On this inspiring episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, we reconnect with storyteller, systems thinker, and regenerative agriculture pioneer Douglas Gayeton to explore the latest developments in the Ecological Benefits Framework (EBF)—a potentially game-changing tool designed to redefine how we value nature. First introduced during an Earth911 podcast event in 2023, the EBF offers a bold new way to measure what matters most to nature—air, water, soil, biodiversity, carbon, and equity. Unlike traditional carbon accounting, the EBF provides a comprehensive view of how projects can restore and regenerate ecosystems.
Douglas calls the EBF a “Rosetta Stone” for ecological impact that offers a shared language for communities, companies, nonprofits, and funders. In our conversation, Douglas takes us inside the making of the EBF—its philosophical roots, its rigorous methodology, and its potential to become a new baseline for evaluating impact in the regenerative economy. He reflects on what we’ve learned so far and how early adopters are helping shape a framework that’s equal parts science, storytelling, and social contract.Now being piloted in 24 projects across the globe and featured in the upcoming BBC series Unearthing The Future, the EBF is quickly becoming a foundational tool in the regenerative movement. In this conversation, Douglas shares how the framework is helping shift investment and storytelling toward the systems that sustain life. Learn more at ebfcommons.org and thelexicon.org.
Douglas calls the EBF a “Rosetta Stone” for ecological impact that offers a shared language for communities, companies, nonprofits, and funders. In our conversation, Douglas takes us inside the making of the EBF—its philosophical roots, its rigorous methodology, and its potential to become a new baseline for evaluating impact in the regenerative economy. He reflects on what we’ve learned so far and how early adopters are helping shape a framework that’s equal parts science, storytelling, and social contract.Now being piloted in 24 projects across the globe and featured in the upcoming BBC series Unearthing The Future, the EBF is quickly becoming a foundational tool in the regenerative movement. In this conversation, Douglas shares how the framework is helping shift investment and storytelling toward the systems that sustain life. Learn more at ebfcommons.org and thelexicon.org.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you
are in this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability
in your Ear, the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition
to a sustainable carbon neutral society. I'm your host, Mitt Rackliffe.
Thanks for joining this conversation with a returning guest. As
climate change accelerates and ecosystems are further strained by extractive industries,
(00:32):
the question isn't just how we reduce harm, it's how
we generate benefits to nature. What if we had a
shared language to value nature not just for what it
provides economically, but for how it supports all life. What
if communities, companies, and governments could align around a new
ecological standard that's not rooted in carbon accounting alone, but
(00:53):
in regenerating the very systems that sustain life, including human life.
Behind the Ecological Benefits Framework, A bold and let's just
say it, beautifully designed tooled is developed by Douglas Gaton
and his team at the Lexicon. You may remember that
the EBF launch was featured on Sustainability in Your Ear
(01:14):
in twenty twenty three, and we wanted to touch base
for an update about this important project. Douglas is a storyteller, filmmaker,
and social innovator who dedicated his career to reshaping the
way that we think and talk about food, farming, and
the planet. His work has been featured in PBS, National
geographic and museums around the world, and it pairs immersive
(01:36):
visual narratives with systems thinking to bring complex sustainability ideas
to life for the buewer. With the Ecological Benefits Framework,
Douglas is tackling one of his most ambitious projects yet.
The framework identifies six core areas that must benefit to
qualify a project as regenerative, that is that it has
(01:57):
to benefit air, water, soil, biodiversity, equity, and carbon. The
framework provides a practical way for communities, nonprofits, funders and
investors to measure regeneration, not just financial risk. The EBF
is being piloted across twenty four case studies globally and
will soon be featured on a BBC series called Unearthing
(02:18):
the Future. Today, We're going to unpack how the EBF
came to be, explore what it looks like in action,
and hear how Douglas envisions this becoming a new baseline
for ecological storytelling and investments. You can learn more about
the Ecological Benefits Framework at the ebfcommons dot org website.
EBF commons is all one word, no space, no dash,
(02:39):
ebfcommons dot org. And if you'd like to learn more
about Douglas and his work, visit the lexicon dot org.
That's also one word with no space, no dash, thelexicon
dot org. We're going to get to the conversation right
after this brief commercial break. Welcome to the show, Douglas.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
How you doing today, I'm doing awesome. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Thanks for joining us. We participated in the launch of
the EBF and I wanted to ask how you're doing
with it. But first, can you tell us how the
idea for the Ecological Benefits Framework first took root with you.
What was the specific gap and environmental and regenderat reporting
that you were trying to address?
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Well? For five years, I created and ran a program
with funding and support from Google called can You Change
the Future? And it had about a thousand companies and
NGOs in it and it ran for five years. It
looked at everything from how meat works on a regional level,
(03:46):
to alternative proteins to regenda agriculture to food is medicine.
It was a pretty diverse collection of subjects, you know,
even you know, food packaging and single use plastics. And
what was an interesting theme that I'm urged across all
of those different spheres of work is that increasingly people
(04:09):
don't care about certifications. Now, I don't say that with
a jauntest view of certifications. It's just that certifications, while valuable,
are essentially designed to warrant that you did something and
(04:29):
that someone validated that you actually did something. But doing
something is not the same as actually generating the result.
And I think people are realizing increasingly that it's less
important to say that you did something and more important
to show you what happened because you did something. And
(04:52):
instead of a certification model that is checking a lot
of boxes, people are trying to determine and they're coalescing
around what are the impacts that they need to achieve.
Most so, we've had twelve thousand years of perfecting what
would be an extractive economy, and we've applied this attractive
(05:14):
mentality to all of the resources around us. In fact,
we've lived with this notion that our resources are infinite
only until a generation ago where we began to realize,
hang on a second, this air, this water, these soils,
these are actually finite resources that can be degraded or
(05:37):
improved by our activities. Right. So, every child learns that
you have to put away what you pick up, that
you have to clean up your room, you know. But
as adults, we've somehow forgot all of those really valuable
lessons that we are taught as children, and one of
them is the responsibility to mitigate the wake that we
(05:59):
make as we move through the world. And so what
emerged with these activators that we did was, as I said,
people carrying less about certifications and more about impacts. And
what was really amazing is they settled on the same
six every time. I went back to Google and I said,
I hate to bum you out. I know that we
spend a lot of time and energy on this, but
(06:20):
I can reduce our learnings just six words. I'm sorry,
it's so simple, but that's how it works. We then
brought a number of companies to Mountain View and asked
them to explain their es TO reporting, and it turned
out that their ESG reporting did not go beyond those
six words that we had determined, and those six words
were air, water, soil, biodiversity, equity, and carbon. And when
(06:47):
companies try to show that they're mitigating the negative externalities
that they're creating, they end up talking about activities in
those six areas. Invariably. It's one of those uncanny truths
that are in front of us. And if we were
thinking about logical we'd go, well, of course, but yet
we've never actually done something with it. So what we
did was we said, this is an ecological benefits framework
(07:11):
for how to reverse and mitigate twelve thousand years of
extraction and extractive practices and how you reverse that trend
and make people more mindful. And one of the things
that we determined was you can't tell people how to
do what they're doing differently. You can't tell them how
to measure what they do differently. Everyone has systems that
(07:34):
they've invested time and money in. So instead of getting
people to operate on the head end and others on
the ground in their operations on how they're measuring their impact,
what we said is, what if we get them to
explain the outcomes, how you visualize what the result of
those capturing those positive impacts and what if we create
(07:55):
a standard framework. Now it's not a new idea. I
mean when the the tech companies created the first smartphones
at the beginning of the two thousands, Imagine the chaos
that would have rained if every smartphone had to have
a different way to talk to every smart device. That
would mean that if you went to rent a car,
like a Hyundaie, you couldn't rent it if you had
(08:15):
an Apple phone, because Hyundai, being Korean, would be based
upon a Sensung smartphone protocol. They figured out, they got together,
they said, yeah, this is crazy, We're going to have
to collaborate even though we're competitors, and they created a Bluetooth.
So Bluetooth is a digital handshake that allows any smartphone
you can talk to any smart device. Bluetooth is actually
a nonprofit and so what we said was, why can't
(08:37):
we make a Bluetooth for the planet. Why can't we
create a framework that allows everyone, regardless of their activities,
regardless of how they talk about the impacts that they're
trying to positively address. What if we could have a
standard way. So that's how the Ecological Benefit Framework began.
And so we had a group of almost two hundred
(08:57):
people from the carbon market space, and a lot of
other players join in to figure out how we might
apply that. We took projects from around the world and
then we were able to render them using this framework,
and it was very a very powerful exercise that we
then released Climate Week in New York a few years ago,
(09:18):
and then from there, you know, it's really taken off
and we've been racing to keep up with it.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Now, let's talk about the frame in which this recognition
of the limits to the resources that we live or
depend upon was realized. The other thing that happened in
that same generation was the explosion of media and the
ability for us to reach and communicate all of these
stories about the impacts that we have on the world.
You're a communicator by nature and by training. How's media
(09:47):
essential to changing human society and individual behavior at this
particular moment in time.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Well, you know, our organization is the Lexicons, So we
focus on the language. That's what our primary focuses. And
you know, our thinking is that if you teach somebody
a word, that might be the most radical activity you
could have. And those words are essentially the toolbox that
(10:17):
you use to form ideas. So in teaching people the
right words, you can unlock new ways for them to communicate,
new ways for them to understand things that they might
otherwise not understand. When we began in Lexicon, we began
gathering these taxonomies, these ways that people speak across all
these domain areas. And what was really interesting about that
is that it's almost it's like almost a curse that
(10:43):
the higher level or degree of expertise that you have
in a domain area, it's almost like this inverse curve
that the more you know about something, the more difficult
it is for you to explain it to a layperson.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
Yeah, we're more insulated and jargon oriented when we talk
as an expert.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Well sure, and you know, and you should be right.
