaning starts to shift. Alan, thank you. Let's go to Herb and then Bob. Thanks. What came up for me, a couple things. One is I guess a mix of emotions and feelings because the first thing was that along with a friend of mine and I, we were able to get our county in Maryland to declare the first climate emergency in the US in 2017. And I immediately followed up with a proposal that every major piece of legislation have a climate test, as you suggested in Palo Alto. And it took me five years of efforts to get our county council to agree to do that, notwithstanding the fact that the resolution declaring the emergency talked about our moral responsibility and all these wonderful words and terms. But also, I hate to say it, the some of the, the part of the reason it took five years is that the climate groups we worked with, that I worked with, weren't all that interested in it for whatever reasons or so forth. So it just sort of in my mind is both good news and bad news. It is in place now. It is being used. And the second point I wanted to make, and I don't know if this is still true, but I had the opportunity to have a one on one conversation after a speech by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse from Rhode Island a couple of years ago. And one of the things he was talking about was his frustration with companies like Apple that have all this great PR and in fact maybe doing good things as the video indicated. But when it comes to the behind the scenes politicking and raising money that they often support tax cuts and Republicans and people who are in the bigger picture, you know, doing a lot more against climate than their own individual corporate efforts are doing for climate. I don't know if that's still true. I hope it's not. But those are the two things that came to my mind. It's great that you bring that up, Herb. Bill Wheel, who's my co presenter that morning, formerly head of sustainability at Google and then at Facebook, now heads a not for profit called Climate Voice, which has been asking professionals and organizations to sign a pledge. Now over a thousand of us have signed this, calling on their companies to actually put their lobbying muscle behind their climate commitments, specifically calling companies to account for that disconnection that you're talking about. And so there's a growing force for that that will be offered to all the participants in this conference next week in New York as well, and hopefully start to see some movement on that question of integrity. That's fantastic. Thank you for that, Herb. And then Stuart. No, we got. Bob is in the queue. Oh, I'm sorry, Bob. Bob, before you go, I just want to say we're going to move to breakout rooms. After Jeff, there will be another. Plenty of convening. So hold your questions or your comments and we will get back to you shortly. But after Jeff, we're going to move along. Stuart. Okay, so one, I wonder who the audience was. Gil, you know, who are you talking to? Okay. The audience is going to be a mixed steward of corporate executives, corporate sustainability executives and leaders and various other folks. Okay. But they're all people who are there out of an interest in the subject. Okay. Yeah, the. The one thought that. That popped in my mind. And I, I love the reference to, you know, to changing culture, the whole idea of changing, changing internal thinking to move away from, you know, the mindset of profit, profitability financially as kind of a key driver of activity. But, you know, the importance of. Of. Of, you know, talking about triple bottom line for the longest time, but that, that kind of new mindset, new thinking, the transition and change that people need to make if they're really serious. Yeah, I'm going to challenge you on that, Stuart, for two reasons. I don't think moving away from profitability is the right point to make for two reasons. One is that it doesn't play well with corporations. Okay. But more fundamentally, profit is a cost of doing business. You know, you got to pay your shareholders for the use of their capital, just like you got to pay your utility company for the, you know, for their electrons. So it's. It's not a question of not profit. It's a question of profit as the central driver. And so what I say to companies around the business case is like, the point of a business case is not to tell you what to do. What to do is the right thing to do. It's the purpose of what you're there to do. Your job is to figure out how to do that profitably. So profit is the result of the right thing done the right way. And that's the distinction I'm trying to raise there. Thank you for that. We'll go to Jeff and then to Breakouts. Now we're going to see if we can get Bob in here first. Hold on, Jeff. Bob, can you speak now and see if we can hear you? Well, I tried adjusting it. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Excellent. Wonderful. I have my notes here. Gil, thank you very much for what you're doing. I'm re. Studying the history of design. And I've noticed a number of competitions between reasonable thinking and planning and just out and out eat the earth to produce anything that started way back in Europe, as you know, and, and of course other places. But you know, the fight or the discussion goes on and I'm encouraged that you and your associates are taking this up and moving forward with it. I feel like I should be doing something as well, but I can't do what you do. I don't know what you know. I don't have your abilities. So I'll leave it at. Thank you. And I hope to move forward with my own efforts and joining in and supporting. Thanks, Bob. Here's the good news. You can do what you do because I don't know what you know and I don't know the experience you've had. So bring yourself and your gifts to the challenges where you find them. The great thing about this network world is that we all can play to our strengths and share experiences and learn from each other and reinforce and, and recommend each other into the mix. So thank you for that and I'm glad you made it into the call. Jeff. Oh, hi there. Thank you so much for again convening all of these lovely folks. Gil, in too long for us to have a conversation. Feelings what I first felt, I think your framing around fiduciary is a bit of a masterstroke, frankly, perhaps taking it even beyond duty, but more to behavior. Because I do think that the way you always do and always often do, always is an absolute term. Your framing really enables people to go from a macro to a mesa to a micro level. And I think that's something which I think is very powerful when you have a room full of executives from different organizations thinking what they can be doing themselves, but what could they be doing for their organizations and beyond that sector and beyond. So I think that's a, that's a great framing. I think it's also very smart to look at boards. You know, I've recently repatriated after 12 years in California. I've moved back to the UK. I've been very uplifted, frankly by the movement that I'm seeing at government, corporate level and civil society around the role of boards and specifically non executive directors who are being increasingly challenged to have a more holistic, expansive view of the rationale, the raison d' etre for a business. So I think that's a very positive move and I think that would also resonate one other thing for me. You may or may not have known this about me, but I've never been part of the cult that is Apple. So whenever I see something like that, it really throws me off. Eyes roll and the like. I critiqued that particular video in the past and I think if we're. If it's going to be shown, I don't know if it is, but I could imagine it could create some sort of visceral reaction because I think what you're framing here is beyond the environment. And that particular video really framed only their environmental positioning. It didn't look at anything to do with their governance and indeed their social behaviors, which. So I think the more holistic thing that. That may. That may backfire. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for that, Jeff. The Apple ad was shown at Earth Day, I think a year ago or two years ago with a lot of appreciation and a lot of criticism that it attracted as any bold move will attract. It's not part of the presentation in New York. It's. This was just for you guys to help center frame for this conversation. So, Ken, take us a break. Yes. So we're going to have just. We planned on two breakout rooms, but it felt so rich to have people comment on what was provoked that we're going to just cut this down to one. We have both questions in one. So here's the questions. What would need to happen for nature to be on the board of directions, board of directors? And where are you seeing this already? That comes from the honor, tradition of appreciative inquiry, of let's see what we can build on rather than finding the obstacles that are in the way. So I'm going to open the breakout rooms now and I also want to just do a little shout out to Philip. I really appreciated when you were talking about if I'm on a board of directors, I'm not just a person. I have responsibility here. And that to me seems to hit at a fundamental point of why would I sell out my connection of being a living being and living world and. And put it aside in order to serve something that does not serve that connection. So thanks for mentioning that. Philip really just struck me very deeply. Okay, I'll let you know when you have five minutes left in the room. We're going to have 25 minutes. We back here. I get 1244, basically back here. Just a little before 10 after 1. Enjoy and have a good time. Thanks everybody. See you soon. Foreign. I hope you had a. As good a conversation as I did, which was pretty robust in my room. So I see some applause going on. Thank you. Randy, we'd love to hear what. And Don, we'd love to hear what. What took place in your rooms. What did you learn, what, what came up for you? Anything you want to talk about as, as part of your experience here today, please raise your hand and we'll call on you. And maybe we could hear from some women since we do have a number one on this call and it's mostly been dominated by us white guys. Thank you, Lynn, please. I missed Gil's presentation as he knows, but this is a great topic. I just want to share because I'm not sure you will, dawn, but I love that example that you gave of. There's someone on a chair of an organization and they're representing what we don't know, like they represent what you don't, we don't know and asking questions from that perspective. And I just thought that is a keeper for me, you know, just a single idea like that. But there also is charging people across the organization with the