[Full Length] Money: In Service of Nature? — with Eric Smith
SYNOPSIS:
Eric Smith has spent his career working at the intersection of economics and nature. Most recently he was the director of the venture capital vehicle Neglected Climate Opportunities (NCO) at the Grantham Environmental Trust, where he co-led over 40 direct investments in startups across all stages that can remove carbon and GHG at scale. He was previously with SJF Ventures and worked for BlackRock on climate finance, and currently is Founder/CEO of Edacious, a company working to differentiate food quality and connect the dots between soil and human health. Eric is also a dear friend and someone with whom I often converse on our shared focus of investing on behalf of nature.
We were both in Mexico for a climate investing conference and caught up, beachside sand rolling in, on everything from:
His personal background in forestry and building certification frameworks around natural resource operations;
Working in Costa Rica on their Payment for Ecosystem Services model;
The tensions in regenerative agriculture and nature conservation;
Why he supports EO Wilson’s Half Earth theory;
If narrow metrics can ever be proxy enough for the complexity of a system;
The intrinsic vs economic values of nature;
Examples of startups and nature-serving businesses, and which ones are not suited for a venture capital model;
And more….
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Money: In Service to Nature?
QUOTES:
You have to be on the ground sitting alongside the stakeholders, and part of that process is talking to nature, and feeling.
That is the crux of systems change — reorienting financial decision-making to be more holistic in the way that it allocates resources.
I don’t think we use debt enough for many of our regenerative agriculture investments. Debt has a certain structure in terms of the patience around it that allows for very clear expectations and a very clear contract.
We are extractive from our producers. If you want to get back to improving the land, you have to return wealth back to those producers. They know the land better than anyone. They're the reason we're alive.
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