So you are essentially speaking at very high level con
you know, on a high level conceptual you know, landscape
with other experts, so of course you're going to be
using you know, technical jargon. So what we did from
the very very beginning of the Lexicon was we went
one domain area after another, and the first thing we
(11:27):
had experts do is and we use you know, natural
language processing tools like all kinds of tools to identify
if you're an expert talking about something what is the
language that you're using. We then found ways to make
that language easier for civilians, for common people to understand,
and invariably along the way, those experts asked us to
(11:51):
help them and communicating otherwise complex ideas in ways that
general people could understand. So that resulted in books that
we've done. We've had a two thousand exis bits explaining
these concepts, concepts just in food and agriculture TV shows
with PVS, so we've really spent the last fifteen twenty
years really helping experts explain the nuances of what they've
(12:16):
learned in their travels, in their journeys with their research,
so that a late person can understand. Because if the
bulk of a population doesn't grasp and have an immediate
sense of the importance of key concepts, you're never going
to get widespread adoption of the things that you need
to have to create solutions. I'll give you an example.
(12:39):
The experts in the areas of specifically food and agriculture,
but now it's in other places have identified that. In
the twentieth century, as we rapidly industrialized across all these
different sectors, we began really focusing on making things as
cheaply as possible. And so one of the ways that
you can make something as cheaply as possible is by
(13:01):
not considering, for example, the negative environmental consequences that result.
You know, it's why you have you know, superfund sites
EPA superfund sites where companies produce something at great rate
and polluted local waterways or or groundwater and then abandon
those those factories and sites and moved on someplace else,
(13:22):
and so we're, you know, we're left with the residue
of that, and those are what it's called the negative
externalities of an appigration. So economists began talking about a
ways to factor in all those negative externalities into the
price of something, and they began talking about true cost accounting,
the idea that you're not not actually paying the real
(13:43):
price when you're buying something, and so what you're doing
is you're paying a artificially low price that encourages even
more waste and even more environmental degradation. And so the
true cost movement came out of that and kind of
sistered that was this idea of these planetary boundaries that
we can't go beyond. And then what came out of
(14:05):
that was something else called the circular economy, This idea
that you have to look at everything you're doing along
the way of making something and address all of the
negative externalities along the way to try to mitigate them.
Each of those three examples have been the dominant approach
in industry internationally to mitigate negative externalities. The problem is
(14:30):
both a language problem consumers don't understand what circularity is.
And it's also a problem that it's it's the wrong
way to look at something because nobody gets out of
the bed in the morning to do less bad. And
so these are all do less bad models, true cost accounting,
the circular economy, the nine planetary boundaries, these are all
(14:54):
we need to do less bad. And ironically that makes
zero sense to a to a general you know, like
to the general public.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Nobody likes to hear the word no.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Nobody likes to hear the word no. But what if
you've got out of bed in the morning to do
more good? And what if you were part of collective
enterprises that led to more good? And this is it's
partially behavior, you know, understanding behavior engineering, it's partially communications,
and it's partially that while all of the answers presented
(15:30):
by Toro across the county or non planetary boundaries or
the circle economy. They're correct, they have never taken hold
with the general public because they are these these these
do less bad models. And so the Ecological Benefit Framework
said this, this, these are the six areas where you
can do more good. And the irony of ironies is
(15:54):
that it turns out that when you do more good,
that means, as a consequence, that you're doing less bad.
And so it's taking that same collection of data sets
and applying them towards positive impacts as opposed to mitigating
negative externalities. That's the rule. And I would say the
uherited rule that understanding communication plays in getting people to
(16:22):
do the right thing and to take more responsibility and
being wedded to being solution oriented as opposed to being,
you know, dealing with risk.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
So, how can a consumer use the EBF to make
a better decision to do some good? And let's say,
just in particular with regard to air or water, can
you how would they how would they assess that opportunity?
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Well, so we we made a couple of really we
had a couple of radical conclusions that came out of
our first sprint with the ecological benefits framework, and that
framework primary raily focused on people in carbon markets. It
was actually funded by people in carbon markets, and it
(17:07):
was funded by the enabling technologies you know that would
be cryptocurrencies, blockchain, et cetera, that are kind of the
plumbing that allows that marketplace to work. But my problem
with the carbon market is that it's it's a mostly
(17:28):
disingenuous marketplace in the sense that we have people that
I mean, it's pretty pathetic that it's twenty twenty five
and our primary methodology used to address climate change is
a privatized marketplace where people profit off of claims that
(17:48):
are made that are not standardized and often of dubious value.
And it's pretty embarrassing that we're only focusing on carbon
because anytime a butterfly or a bird or a lizard
goes extinct, that means it's not coming back. That's a
(18:10):
forever event. So you can't tell me that biodiversity loss
is less important than sequestering carbon. You could say the
same for air and water. That nature doesn't think in
terms of benefits and co benefits. Nature, it turns out,
understands that they're all intrinsically connected. And so we started
(18:31):
in the carver market, and we started by trying to
explain to people in carver markets that they are really
doing a disservice, not a service, but a disservice because
they're not embracing the holistic nature of how natural systems work.
It's essentially malpractice to participate in carbon markets because you're
essentially operating under the assumption that these other areas aren't
(18:53):
worth monitoring, or are not of value, or are not connected.
It's how you create an aten of consequences, you know.
And so when you look at air and water quality,
you can't again fall into the same same trap that
people have fallen into in carbon markets. These all have
to be addressed holistically. And so what happened after our
first sprint, which was in a pretty amazing journey and
(19:16):
you know, one of those classic cases of a project
that didn't have an enemy, everyone realized the value of
it is. I had an individual from the World Bank
who approached me afterwards and he said, you know, you're
you've been talking all about the carbon market, but the
carbon market is fractional compared to the amount of money
(19:37):
that's deployed by multi laddle development banks to address these challenges.
And when multilateral development banks addressing challenges, they do it
holistically as you you know, as nature does. And so
they said to me, you should focus the next phase
of the Ecological Benefits Framework on working with multi ladle
development banks. And so at the same time we were
(20:02):
approached by the World Food Program who said, can you
use this to explain the economic activities that are required
to make an impact on the ground. So they talked
about Chad for example, in this house, you know, very
challenging because of political unrest and because of drought. It's
(20:24):
a very challenging area of the world. And interestingly enough,
during that same period we were approached by in global agriculture.
There are fifteen centers which are called the International Centers
for Agriculture Research, which obviously makes sense, like there would
be one for rice or wheat or corny who exists.
They're called the CGRs. So the CGRs approached us after
(20:48):
they looked at the Ecologicalvendment Framework, and so the World
Food Program what ended up being the Agent Development Bank,
which I think is the second largest multi laditivement bank
in the world, and the CGRs approached us all within
two weeks of us presenting this work the first phase
of work for EBA, and said, how can you help
us to standardize how we talk about impacts? And so
(21:10):
for the past sixteen months, I've been all over the world,
you know, you know, I've been in the Hells, I've
been you know, all through Africa, South America, Asia, and
I'll kind of walk through them really really quickly. Each
of each of them are different. The World Food Program
in Chad, they have people on the ground trying to
explain what they're doing and trying to standardize how they
(21:30):
gather information and then how they can assess it. But
they it turns out they have no standardized way to
do that. Everybody's just gathering whatever information information they can
on the fly, which then can't really be integrated into
a system where you can assess the impacts so that
you can make better decisions down the road. The result
is you're gathering a lot of information that you don't need,
(21:52):
and you're gathering information that isn't interoperable with other information.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
So the World Food is in the system. Would you
describe that as or is that that's something we can
tune out?
Speaker 2 (22:02):
I just think that. I think that what you often
have is you have maybe you have a group at
the World Food Program that's interested in gender, or another
one that's the agriculture team, another one that is the
nutrition team, And so you have these different teams that
different different objectives, and they have different UH data gathering
methods that they use on the ground, and those those
(22:24):
and then they're and then they're gathered placed you know,
digitally in a cloud, but not in formats that are interoperable.
And so having things like a standardized question set that
gathers information in standardized areas that are then replicable in
other nations and the hells you know, it will allow
(22:46):
them to understand what is working what isn't because the
when you have international aid, the thing that you don't
want to do is keep on doing the same exercise
re activity that isn't useful in other places, hoping to
somehow have a different result. But you do want to
see what works and double down on that time and
(23:08):
time again. That's the great problem of international geos is
how do you replicate success? So EBF allowed them to
have a framework to do that. In the case of
the cgi RS, these fifteen international centers for agriculture. These
are the people on the ground working with farmers in
(23:30):
one hundred countries around one hundred and something countries around
the world. They have coalesced around two principles of that
drive their agriculture agriculture philosophy. Let's say one is agroecology
and the other one is nature positive solutions. But yet
ironically they don't have a standardized framework to assess what
(23:52):
works so that they can replicate it elsewhere. Now you
might say, well, these things are all very place based,
and so you have to take into a out that
what works in one place when works someplace else. Absolutely
that's true. But within the within any model, whether it's
agrocology or ancient posit solutions, you have to have it
there's a set of universal principles. Then you have to
(24:13):
have an adaptive framework to show you can localize that
in different areas, in different regions. But if you don't
have a standardized question set from the very beginning, again,
you might be gathering information that's not useful to anybody
or and you're not gathering the right information that could
lead to better operational decision making. So that led to
the Lexicon team. You know, us going you know, to
(24:35):
Kenya and going you know, we can go to India
and Columbia, you know, and these other countries to work
on the ground with with with these agronomists and plant breeders,
soil scientists, community organizations to help them come up with
a standard framework. And now we've done that. So we
we've now built the world's first standardized framework that explains
(24:58):
nature positive solutions. And this ecological bet of framework was
the really efficacious tool that allowed us to get there.