challenge, like instead of making it a representational role, is charging people across the organization to think about how they can, how they can serve nature and cut down, you know, cut down waste and use water better and reuse. And I thought that's a good point as well. And we talked too about how it's like it can be a very formal process to get people on a board. And you know, I shared an example where somebody is on the board representing nature. But this idea that, you know, can we make it like this? Is it in fact sort of a 21st century competency to think about, think about the impact on multi capitals and on nature as part of our decisions. And then, you know, having, having both the awareness of ecology be put into the skills matrix. And then, you know, I've got two ideas here and then the any decision being sort of like what is the impact? Every organization registering across its undertakings where they affect nature and as they make decisions, they look at that register and say what is, what is being enhanced, what is being degraded? Like without that awareness of the dimensionality of how they're affecting nature, then their decisions won't reflect the, you know, the care for nature. So there's some ideas there and it was just such a great group. So thank you. Thank you, Randy, please. Yes, we. It was a great group and I think one of the themes was to get a wider and wider perspective and for businesses to actually look at how they fit into the big picture. Not just the environment, but social and governance and having multiple generations on a board and looking at well, right livelihood came out at the end. Really important idea that. Is your business really building or is it just as extractive and trying to turn more resources into money? So trying to get people onto your boards that have this culture that we are talking about here. Thanks. Thank you, Randy. Who else heard something interesting in their breakout room that shook them up or opened their a new perspective for them? Shell? Yeah. So we had a really interesting discussion with George, Philip, David Morse and myself and we looked at how things aren't always what they seem. The idea of society, economy and environment having nice even circles in a neat little Venn diagram doesn't always work. I think it was George who posited that the environment circle needs to be much, much larger. And then I was the one who said maybe they're not circles. When you zoom in close you see that the, the economy one is Kate Raworth's donut and the ecology one is a mycelial network with thousands of connections that we don't understand. Thanks, Shel. Thank you, David. Well, we wrestled with regulation and rules, sort of government as the expression of democratic will and a way to mix together a bunch of different values and you know, put the thumb on the scale and protect nature better. And we bemoaned dark money and we bemoaned the, I would say inherent difficulties of writing rules that are optimal. So it's like one crude rule versus another one, the corruptability of vague language and rules. And then I threw down CEQA in California, the nimby's weapon of choice. Or any stakeholder who wants a project frustrated can go to this very well intentioned law which under case law apparently could even be used to slow down adding a campus dormitory to downtown Berkeley and other fascinating things. I mean it doesn't necessarily have to win, but it's a tool that in litigation can achieve the goals of stakeholders in delay or leverage they can negotiate. Union will say will drop the suit if you agree that this development project will hire union labor. And it's outrageous and that's very humbling about government rules. And I await what the Palo Alto Chief Sustainability Officer Emeritus might say about that. Palo Alto Chief Sustainability Emeritus Would you like to comment on that? I'm going to let dawn speak and then maybe for other people then I'll come back to it. Okay, dawn, please. Okay. I just wanted to add to what was Lynn was saying, which is how we started off our group with Lynn saying a redefinition of words in business the words are so mechanistic and machine, you know Vertical thinking or just linear thinking rather than whole Holacracy thinking. And Randy and I had just been talking about that earlier today. So yeah, the definition of words and calling things by their right names was very reinforcing. Do, do you have a couple of examples of that, dawn, you want to throw out for us? I can. I worked in a very creative corporation and the marketing person said, we're going to showcase your exhibit that you did for this client and show tell people their killer graphics. I said, no, absolutely not. They are, they. You can use any other descriptive wonderful word, but it's not killer. This is not killer graphics. They're inspiring and, and beautiful graphics. And she did not use that word killer. Thank goodness. And this was in the 90s. This was in the 90s. Great. Thank you. I can throw one in. There's a wonderful book called the Way Life Works. Mahan Hoagland, who was a discoverer of messenger RNA and he worked with an illustrator and produced this wonderful book. And there's 16 things to know about life that came out of it. Number 13 is nature does not maximize, it optimizes. And use the example of deer antlers, you could put more calories calcium in, but then the Durant orders might