And in twenty twenty five or twenty twenty six we
will expand that out even further in nature posititions and
also an agrocology. So they finally now have a framework
of interoperability that can help them to identify what to
(25:18):
double down on. In the case of the Asia Development Bank,
well they have a twenty billion dollar fund in Asia
for coaster restoration and so I spent the last year,
you know, shuttling back and forth to Cambodia. Cambodia is
one of foreign nations in the world that have been
red flag. You can't buy seafood from that country because
of the mismanagement of their fisheries, and so what they're
(25:42):
trying to do through all these interventions that are that
are creating livelihoods for women and better stewardship practices and
coastal fisheries. They need to be able to show their
donors what success looks like, and increasingly what that success
is is how they are contributing positively in those areas
(26:07):
that I've outlined an air, water, soil, bio verse secret
and carbon. You know, we have a carbon credit now
and we have increasingly a biodiversity crediting, right, but it's
it's in many ways it's it's silly. It's like people
are bolting a biodiversity credit, not often on the side
(26:28):
of a carbon credit. But you know, as we've seen
over the last twelve months in India, the air quality
is so poor in some areas that people have negative
health consequences even inside their own homes indoors, and so
there's going to be an aircraft an air credit in
(26:48):
India the next two to three years. We're seeing the
same with the same thing with water throughout you know,
much of North Africa and now even going down into
East Africa, we're going to be seen water credits that
are going to emerge, and it's these are inevitabilities. You know,
as we continue to degrade our soils, people are going
to connect regeneral agriculture with a soil credit, and so
(27:13):
invariably we're going to end up with credits in all
six of these areas. And we can either do it
sequentially in a kind of a nonstructured way, or simply
bite the bullet and identify that these are the six
areas we need to address and begin tracking data one
(27:34):
when we're on the ground that actually expresses what these
values are, the impacts that we can have to mitigate
the negative externalities that we've created through our executive practices
in the six areas. But you know, these are inevitabilities.
It's not like a you know, an idealized notion of
(27:54):
how to respond to the planet. We're going to have
to create a way to identify impacts, which might include credits.
But also, you know, credits are one way. You know,
there's there there's many ways to address the flow of capital.
There's the marketplace in terms of consumer goods. There's there's
(28:18):
philanthropic activities that give grants. There's there's governments that that
can provide loans, and then there's the venture community that
can provide investments. And the reason why we don't have
an acceleration towards addressing these challenges in a holistic way
is because we aren't measuring and so if we're not
(28:39):
coalescing around these are the positive areas where we need
to create impact, and if we're not identifying what our
activities are that can help to mitigate that, we're never
going to be able to reverse the situation where we
now find ourselves, which is we're really we're really degrade
(29:01):
at a rapid scale everything around us because we don't
have a positive outlook on what we can do to
mitigate that as individuals.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Douglas, this is a great basis for the rest of
our conversation, but we need to take a quick commercial break.
We're going to be right back now. Let's get back
to our conversation with Douglas Gayton. He is the co
founder and chief lexicographer at The Lexicon, which is launching
(29:33):
the Ecological Benefits Framework. That's a science and culturally grounded
method for quantifying environmental impact. So, Douglas, the EBF includes
equity as one of the environmental benefits. That's a controversial
word these days, though it shouldn't be because it belongs
in a discussion about nature. After all, we're part of it,
not separate from nature. But how do you suggest we
(29:54):
think about human socio economic impacts when assessing regenerative projects.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Well, you know, equity is a it's so it's a wormhole.
The five you know, air, water, soil, biodiversity, and carbon
are carbon. You could say carbon, you could say carbon equivalents,
you could say climate. But in the United States people
(30:23):
talk about regendaive agriculture. And what's funny when I asked
them to explain what regenda agriculture is, they talk about
all of these social elements, none of which are actually
regenda agriculture. But I don't want to point out to
people that what they're really talking about is agrocology, because
agricology is on the one side, it's these agricultural practices,
(30:49):
many of them being indigenous or traditional practices, and then
on the other side is the social component, how it
relates to people and communities, et cetera. So when people
in in the United States talk about regender agriculture, more
often than not, what they're really talking about is agrocology.
And so the next phase of our work with the
(31:12):
c g rs these you know, fifteen centers globally for agriculture,
is is looking at nature, positive solutions and agrocology and
having two spheres. One is the Ecological Benefit Framework and
they are the Social Benefit Framework. Okay, yeah, that will
be the next eighteen months, and then after that in
(31:33):
twenty twenty seven, we'll finally be able to look at
the Economic Benefit Framework and then our global vision, our
vision that will take us in the next three years
to get there is what we call c see, which
is the social, economic, and ecological benefits that we're all
trying to contribute to. And that's the you know, just
(31:57):
as nature, you know, is holistic, We really see that.
The the C framework, which will which we will start
to talk about in twenty twenty seven is is really
where we're going, you know, Mitch. To this day, we've
never spoken publicly about about EBF. We've never made press
(32:19):
releases or you know, gone and spoken at conferences and
and and made much made much noise about it, mainly
because we really wanted to ground truth this and see
how elastic it is. There's a number of things I
(32:39):
can't get into today with companies that we're working closely
with because as ESG reporting falls apart, and it it's,
you know, something that nobody ever knew anyway. But they're
they're looking to explain the activities in a much more
(33:01):
holistic way, and companies are now coming to us to
do that. We've taken the path of not talking publicly
about what we're doing because this needs to be ground truth.
It's not really ready for the general public. We watched
very closely at what happened with circularity and true cost
accounting and planetary boundaries. How consumers never really embraced these concepts.
(33:26):
They were more like inside baseball.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
Jargoning. Yeah. I once.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
Took a very interesting high networth individual to a conference
that was about a lot of these ideas, and you know,
he's a software engineer, and as we were leaving the
place where the event was gathered, I asked him how
it was, and he just shook his head and looked
(33:57):
at me kind of sideways, and he said, jargonears. And
I really love that term because I think that people obviously,
people in many cases make announcements of things before they start,
and make great claims about what they're going to achieve
(34:17):
and do. And I get that they're trying to get funding,
or they're trying to make noise and get above and
get above that noise. But we subscribe to a different
notion here, which is really that this stuff is hard
to do. You can't really make claims for things until
you know that you're right, And more often than not,
even if you know that you're right, what's the benefit
(34:38):
of making too much noise? I remember, well, yeah, you know,
so we don't do that.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
Well, here's the question that follows from that is what's
the difference between progress and perfection in describing the potential impacts?
And how do you make those incremental steps towards something
that we can all have a shared understanding of.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Yeah, well, first of all, you know, I teach at
slow foods Uh. Slow food is a food movement and
its headquarters is in Italy, and I teach their graduate
students every year. It's actually called the course is called
the Storytelling of Food. And I say to them the
first day that whatever work that we're going to do together,
everything has to be perfect. And the students just go
(35:23):
crazy when I say that. They're like, you know, how
can you do that? You know you're sitting a high
bar and then the last day I put a slide
on the screen and I say, you know, there is
only perfect and then the next slide says perfect doesn't exist.
So we have to we have to operate under the
(35:48):
assumption that everything we're doing is perfecting, even if knowing
it does not exist or the time being. Yeah, and
also because people start to make quarters or you know,
they start saying things that you just irritate the hell
out of me, like it's good enough or you know,
it's it's it's it's good enough to work right now,
(36:08):
you know. And what's the thing about perfection is the
enemy of I.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
Don't know something, right of progress?
Speaker 2 (36:15):
Yeah, I mean, the thing about it is that there
is a you know, it's when you're when you're developing things.
A great lesson I learned from Google is the difference
between being incremental and being iterative, right, and so iterative
is that you're constantly releasing something. I mean, look, Google
(36:36):
put Gmail beta on their email client and the beta
stayed there for three years. People thought it was called
People who didn't know how software worked, they called their
their software. They called their email program Gmail beta because
they didn't know. Yeah, but Google's idea was this thing's
you know, is definitely not ready, Let's release it. And
(36:58):
I think we have to embrace you know, what's the
software world called m vps and minimum viable products. We
have to think Italy, we can't wait, and so we
have been putting EBF out into the world. But we've
also been very sober about it in the sense that
we're aware that we don't know what we don't know right,
(37:19):
so we're aware that we have to ground truth this
and we've learned a lot about how it works and
how it and where it's effication and where it doesn't.
And so we don't feel like we've not released something
or not worked with something because we're not ready. We're
never going to be ready, and we're constantly groving. However, Mitch,
(37:41):
I would draw live beeing that and going out and
talking at Davos or something about we figured out the solution.
I'd much rather be talking at larger venues when there
is already is this understanding, before we've spoken among people
that are using it, it already works, and then we
(38:01):
can lay out the broader vision. But until there's the adoption,
not widespread adoption, but until it's the adoption by the
key players. Right, So inter words, when food companies make
pronouncements about all the great stuff that they're doing or
what they're going to do by twenty thirty or whatever else,
it is has zero value. But when people actually on
(38:22):
the ground that are doing the actual work, when they're
implementing things at scale, that has value. And so that
is where we spend our time is how do you
get the people that are actually doing the actual work
to operationalize things. The problem, Mitch, in the case that
we have is that there's a problem. There's a problem
(38:44):
in there are institutional barriers for how we gather information
to explain the impacts that we are trying to achieve,
and part of those is that it costs money to
gather data. Yeah, and so often people the reason why,
you know, there's only a biodiversity market and that's that's
(39:07):
emerging and not an air and water. Of course, you
could say there are certain, you know, fragmented cases where
air and water credits have been have been and I
have been evolved in some of those, but there hasn't
been a holistic model because while people I appreciate this
as a valuable idea, they the institutional barrier is that
there's not an efficacious way to gather the data, and
(39:28):
that data gathering comes at a cost. So you have
to figure out what the minimum viable data set is,
in other words, the least amount of you need right
in order to make a decision, you know, an operational decision.
And that's what we've been working on, is that real
kind of you know. And the other thing that we
work with on a daily basis is helping people to
understand the difference between quantitative measurement and qualitative measurement. And
(39:53):
often there is this overabundance of trust and quantitative measurement
as opposed to qualitative measurement, and we are in which
is to our great detriment. I'll give you a few
examples of that. When people tell me climate people tell
me that they have gathered all this data on certain
(40:15):
you know, climate markers, or let's let's I mean the
easy one is carbon sequestration, certain carbon sequestration markers. It
turns out that everyone is gathering carbon sequestration data using
a different tool, a different pathology, some more efficacious than others.
(40:36):
And then they they start to take these different data
sets and they start to aggregate them. So then what
they have is a bunch of data that's been gathered quantitatively,
all using various tools and methodologies, all of let's say,
different levels of quality that you could assign to that
(40:57):
quantitative measurement. But now they're agrigating it. So now you
can't tell which piece of data was gathered which way,
but now it's all been aggregated.
Speaker 1 (41:06):
Right.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
It's how we had, you know, It's how we had
the Great Crisis of two thousand and eight with mortgages
is because they aggregated good mortgages with bad mortgages, and
you couldn't tell what the hell was going on. And
so we have a lot of this. Whenever people talk
to me about large data sets, then I find out
they've aggregated it from any data sets. It's useless information.
But people have such a high regard for something that's
(41:29):
considered quantitative that you can't get them to understand that
the data that they're making decisions from is completely useless,
pointless information because it's aggregated, and you've hidden the really
valid ways of measuring carbon supprecision against the ones that
actually aren't so valid. And so the comet Farm tool
created by Colorado State and USDA is the most. It's
(41:50):
the most it's the standard tool that's used in agriculture
to measure your impacts. And one of the people that
architected that tool worked with us on a project by
Regina Agriculture, and they said that, you know, the problem
is is that we put too much value on quantitative data,
when when we could qualitatively make decisions based upon what's
(42:11):
available in base of all what we know and our expertise,
but we do not trust qualitative data, right. And so
one of the most powerful ways to measure regenerative farming
and its positive impacts was actually made by a man
Wendell Gilbert, who's like my guru from a point of
blue conservation and Wendell Gildgert there's always my go to, right,
(42:34):
Wendell Gilbert said, I asked him how he measures regenerative practices,
and he said, he walks out into the middle field
and he closes his eyes and he listens, and he
immediately is able to figure out how many birds he
can hear in the field. The type of birds that
they are tells them, the types of insects, that tells
(42:57):
them what's happening in the soil and that tells them,
you know, those those trophic relationships all by come from
making a politative assessment. Are you know, for people like
Gynda Gilgert and conservationists more valuable than all of that
aggregated data about carbon sequestration.
Speaker 1 (43:15):
When you know, and that's my indigenous wisdom, it's a
different sense of our relationship with the space we're in,
and one that's truly holistic, right, And also you know.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
Don't I don't fault the incredible scientific and technological breakthrough
of the twentieth century. That was an extraordinary century, but
it also was a century of great specialization where people
became really a dept or an expert in one very
thin sliver of a domain area, but they suddenly lacked
(43:48):
that holistic understanding of how it fit into everything else,
which of course you could say is valuable on some level,
but also we lose that holistic thinking that allows us
to have to integrate ideas that in one area in
other places. And Eskimo has I don't know, seventy something
ways to describe ice, And you could say as a
(44:09):
result that for an Eskimo, an adjective is a form
of measurement. We don't value what is right in front
of us. We don't value qualitative measurement. You know. I
was down in the down in the Amazon last year
with people, let's say that are in carving markets, and
they were going on and on to the with the
(44:29):
speaking to the indigenous people, you know, through a translator
that took the English to Spanish and then from the
Spanish into the Indigenous language they spokes. It was like
like a game of Post Office. But they were explaining
all of the remote sensing that they were doing, and they,
you know, they kept them pointing at the sky. And
then when that was explaining the Indigenous people, they had
(44:50):
this puzzled look on their face and they started pointing,
and they kept on using this word. And I said
to the translator, what is that word that they're using.
They're saying the high level of the trees. I mean
the canon. I said, the canopy. They said, yes, the canopy.
And what the Indigenous people were saying is how can
these people tell us what's happening in our rainforest when
(45:11):
everything that they're gathering is above the canopy, everything that
we're experiencing is below the canopy. But yet all these
carbon credits and you know forestry, you know, credits and
investments and tokenization of force don't take into account the
qualitative measurement that comes from indigenous knowledge, and so it's
(45:32):
just a it's just it's a it's a it's a
really oddly, sadly imbalanced way of valuing data and of
only trusting things off spreadsheets. That's why some of the
people you know who are really adept at understanding the
integration of indigenous knowledge when they talk about biodiversity, all
(45:53):
they talk about, you know, rainforests, all they talk about
is jaguars. But they set up cameras to look for
jaguars because the jaguar is the apex predator, just as
that bird in that field was the apex predator. The jaguar.
If you have jaguars, you're basically stating that there's an
entire set of tropic relationships that that jaguar represents. And
(46:15):
so a jaguar is a proxy or explained biodversity. You know,
in Anodia, they're trying to restore these coastal waterways and
the do gong, which is like their amanatee. When the
dugong returns, that signifies tropic health. In coastal water. So
we have to we have to value qualitative data side
(46:38):
by side with quantitative data. And the reason why we
don't advance in our way of looking at credits is
because people are nervous about making claims that are qualitative,
because they believe that funders won't fund or support something
unless it has a spreadsheet associated with it, even if
(46:58):
that spreadsheet is based upon aggregated data of dubious value.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
Well, so, I mean it's clear what we're talking about
is how do you avoid taking a Rube Goldberg approach
to integrating all of these different ways we're accounting for
the things that we used to treat as externalities and
still haven't fully integrated. So, as you've looked at how
the EBF has been applied around the world, what surprised
you most about how the framework performed across different geographies
(47:24):
and related to different goals.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
Well, I'll go back to those people. And when I
was in a in the when I was out in
Columbia done in Amazon, at some point the people, the
native people there, asked the translators to explain who I
was and what I was doing. I explained EVF, and
(47:47):
they were quiet and they all, you know, didn't say anything,
And I said to the translator, what don't they have
they have any comment about? It?
Speaker 1 (47:56):
Was?
Speaker 2 (47:57):
Did I explain it the way that was too complicated?
Did they not understand it? And so the translator asked
them that, and then they responded to the translator, No,
what he explained it was is perfectly obvious. That's how
we look at things here. So I felt very validated
by the simplicity of it. The greatest challenges that I
have faced and our team has faced, is that people
(48:20):
get very, very nervous because they fear that we're talking
about dismantling everything that they do and throwing it all out.
And they've invested, in some cases millions of dollars in platforms,
and the last thing they want to do is have
somebody to come and tell them that it's all invalidated
and that they need to throw it all out. And
(48:40):
so the thing that we have to constantly explain to
people that we're not telling anybody to do their activities different.
We're simply saying that if you want it to be
understood easily understood, you probably need to come up with
a more holistic, easy to understand framework. I'm not going
to say the name of the global funder, but I
was in a meeting recently with a global funder that
(49:03):
has brought us into integrate EBF, and the global funder
said to all of the scientific institutions around the table,
he said, I feel very, very bad to tell you this,
because we give you all this money to put these
reports together, but nobody reads your reports because they're too
complicated and we don't understand them. And I know we
pay for them, and it's it's a requirement you have
(49:24):
to deliver that. And we do trust that you're making
great strides and the work you're doing, but nobody understands
your reports. And we hope, we're hoping that EBF is
going to allow us to be able to see this
international you know, this kind of Rosetta stone that helps
us to understand and in general terms, what you're doing.
When you look at the New York Times, Mitch, New
(49:45):
York Times is taught I mean newspapers, you know, beginning
whatever seventeen eighteen hundreds, they taught people how to how
to gather, how to absorb knowledge in a size format,
which is the headline, A little quote under the headline,
of like a sentence, and then it has like the
dateline like there's a Jakarta, and then it has in
(50:07):
the first sentence it lays out the mission of what
the article is going to be about, and then it
goes down and then at.
Speaker 1 (50:13):
The inverted pyramid and structure for introducing the topic, giving
a summary, and then breaking it down. And it is
our old way of understanding information.
Speaker 2 (50:24):
Right And you know, if you look at if you
think about that structure, anybody in the world can read
any newspaper, you know, if they understand the language and
understand where they are the orientation of that and basically
it is ninety percent of it of people are not
going to read the article, but they're going to just
glance at the headline. Another you know, three percent are
(50:45):
going to want to go deeper and they'll get to
the bottom of the page where it says contingent on
page twenty two. That's for the two percent of the
people that are actually deeply interested. And you have to
create scalable experiences that deliver the content and at different
scales depending upon people's interests. EBF is that EBF is,
(51:05):
this is the high level understanding of what they're doing
in these six areas. Now, if you go into air,
this is the generally what they're doing in air. Now,
if you go deeper into each one of those activities,
you're like, wow, this is the range of things they're
doing that positively impact air quality. But we don't ever
make the assumption that somebody wants to understand the totality
of something. It's more important for us that they get
(51:28):
the general understanding that there's six things that we need
to be leaning into that create that we should be
contributing to create positive impacts in these six areas. That's
what we should be doing. And so EBF is a
way to structure knowledge that allows a lay person to
have a deeper understanding in a standardized format of something
(51:53):
that if they understood more deeply, they would probably be
more deeply engaged in being part of the solution.
Speaker 1 (52:02):
Well, so you're you're doing the work with the BBC
to unearth the future and tell stories about EBF inspired projects.
How are you going to translate what you just described
that that orientation to the problem and the story that
relates to the solution to the problem for the viewer.
(52:22):
Tell us about that and when does the series appear
so people can start to dig into this thinking.
Speaker 2 (52:27):
Sure, So first of all, it's the it's a group
within BBC called BBC story Works. And while we are
deeply engaged with with BBC story Works on these stories,
I would not presume that we're going to be driving
the editorial side of it. That's great, nor saying nor
(52:51):
would I presume that we're going to be you know,
having EBF play out across all those areas. But so
in a way, I would say it's it's too early.