be too heavy for the, the head to lift. So it's finding the right balance and stopping with the maximization. And he says the maximization is cancer. And I work in business all the time and everybody's trying to maximize everything. And so one big shift, one big leverage point is simply the shift in language from how do we maximize to how do we optimize? How do we optimize or how do we optimize for maximal well being in all spheres that's touched on by our land, by our work. Yes. Shift from maximal to optimal and also shift from a narrow because of maximum for one element of the system versus for the entire system as well. The entire system. Exactly. In our group, Glenn had an interesting observation about nature too. Glenn, you may want to speak to it, but you observed that nature always operating bottom up. Human institutions tend to be operating top down. Maybe that's a very important difference to look at. Alan? Yeah, I introduced, as I tend in general too, that this is a system question in some way that there are corporations, a function of which is expropriation and exploitation, and they are basically in conflict and at war with the life system. And someone in that board of directors has to be really involved with changing the nature and function of that entire operation, producing nuclear weapons, even if you're taking recycling Your lunchboxes is not a positive activity. And we are in a overall economic system that is very much dominated by the extractive, exploitative, expropriation quality, which is oppressive to humanity and to the life system. And someone mentioned that we began to think about the corporation as a producer of right livelihood. Is what the work that is going on have a moral quality and harmonious relation with the life system or is it basically rubbing up against it in a conflictual way? So I think somehow making peace in the world from domination to cooperation is an essential quality that the directors have to be attentive to. And which side of this are they on? Because the war system has a timeline that is taking us to destruction. Not that we can keep talking about this for the next three generations. We don't have that. The war system is bringing us to a point of conflict that is ultimately destructive of the entire life system. So anyhow, Peace International coming up. Think about it. Thank you, Anna, please. So I. I wanted to talk actually a bit about something that, Ken, that you said in our group, which is about this idea of, you know, what would it mean if you brought your grandchildren into the boardroom? How would that change the conversation? And I'm. That kind of got me curious about, you know, what would it take to get better representation in boardroom, not just in terms of male to female, but bringing more younger people in and having them be a stakeholder in some of these conversations. I'm just sort of curious about what that would look like because we're still living in a world where there's gross underrepresentation in boardrooms across the board. So it's like, what's it going to take to change that? So that's what I'm interested in. Yeah. Thanks. Thank you. That could be, you know, bringing the grandchildren into the boardroom or doing something to ensure that the people on the board are. Have their grandchildren and not just their shareholders in mind. I heard a story years ago. This is, gosh, this must have been 20, 25 years ago of a company that changed their direction on environmental policy because the CEO had his grandchildren visit the prior weekend, and he welcomed them with open arms, said, come sit in grandpa's lap. And they said no because. Because of what that company was doing, River Community. And they said no. And he was heartbroken. He was a big, rough and tough, highly successful CEO, and he was heartburn. And he drove change. They don't teach you that in business school, you know. Thank you, Anna. Looks like we got Glenn and then Jane. Thank You, Gil, thinking about the discussion we had in our group, if you're addressing this august body of directors and boards, perhaps the one thing they can do is try to limit the CEO and director's pay to a small multiple of the mean pay in their corporation or organization. You know, 30 sounds like a good idea. Paying perks. Glenn, help me out here. That's a good idea. But how does that tie in with the nature question that we're talking? Well, you mentioned not maximizing everything. Yeah. Okay. Basically what CEOs do is maximize the pay and perks. So, you know, set a limit. Common sense, which my son reminds me is not common. Very common. Yeah. And you can, you can find graphics on, on, on the net comparing the, the discrepancy of CEO pay to. It's wildly different in the United States than any other industrial country. Wildly different. Fact 10 different. Shane Bird, I think last word. Okay, here we go. Thank you. I'm unfamiliar with the controls of doing this on my little phone. This is such a rich field of thought and feeling that I really compliment you, Gil, for bringing us to focus on it. And it's very humbling to be nature and yet to be divorced from nature as a separate, mechanistically thought trained, reductionist, seat belted, hopeless human being. I have a hope that our despair will end soon when we get a different government in the White House than we've had under Trump and reactions to Trump. But it makes this question