The cake is not in the oven. Our main role
is to part of what the Lexicon does is we
support people in their storytelling efforts and often they either
(53:13):
don't have the deep relationships with a lot of the
key players, or they don't understand maybe how those ideas
integrate into a common hole. For example, most you know,
most people outside of food don't know what the concept
of food as medicine is, or they don't know what
the concept of nutrient density is. And you know, these
(53:34):
are kind of real, kind of core drivers of really
massive decision making shifts that are happening in food. So
part of our rold with the Lexicon is always just
to provide, like whether it's BBC story Works or or
companies that deeper insight. But I think it's Yeah, I'm
(53:56):
curious to see how it's going to unfold. It'll be
the series of episodes will be delivered in the fall,
and you know, I'm hopeful that it's going to address
the things that we care most deeply about some of
the domain areas that I mentioned. And but yeah, but
(54:19):
we're still at the very beginning of a long journey.
Speaker 1 (54:22):
Well, I'm really looking forward to seeing those those shows. Douglas,
You've been very generous with your time. How can our
listeners follow your work and spread the word about EBF.
Speaker 2 (54:32):
I mean, we made a decision long ago that we're
not really to spend a lot of time on social media,
So we don't really and I would I would much
rather work on being, like you know, helping our partners
tell their stories that have been hopefully empowered or partially
(54:52):
enabled by our contributions. So we're not really social media focused.
I mean, obviously I am on LinkedIn and uh, from
time to time I will share parts of what we're doing. Certainly,
if people want to understand how to integrate frameworks like
the ecological viguage framework or to really understand how to
(55:14):
how quantitative and qualitative data can be can coexist and
make them help people make better decisions. Then I'm always
here to you know, to support people and help them
and to help them integrate the work. All of the
work that we do, Mitch, has all been people have
(55:35):
come to us. We don't really, We're just pretty focused
on trying to deal with the work that we have
in front of us and getting the adoption on the
ground from our key the key players and partners that
we're working with. But so if any of if any
of your listeners fall into that, into those buckets, and
you know, we're certainly here for them and we would
certainly love to help them and furthering their and deepening
(55:58):
their ability to express their activities and lean more into
these positive impacts in areas that we've discussed.
Speaker 1 (56:06):
Well, I'm glad that you're staying focused and that to
you are valuing depth over that surface stuff that we
see on social media. Douglas, thank you so much for
your time today. It's been fascinating.
Speaker 2 (56:18):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (56:26):
You've been listening to a conversation with Douglas Gaton, Chief
Lexicographer at the Lexicon, a creative organization that developed the
Ecological Benefits Framework and that is now testing that model
with regeneritive programs around the world. You can learn more
about the Ecological Benefits Framework at Ebfcommons dot org. EBF
Commons is all one word, no space, no dash, Ebfcommons
(56:48):
dot org. And you can discover the story behind Douglas
and the Lexicon at the Lexicon dot org. The Lexicon
is also one word, no space, no dash. That's the
Lexicon dot org. The Ecological Benefits Framework, as we heard,
is a work in progress, but that's understandable because we
still we know so little about nature and the universe
(57:09):
that we live in. Even as we're learning more all
the time, we recognize the gap between where we are
and where we really need to be, and the idea
that the EBF and bodies is a basis for making
practical decisions about where to invest limited resources in regenitive
programs in order to make the biggest impact, biggest positive impact.
(57:30):
Those decisions must be grounded in real world experience, and
with twenty four projects operating in diverse settings around the planet,
Douglas's team is doing the hard and time consuming work
that can make the EBF a useful guide to understanding
the positive impacts we can achieve in the race to
restore nature. Douglas described the EBF as a Rosetta stone, which,
(57:52):
when it was discovered by archaeologists, provided a bridge between
modern and ancient Egyptian languages. It created a bis for
understanding a lost language. To a degree, we've lost our
connection with nature, and EBF is the beginning of how
we re engage with the reality that we live in.
After all, humans are still just beginning to see into
(58:14):
the complexity the myriad systems that add up to what
we call nature. We need a basis not just for
measuring environmental impact. We need a language to talk about
and to debate the means that humans will invest in
to restore the planet and preserve a healthy human society.
For centuries, either because we were ignorant of or chose
(58:35):
to ignore the price that the planet pays for our actions,
advanced economies have treated the world in which we live
as being separate from us, as externalities, as the bookkeepers
like to put it, that need to be struck from consideration. Now,
the dawning realization that we're intricately integrated into the world,
not a visitor who has carte blanche to take home
(58:56):
whatever souvenirs we want from the system of the world
without any concer sequences. In the face of that, EBF
can be a more than a bookkeeping mechanism. It can
become a basis for any decision that will impact the air, water, soil, biodiversity,
carbon and human communities we rely on for survival, and
(59:16):
it can be the foundation for investing to create a thriving,
nature aligned society. So stay tuned. We'll keep track of
the EBF as it continues to evolve, and I hope
you'll take a moment to share this or any of
the more than five hundred episodes of sustainability in your
ear with a friend, with a family member, or somebody
that you mute on the street. Folks, writing review on
your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us.
(59:40):
You are the amplifier that can spread more ideas to
create less waste. So please tell your friends, your family, coworkers,
those people on the street that they can find us
on Apple, Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of
podcast goodness they prefer. Thank you for your support. I'm Mitracliffe.
This is sustainability in your ear and we will be
(01:00:01):
back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks,
take care of yourself, take care of one another, and
let's all take care of this beautiful planet of ours.
Have a green day.
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you
are in this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability
in your Ear, the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition
to a sustainable carbon neutral society. I'm your host, Mitt Rackliffe.
Thanks for joining this conversation with a returning guest. As
climate change accelerates and ecosystems are further strained by extractive industries,
(00:32):
the question isn't just how we reduce harm, it's how
we generate benefits to nature. What if we had a
shared language to value nature not just for what it
provides economically, but for how it supports all life. What
if communities, companies, and governments could align around a new
ecological standard that's not rooted in carbon accounting alone, but
(00:53):
in regenerating the very systems that sustain life, including human life.
Behind the Ecological Benefits Framework, A bold and let's just
say it, beautifully designed tooled is developed by Douglas Gaton
and his team at the Lexicon. You may remember that
the EBF launch was featured on Sustainability in Your Ear
(01:14):
in twenty twenty three, and we wanted to touch base
for an update about this important project. Douglas is a storyteller, filmmaker,
and social innovator who dedicated his career to reshaping the
way that we think and talk about food, farming, and
the planet. His work has been featured in PBS, National
geographic and museums around the world, and it pairs immersive
(01:36):
visual narratives with systems thinking to bring complex sustainability ideas
to life for the buewer. With the Ecological Benefits Framework,
Douglas is tackling one of his most ambitious projects yet.
The framework identifies six core areas that must benefit to
qualify a project as regenerative, that is that it has
(01:57):
to benefit air, water, soil, biodiversity, equity, and carbon. The
framework provides a practical way for communities, nonprofits, funders and
investors to measure regeneration, not just financial risk. The EBF
is being piloted across twenty four case studies globally and
will soon be featured on a BBC series called Unearthing
(02:18):
the Future. Today, We're going to unpack how the EBF
came to be, explore what it looks like in action,
and hear how Douglas envisions this becoming a new baseline
for ecological storytelling and investments. You can learn more about
the Ecological Benefits Framework at the ebfcommons dot org website.
EBF commons is all one word, no space, no dash,
(02:39):
ebfcommons dot org. And if you'd like to learn more
about Douglas and his work, visit the lexicon dot org.
That's also one word with no space, no dash, thelexicon
dot org. We're going to get to the conversation right
after this brief commercial break. Welcome to the show, Douglas.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
How you doing today, I'm doing awesome. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Thanks for joining us. We participated in the launch of
the EBF and I wanted to ask how you're doing
with it. But first, can you tell us how the
idea for the Ecological Benefits Framework first took root with you.
What was the specific gap and environmental and regenderat reporting
that you were trying to address?
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Well? For five years, I created and ran a program
with funding and support from Google called can You Change
the Future? And it had about a thousand companies and
NGOs in it and it ran for five years. It
looked at everything from how meat works on a regional level,
(03:46):
to alternative proteins to regenda agriculture to food is medicine.
It was a pretty diverse collection of subjects, you know,
even you know, food packaging and single use plastics. And
what was an interesting theme that I'm urged across all
of those different spheres of work is that increasingly people
(04:09):
don't care about certifications. Now, I don't say that with
a jauntest view of certifications. It's just that certifications, while valuable,
are essentially designed to warrant that you did something and
(04:29):
that someone validated that you actually did something. But doing
something is not the same as actually generating the result.
And I think people are realizing increasingly that it's less
important to say that you did something and more important
to show you what happened because you did something. And
(04:52):
instead of a certification model that is checking a lot
of boxes, people are trying to determine and they're coalescing
around what are the impacts that they need to achieve.