of the boardroom and nature and the nature of the boardroom very thorny and the nightmares of regulation. But it does orient us toward what are we valuing, what do we value and what. And who are our representatives valuing? And while it seems like it should be pretty simple to tell whether your boardroom is making decisions that provoke the sawing off of the limb we're all sitting on for our homes. That should be a simple question. But our bodies, our body of law turns these simple questions into very thorny things. Going into a lawsuit about a pesticide and proving whether that pesticide unquestionably causes X person's cancer, for example, becomes such a thorny problem that finding a way to scale our laws to the depth of our values to me is very much an issue that we will confront over and over and over again with new governments in charge of, of wrestling with corporate finance, capital and the financialization of everything and electing champions who are effective at that wrestling match is of the utmost importance. I want before I, I must point out, because I can't resist the education Opportunity. Everyone must know that when the Apple ad vows to remove carbon from the atmosphere, they're talking about a static model of life. Carbon has to cycle, it has to cycle through the biosphere for there to be life. And it's not a poison. That's a very context loaded question. So Apple really put its foot in its mouth. Topic for another maybe, let's maybe cue that up for a future session. Soil matrix. What is a living world and what are the values appropriate to a living world under the, under recognized value of the soil matrix in the climate story? Stuart, can you keep it really short because we're right when you're close here? Yep, I can keep it really short. Very quickly, just to add. To what Glenn said about our group, we talked about the difference between how much top down there is in, in corporate universes and how much legislation pays attention and, and the idea that, you know, corporations are creatures of, of legislation, of the state. And what popped up in, in my mind as a result of that is what about bottom up? The idea of paying attention to what frontline workers have to say about this whole milieu because people are much smarter than we might think. So I'll just end on that note. Thank you, Gil. You want me to show this last slide a second before you do, I just want to thank everybody for a really rich discussion, a little bit of breakout that I was in and what I've heard from all of you, frankly, to do two things with this conversation. One was to give me a chance to dry run this show show in front of a live audience. And I've gotten, you know, from the feed that you've offered, but from my experience of presenting it, you know, I've gotten what I needed to fine tune this and really make it, make it land next week. And I also wanted to, you know, as always, as always with these calls, is to seed, plant some seeds for you that hopefully affect your thinking and you're doing and your ways of being in the world some things that can sprout and you can share with others. And so it looks like we've done that well. And as always, I'm really grateful to you all for that shell. We had an open question from you that I ducked before. Do we need to do that now or can we take that offline? I, I, I don't, I didn't consciously raise my hand. Okay, all right, we'll move on from there. So Ken, why don't you bring last slide for a moment while I'm doing this. Let me just tell a Very quick story, I want to say. David, I am not ducking your question about cea. I'm not going to cea. So while you're looking at. At this slide of how to do things, let me tell a really quick story. One day, there was a very hungry man walking down the street. Been a while since he'd eaten, and he was really kind of starving. And he walked past this restaurant, and the most amazing smells were coming from it. And his eye caught this sign in the window. It said, come on in, all you can eat. Your grandchildren will pay the bill. He poked his head in and he looked, and there's this amazing spread of food. And the guy came up, said, please come in. Have a seat. And he said, feel free to help yourself to the buffets. And it was meat and game and fish and foul and all manner of foods. And he sat there and stuffed himself and went back three times, and they brought the dessert cart, and he had coffee and pastry, and he was so full, he always felt he was going to burst. And he pushed back from his chair, he got up, put his hand on the door, and suddenly the maitre d was in front of him and said, here's your bill, sir. He said, no, no, no, no. There's some mistake. The sign says my grandchildren paid the bill. He says, that is correct, sir. This is the bill for your grandparents. Maybe we make sure our grandchildren have what they need to pay our bills. And with that, we are. We're out. Just a reminder, as we always close these, we are bus. Living in a hurricane. Hurricane season all the time. You all know that hurricanes are powered by ocean temperatures. More climate change, hotter oceans, bigger hurricanes, more flooding, et cetera. We are living in a hurricane. And what can you do in a hurricane, Gil? Well, let's ask for Carlisle. You can dance in a hurricane, but only if you're standing in the eye. You can dance in a hurricane, but only if you're standing in the ice.