Most so, we've had twelve thousand years of perfecting what
would be an extractive economy, and we've applied this attractive
(05:14):
mentality to all of the resources around us. In fact,
we've lived with this notion that our resources are infinite
only until a generation ago where we began to realize,
hang on a second, this air, this water, these soils,
these are actually finite resources that can be degraded or
(05:37):
improved by our activities. Right. So, every child learns that
you have to put away what you pick up, that
you have to clean up your room, you know. But
as adults, we've somehow forgot all of those really valuable
lessons that we are taught as children, and one of
them is the responsibility to mitigate the wake that we
(05:59):
make as we move through the world. And so what
emerged with these activators that we did was, as I said,
people carrying less about certifications and more about impacts. And
what was really amazing is they settled on the same
six every time. I went back to Google and I said,
I hate to bum you out. I know that we
spend a lot of time and energy on this, but
(06:20):
I can reduce our learnings just six words. I'm sorry,
it's so simple, but that's how it works. We then
brought a number of companies to Mountain View and asked
them to explain their es TO reporting, and it turned
out that their ESG reporting did not go beyond those
six words that we had determined, and those six words
were air, water, soil, biodiversity, equity, and carbon. And when
(06:47):
companies try to show that they're mitigating the negative externalities
that they're creating, they end up talking about activities in
those six areas. Invariably. It's one of those uncanny truths
that are in front of us. And if we were
thinking about logical we'd go, well, of course, but yet
we've never actually done something with it. So what we
did was we said, this is an ecological benefits framework
(07:11):
for how to reverse and mitigate twelve thousand years of
extraction and extractive practices and how you reverse that trend
and make people more mindful. And one of the things
that we determined was you can't tell people how to
do what they're doing differently. You can't tell them how
to measure what they do differently. Everyone has systems that
(07:34):
they've invested time and money in. So instead of getting
people to operate on the head end and others on
the ground in their operations on how they're measuring their impact,
what we said is, what if we get them to
explain the outcomes, how you visualize what the result of
those capturing those positive impacts and what if we create
(07:55):
a standard framework. Now it's not a new idea. I
mean when the the tech companies created the first smartphones
at the beginning of the two thousands, Imagine the chaos
that would have rained if every smartphone had to have
a different way to talk to every smart device. That
would mean that if you went to rent a car,
like a Hyundaie, you couldn't rent it if you had
(08:15):
an Apple phone, because Hyundai, being Korean, would be based
upon a Sensung smartphone protocol. They figured out, they got together,
they said, yeah, this is crazy, We're going to have
to collaborate even though we're competitors, and they created a Bluetooth.
So Bluetooth is a digital handshake that allows any smartphone
you can talk to any smart device. Bluetooth is actually
a nonprofit and so what we said was, why can't
(08:37):
we make a Bluetooth for the planet. Why can't we
create a framework that allows everyone, regardless of their activities,
regardless of how they talk about the impacts that they're
trying to positively address. What if we could have a
standard way. So that's how the Ecological Benefit Framework began.
And so we had a group of almost two hundred
(08:57):
people from the carbon market space, and a lot of
other players join in to figure out how we might
apply that. We took projects from around the world and
then we were able to render them using this framework,
and it was very a very powerful exercise that we
then released Climate Week in New York a few years ago,
(09:18):
and then from there, you know, it's really taken off
and we've been racing to keep up with it.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Now, let's talk about the frame in which this recognition
of the limits to the resources that we live or
depend upon was realized. The other thing that happened in
that same generation was the explosion of media and the
ability for us to reach and communicate all of these
stories about the impacts that we have on the world.
You're a communicator by nature and by training. How's media
(09:47):
essential to changing human society and individual behavior at this
particular moment in time.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Well, you know, our organization is the Lexicons, So we
focus on the language. That's what our primary focuses. And
you know, our thinking is that if you teach somebody
a word, that might be the most radical activity you
could have. And those words are essentially the toolbox that
(10:17):
you use to form ideas. So in teaching people the
right words, you can unlock new ways for them to communicate,
new ways for them to understand things that they might
otherwise not understand. When we began in Lexicon, we began
gathering these taxonomies, these ways that people speak across all
these domain areas. And what was really interesting about that
is that it's almost it's like almost a curse that
(10:43):
the higher level or degree of expertise that you have
in a domain area, it's almost like this inverse curve
that the more you know about something, the more difficult
it is for you to explain it to a layperson.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
Yeah, we're more insulated and jargon oriented when we talk
as an expert.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Well sure, and you know, and you should be right.
So you are essentially speaking at very high level con
you know, on a high level conceptual you know, landscape
with other experts, so of course you're going to be
using you know, technical jargon. So what we did from
the very very beginning of the Lexicon was we went
one domain area after another, and the first thing we
(11:27):
had experts do is and we use you know, natural
language processing tools like all kinds of tools to identify
if you're an expert talking about something what is the
language that you're using. We then found ways to make
that language easier for civilians, for common people to understand,
and invariably along the way, those experts asked us to
(11:51):
help them and communicating otherwise complex ideas in ways that
general people could understand. So that resulted in books that
we've done. We've had a two thousand exis bits explaining
these concepts, concepts just in food and agriculture TV shows
with PVS, so we've really spent the last fifteen twenty
years really helping experts explain the nuances of what they've
(12:16):
learned in their travels, in their journeys with their research,
so that a late person can understand. Because if the
bulk of a population doesn't grasp and have an immediate
sense of the importance of key concepts, you're never going
to get widespread adoption of the things that you need
to have to create solutions. I'll give you an example.
(12:39):
The experts in the areas of specifically food and agriculture,
but now it's in other places have identified that. In
the twentieth century, as we rapidly industrialized across all these
different sectors, we began really focusing on making things as
cheaply as possible. And so one of the ways that
you can make something as cheaply as possible is by
(13:01):
not considering, for example, the negative environmental consequences that result.
You know, it's why you have you know, superfund sites
EPA superfund sites where companies produce something at great rate
and polluted local waterways or or groundwater and then abandon
those those factories and sites and moved on someplace else,
(13:22):
and so we're, you know, we're left with the residue
of that, and those are what it's called the negative
externalities of an appigration. So economists began talking about a
ways to factor in all those negative externalities into the
price of something, and they began talking about true cost accounting,
the idea that you're not not actually paying the real
(13:43):
price when you're buying something, and so what you're doing
is you're paying a artificially low price that encourages even
more waste and even more environmental degradation. And so the
true cost movement came out of that and kind of
sistered that was this idea of these planetary boundaries that
we can't go beyond. And then what came out of
(14:05):
that was something else called the circular economy, This idea
that you have to look at everything you're doing along
the way of making something and address all of the
negative externalities along the way to try to mitigate them.
Each of those three examples have been the dominant approach
in industry internationally to mitigate negative externalities. The problem is
(14:30):
both a language problem consumers don't understand what circularity is.
And it's also a problem that it's it's the wrong
way to look at something because nobody gets out of
the bed in the morning to do less bad. And
so these are all do less bad models, true cost accounting,
the circular economy, the nine planetary boundaries, these are all
(14:54):
we need to do less bad. And ironically that makes
zero sense to a to a general you know, like
to the general public.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Nobody likes to hear the word no.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Nobody likes to hear the word no. But what if
you've got out of bed in the morning to do
more good? And what if you were part of collective
enterprises that led to more good? And this is it's
partially behavior, you know, understanding behavior engineering, it's partially communications,
and it's partially that while all of the answers presented
(15:30):
by Toro across the county or non planetary boundaries or
the circle economy. They're correct, they have never taken hold
with the general public because they are these these these
do less bad models. And so the Ecological Benefit Framework
said this, this, these are the six areas where you
can do more good. And the irony of ironies is
(15:54):
that it turns out that when you do more good,
that means, as a consequence, that you're doing less bad.
And so it's taking that same collection of data sets
and applying them towards positive impacts as opposed to mitigating
negative externalities. That's the rule. And I would say the
uherited rule that understanding communication plays in getting people to
(16:22):
do the right thing and to take more responsibility and
being wedded to being solution oriented as opposed to being,
you know, dealing with risk.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
So, how can a consumer use the EBF to make
a better decision to do some good? And let's say,
just in particular with regard to air or water, can
you how would they how would they assess that opportunity?
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Well, so we we made a couple of really we
had a couple of radical conclusions that came out of
our first sprint with the ecological benefits framework, and that
framework primary raily focused on people in carbon markets. It
was actually funded by people in carbon markets, and it
(17:07):
was funded by the enabling technologies you know that would
be cryptocurrencies, blockchain, et cetera, that are kind of the
plumbing that allows that marketplace to work. But my problem
with the carbon market is that it's it's a mostly
(17:28):
disingenuous marketplace in the sense that we have people that
I mean, it's pretty pathetic that it's twenty twenty five
and our primary methodology used to address climate change is
a privatized marketplace where people profit off of claims that
(17:48):
are made that are not standardized and often of dubious value.
And it's pretty embarrassing that we're only focusing on carbon
because anytime a butterfly or a bird or a lizard
goes extinct, that means it's not coming back. That's a
(18:10):
forever event. So you can't tell me that biodiversity loss
is less important than sequestering carbon. You could say the
same for air and water. That nature doesn't think in
terms of benefits and co benefits. Nature, it turns out,
understands that they're all intrinsically connected. And so we started
(18:31):
in the carver market, and we started by trying to
explain to people in carver markets that they are really
doing a disservice, not a service, but a disservice because
they're not embracing the holistic nature of how natural systems work.
It's essentially malpractice to participate in carbon markets because you're
essentially operating under the assumption that these other areas aren't
(18:53):
worth monitoring, or are not of value, or are not connected.
It's how you create an aten of consequences, you know.
And so when you look at air and water quality,
you can't again fall into the same same trap that
people have fallen into in carbon markets. These all have
to be addressed holistically. And so what happened after our
first sprint, which was in a pretty amazing journey and
(19:16):
you know, one of those classic cases of a project
that didn't have an enemy, everyone realized the value of
it is. I had an individual from the World Bank
who approached me afterwards and he said, you know, you're
you've been talking all about the carbon market, but the
carbon market is fractional compared to the amount of money
(19:37):
that's deployed by multi laddle development banks to address these challenges.
And when multilateral development banks addressing challenges, they do it
holistically as you you know, as nature does. And so
they said to me, you should focus the next phase
of the Ecological Benefits Framework on working with multi ladle
development banks. And so at the same time we were
(20:02):
approached by the World Food Program who said, can you
use this to explain the economic activities that are required
to make an impact on the ground. So they talked
about Chad for example, in this house, you know, very
challenging because of political unrest and because of drought. It's
(20:24):
a very challenging area of the world. And interestingly enough,
during that same period we were approached by in global agriculture.
There are fifteen centers which are called the International Centers
for Agriculture Research, which obviously makes sense, like there would
be one for rice or wheat or corny who exists.
They're called the CGRs. So the CGRs approached us after
(20:48):
they looked at the Ecologicalvendment Framework, and so the World
Food Program what ended up being the Agent Development Bank,
which I think is the second largest multi laditivement bank
in the world, and the CGRs approached us all within
two weeks of us presenting this work the first phase
of work for EBA, and said, how can you help
us to standardize how we talk about impacts? And so
(21:10):
for the past sixteen months, I've been all over the world,
you know, you know, I've been in the Hells, I've
been you know, all through Africa, South America, Asia, and
I'll kind of walk through them really really quickly. Each
of each of them are different. The World Food Program
in Chad, they have people on the ground trying to
explain what they're doing and trying to standardize how they
(21:30):
gather information and then how they can assess it. But
they it turns out they have no standardized way to
do that. Everybody's just gathering whatever information information they can
on the fly, which then can't really be integrated into
a system where you can assess the impacts so that
you can make better decisions down the road. The result
is you're gathering a lot of information that you don't need,
(21:52):
and you're gathering information that isn't interoperable with other information.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
So the World Food is in the system. Would you
describe that as or is that that's something we can
tune out?
Speaker 2 (22:02):
I just think that. I think that what you often
have is you have maybe you have a group at
the World Food Program that's interested in gender, or another
one that's the agriculture team, another one that is the
nutrition team, And so you have these different teams that
different different objectives, and they have different UH data gathering
methods that they use on the ground, and those those
(22:24):
and then they're and then they're gathered placed you know,
digitally in a cloud, but not in formats that are interoperable.
And so having things like a standardized question set that
gathers information in standardized areas that are then replicable in
other nations and the hells you know, it will allow
(22:46):
them to understand what is working what isn't because the
when you have international aid, the thing that you don't
want to do is keep on doing the same exercise
re activity that isn't useful in other places, hoping to
somehow have a different result. But you do want to
see what works and double down on that time and
(23:08):
time again. That's the great problem of international geos is
how do you replicate success? So EBF allowed them to
have a framework to do that. In the case of
the cgi RS, these fifteen international centers for agriculture. These
are the people on the ground working with farmers in
(23:30):
one hundred countries around one hundred and something countries around
the world. They have coalesced around two principles of that
drive their agriculture agriculture philosophy. Let's say one is agroecology
and the other one is nature positive solutions. But yet
ironically they don't have a standardized framework to assess what
(23:52):
works so that they can replicate it elsewhere. Now you
might say, well, these things are all very place based,
and so you have to take into a out that
what works in one place when works someplace else. Absolutely
that's true. But within the within any model, whether it's
agrocology or ancient posit solutions, you have to have it
there's a set of universal principles. Then you have to
(24:13):
have an adaptive framework to show you can localize that
in different areas, in different regions. But if you don't
have a standardized question set from the very beginning, again,
you might be gathering information that's not useful to anybody
or and you're not gathering the right information that could
lead to better operational decision making. So that led to
the Lexicon team. You know, us going you know, to
(24:35):
Kenya and going you know, we can go to India
and Columbia, you know, and these other countries to work
on the ground with with with these agronomists and plant breeders,
soil scientists, community organizations to help them come up with
a standard framework. And now we've done that. So we
we've now built the world's first standardized framework that explains
(24:58):
nature positive solutions. And this ecological bet of framework was
the really efficacious tool that allowed us to get there.
And in twenty twenty five or twenty twenty six we
will expand that out even further in nature posititions and
also an agrocology. So they finally now have a framework
of interoperability that can help them to identify what to
(25:18):
double down on. In the case of the Asia Development Bank,
well they have a twenty billion dollar fund in Asia
for coaster restoration and so I spent the last year,
you know, shuttling back and forth to Cambodia. Cambodia is
one of foreign nations in the world that have been
red flag. You can't buy seafood from that country because
of the mismanagement of their fisheries, and so what they're
(25:42):
trying to do through all these interventions that are that
are creating livelihoods for women and better stewardship practices and
coastal fisheries. They need to be able to show their
donors what success looks like, and increasingly what that success
is is how they are contributing positively in those areas
(26:07):
that I've outlined an air, water, soil, bio verse secret
and carbon. You know, we have a carbon credit now
and we have increasingly a biodiversity crediting, right, but it's
it's in many ways it's it's silly. It's like people
are bolting a biodiversity credit, not often on the side
(26:28):
of a carbon credit. But you know, as we've seen
over the last twelve months in India, the air quality
is so poor in some areas that people have negative
health consequences even inside their own homes indoors, and so
there's going to be an aircraft an air credit in
(26:48):
India the next two to three years. We're seeing the
same with the same thing with water throughout you know,
much of North Africa and now even going down into
East Africa, we're going to be seen water credits that
are going to emerge, and it's these are inevitabilities. You know,
as we continue to degrade our soils, people are going
to connect regeneral agriculture with a soil credit, and so
(27:13):
invariably we're going to end up with credits in all
six of these areas. And we can either do it
sequentially in a kind of a nonstructured way, or simply
bite the bullet and identify that these are the six
areas we need to address and begin tracking data one
(27:34):
when we're on the ground that actually expresses what these
values are, the impacts that we can have to mitigate
the negative externalities that we've created through our executive practices
in the six areas. But you know, these are inevitabilities.
It's not like a you know, an idealized notion of
(27:54):
how to respond to the planet. We're going to have
to create a way to identify impacts, which might include credits.
But also, you know, credits are one way. You know,
there's there there's many ways to address the flow of capital.
There's the marketplace in terms of consumer goods. There's there's
(28:18):
philanthropic activities that give grants. There's there's governments that that
can provide loans, and then there's the venture community that
can provide investments. And the reason why we don't have
an acceleration towards addressing these challenges in a holistic way
is because we aren't measuring and so if we're not
(28:39):
coalescing around these are the positive areas where we need
to create impact, and if we're not identifying what our
activities are that can help to mitigate that, we're never
going to be able to reverse the situation where we
now find ourselves, which is we're really we're really degrade
(29:01):
at a rapid scale everything around us because we don't
have a positive outlook on what we can do to
mitigate that as individuals.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Douglas, this is a great basis for the rest of
our conversation, but we need to take a quick commercial break.
We're going to be right back now. Let's get back
to our conversation with Douglas Gayton. He is the co
founder and chief lexicographer at The Lexicon, which is launching
(29:33):
the Ecological Benefits Framework. That's a science and culturally grounded
method for quantifying environmental impact. So, Douglas, the EBF includes
equity as one of the environmental benefits. That's a controversial
word these days, though it shouldn't be because it belongs
in a discussion about nature. After all, we're part of it,
not separate from nature. But how do you suggest we
(29:54):
think about human socio economic impacts when assessing regenerative projects.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Well, you know, equity is a it's so it's a wormhole.
The five you know, air, water, soil, biodiversity, and carbon
are carbon. You could say carbon, you could say carbon equivalents,
you could say climate. But in the United States people
(30:23):
talk about regendaive agriculture. And what's funny when I asked
them to explain what regenda agriculture is, they talk about
all of these social elements, none of which are actually
regenda agriculture. But I don't want to point out to
people that what they're really talking about is agrocology, because
agricology is on the one side, it's these agricultural practices,
(30:49):
many of them being indigenous or traditional practices, and then
on the other side is the social component, how it
relates to people and communities, et cetera. So when people
in in the United States talk about regender agriculture, more
often than not, what they're really talking about is agrocology.
And so the next phase of our work with the
(31:12):
c g rs these you know, fifteen centers globally for agriculture,
is is looking at nature, positive solutions and agrocology and
having two spheres. One is the Ecological Benefit Framework and
they are the Social Benefit Framework. Okay, yeah, that will
be the next eighteen months, and then after that in
(31:33):
twenty twenty seven, we'll finally be able to look at
the Economic Benefit Framework and then our global vision, our
vision that will take us in the next three years
to get there is what we call c see, which
is the social, economic, and ecological benefits that we're all
trying to contribute to. And that's the you know, just
(31:57):
as nature, you know, is holistic, We really see that.
The the C framework, which will which we will start
to talk about in twenty twenty seven is is really
where we're going, you know, Mitch. To this day, we've
never spoken publicly about about EBF. We've never made press
(32:19):
releases or you know, gone and spoken at conferences and
and and made much made much noise about it, mainly
because we really wanted to ground truth this and see
how elastic it is. There's a number of things I
(32:39):
can't get into today with companies that we're working closely
with because as ESG reporting falls apart, and it it's,
you know, something that nobody ever knew anyway. But they're
they're looking to explain the activities in a much more
(33:01):
holistic way, and companies are now coming to us to
do that. We've taken the path of not talking publicly
about what we're doing because this needs to be ground truth.
It's not really ready for the general public. We watched
very closely at what happened with circularity and true cost
accounting and planetary boundaries. How consumers never really embraced these concepts.
(33:26):
They were more like inside baseball.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
Jargoning. Yeah. I once.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
Took a very interesting high networth individual to a conference
that was about a lot of these ideas, and you know,
he's a software engineer, and as we were leaving the
place where the event was gathered, I asked him how
it was, and he just shook his head and looked
(33:57):
at me kind of sideways, and he said, jargonears. And
I really love that term because I think that people obviously,
people in many cases make announcements of things before they start,
and make great claims about what they're going to achieve
(34:17):
and do. And I get that they're trying to get funding,
or they're trying to make noise and get above and
get above that noise. But we subscribe to a different
notion here, which is really that this stuff is hard
to do. You can't really make claims for things until
you know that you're right, And more often than not,
even if you know that you're right, what's the benefit
(34:38):
of making too much noise? I remember, well, yeah, you know,
so we don't do that.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
Well, here's the question that follows from that is what's
the difference between progress and perfection in describing the potential impacts?
And how do you make those incremental steps towards something
that we can all have a shared understanding of.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Yeah, well, first of all, you know, I teach at
slow foods Uh. Slow food is a food movement and
its headquarters is in Italy, and I teach their graduate
students every year. It's actually called the course is called
the Storytelling of Food. And I say to them the
first day that whatever work that we're going to do together,
everything has to be perfect. And the students just go
(35:23):
crazy when I say that. They're like, you know, how
can you do that? You know you're sitting a high
bar and then the last day I put a slide
on the screen and I say, you know, there is
only perfect and then the next slide says perfect doesn't exist.
So we have to we have to operate under the
(35:48):
assumption that everything we're doing is perfecting, even if knowing
it does not exist or the time being. Yeah, and
also because people start to make quarters or you know,
they start saying things that you just irritate the hell
out of me, like it's good enough or you know,
it's it's it's it's good enough to work right now,
(36:08):
you know. And what's the thing about perfection is the
enemy of I.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
Don't know something, right of progress?
Speaker 2 (36:15):
Yeah, I mean, the thing about it is that there
is a you know, it's when you're when you're developing things.
A great lesson I learned from Google is the difference
between being incremental and being iterative, right, and so iterative
is that you're constantly releasing something. I mean, look, Google
(36:36):
put Gmail beta on their email client and the beta
stayed there for three years. People thought it was called
People who didn't know how software worked, they called their
their software. They called their email program Gmail beta because
they didn't know. Yeah, but Google's idea was this thing's
you know, is definitely not ready, Let's release it. And
(36:58):
I think we have to embrace you know, what's the
software world called m vps and minimum viable products. We
have to think Italy, we can't wait, and so we
have been putting EBF out into the world. But we've
also been very sober about it in the sense that
we're aware that we don't know what we don't know right,
(37:19):
so we're aware that we have to ground truth this
and we've learned a lot about how it works and
how it and where it's effication and where it doesn't.
And so we don't feel like we've not released something
or not worked with something because we're not ready. We're
never going to be ready, and we're constantly groving. However, Mitch,
(37:41):
I would draw live beeing that and going out and
talking at Davos or something about we figured out the solution.
I'd much rather be talking at larger venues when there
is already is this understanding, before we've spoken among people
that are using it, it already works, and then we
(38:01):
can lay out the broader vision. But until there's the adoption,
not widespread adoption, but until it's the adoption by the
key players. Right, So inter words, when food companies make
pronouncements about all the great stuff that they're doing or
what they're going to do by twenty thirty or whatever else,
it is has zero value. But when people actually on
(38:22):
the ground that are doing the actual work, when they're
implementing things at scale, that has value. And so that
is where we spend our time is how do you
get the people that are actually doing the actual work
to operationalize things. The problem, Mitch, in the case that
we have is that there's a problem. There's a problem
(38:44):
in there are institutional barriers for how we gather information
to explain the impacts that we are trying to achieve,
and part of those is that it costs money to
gather data. Yeah, and so often people the reason why,
you know, there's only a biodiversity market and that's that's
(39:07):
emerging and not an air and water. Of course, you
could say there are certain, you know, fragmented cases where
air and water credits have been have been and I
have been evolved in some of those, but there hasn't
been a holistic model because while people I appreciate this
as a valuable idea, they the institutional barrier is that
there's not an efficacious way to gather the data, and
(39:28):
that data gathering comes at a cost. So you have
to figure out what the minimum viable data set is,
in other words, the least amount of you need right
in order to make a decision, you know, an operational decision.
And that's what we've been working on, is that real
kind of you know. And the other thing that we
work with on a daily basis is helping people to
understand the difference between quantitative measurement and qualitative measurement. And
(39:53):
often there is this overabundance of trust and quantitative measurement
as opposed to qualitative measurement, and we are in which
is to our great detriment. I'll give you a few
examples of that. When people tell me climate people tell
me that they have gathered all this data on certain
(40:15):
you know, climate markers, or let's let's I mean the
easy one is carbon sequestration, certain carbon sequestration markers. It
turns out that everyone is gathering carbon sequestration data using
a different tool, a different pathology, some more efficacious than others.
(40:36):
And then they they start to take these different data
sets and they start to aggregate them. So then what
they have is a bunch of data that's been gathered quantitatively,
all using various tools and methodologies, all of let's say,
different levels of quality that you could assign to that
(40:57):
quantitative measurement. But now they're agrigating it. So now you
can't tell which piece of data was gathered which way,
but now it's all been aggregated.
Speaker 1 (41:06):
Right.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
It's how we had, you know, It's how we had
the Great Crisis of two thousand and eight with mortgages
is because they aggregated good mortgages with bad mortgages, and
you couldn't tell what the hell was going on. And
so we have a lot of this. Whenever people talk
to me about large data sets, then I find out
they've aggregated it from any data sets. It's useless information.
But people have such a high regard for something that's
(41:29):
considered quantitative that you can't get them to understand that
the data that they're making decisions from is completely useless,
pointless information because it's aggregated, and you've hidden the really
valid ways of measuring carbon supprecision against the ones that
actually aren't so valid. And so the comet Farm tool
created by Colorado State and USDA is the most. It's
(41:50):
the most it's the standard tool that's used in agriculture
to measure your impacts. And one of the people that
architected that tool worked with us on a project by
Regina Agriculture, and they said that, you know, the problem
is is that we put too much value on quantitative data,
when when we could qualitatively make decisions based upon what's
(42:11):
available in base of all what we know and our expertise,
but we do not trust qualitative data, right. And so
one of the most powerful ways to measure regenerative farming
and its positive impacts was actually made by a man
Wendell Gilbert, who's like my guru from a point of
blue conservation and Wendell Gildgert there's always my go to, right,
(42:34):
Wendell Gilbert said, I asked him how he measures regenerative practices,
and he said, he walks out into the middle field
and he closes his eyes and he listens, and he
immediately is able to figure out how many birds he
can hear in the field. The type of birds that
they are tells them, the types of insects, that tells
(42:57):
them what's happening in the soil and that tells them,
you know, those those trophic relationships all by come from
making a politative assessment. Are you know, for people like
Gynda Gilgert and conservationists more valuable than all of that
aggregated data about carbon sequestration.
Speaker 1 (43:15):
When you know, and that's my indigenous wisdom, it's a
different sense of our relationship with the space we're in,
and one that's truly holistic, right, And also you know.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
Don't I don't fault the incredible scientific and technological breakthrough
of the twentieth century. That was an extraordinary century, but
it also was a century of great specialization where people
became really a dept or an expert in one very
thin sliver of a domain area, but they suddenly lacked
(43:48):
that holistic understanding of how it fit into everything else,
which of course you could say is valuable on some level,
but also we lose that holistic thinking that allows us
to have to integrate ideas that in one area in
other places. And Eskimo has I don't know, seventy something
ways to describe ice, And you could say as a
(44:09):
result that for an Eskimo, an adjective is a form
of measurement. We don't value what is right in front
of us. We don't value qualitative measurement. You know. I
was down in the down in the Amazon last year
with people, let's say that are in carving markets, and
they were going on and on to the with the
(44:29):
speaking to the indigenous people, you know, through a translator
that took the English to Spanish and then from the
Spanish into the Indigenous language they spokes. It was like
like a game of Post Office. But they were explaining
all of the remote sensing that they were doing, and they,
you know, they kept them pointing at the sky. And
then when that was explaining the Indigenous people, they had
(44:50):
this puzzled look on their face and they started pointing,
and they kept on using this word. And I said
to the translator, what is that word that they're using.
They're saying the high level of the trees. I mean
the canon. I said, the canopy. They said, yes, the canopy.
And what the Indigenous people were saying is how can
these people tell us what's happening in our rainforest when
(45:11):
everything that they're gathering is above the canopy, everything that
we're experiencing is below the canopy. But yet all these
carbon credits and you know forestry, you know, credits and
investments and tokenization of force don't take into account the
qualitative measurement that comes from indigenous knowledge, and so it's
(45:32):
just a it's just it's a it's a it's a
really oddly, sadly imbalanced way of valuing data and of
only trusting things off spreadsheets. That's why some of the
people you know who are really adept at understanding the
integration of indigenous knowledge when they talk about biodiversity, all
(45:53):
they talk about, you know, rainforests, all they talk about
is jaguars. But they set up cameras to look for
jaguars because the jaguar is the apex predator, just as
that bird in that field was the apex predator. The jaguar.
If you have jaguars, you're basically stating that there's an
entire set of tropic relationships that that jaguar represents. And
(46:15):
so a jaguar is a proxy or explained biodversity. You know,
in Anodia, they're trying to restore these coastal waterways and
the do gong, which is like their amanatee. When the
dugong returns, that signifies tropic health. In coastal water. So
we have to we have to value qualitative data side
(46:38):
by side with quantitative data. And the reason why we
don't advance in our way of looking at credits is
because people are nervous about making claims that are qualitative,
because they believe that funders won't fund or support something
unless it has a spreadsheet associated with it, even if
(46:58):
that spreadsheet is based upon aggregated data of dubious value.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
Well, so, I mean it's clear what we're talking about
is how do you avoid taking a Rube Goldberg approach
to integrating all of these different ways we're accounting for
the things that we used to treat as externalities and
still haven't fully integrated. So, as you've looked at how
the EBF has been applied around the world, what surprised
you most about how the framework performed across different geographies
(47:24):
and related to different goals.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
Well, I'll go back to those people. And when I
was in a in the when I was out in
Columbia done in Amazon, at some point the people, the
native people there, asked the translators to explain who I
was and what I was doing. I explained EVF, and
(47:47):
they were quiet and they all, you know, didn't say anything,
And I said to the translator, what don't they have
they have any comment about? It?
Speaker 1 (47:56):
Was?
Speaker 2 (47:57):
Did I explain it the way that was too complicated?
Did they not understand it? And so the translator asked
them that, and then they responded to the translator, No,
what he explained it was is perfectly obvious. That's how
we look at things here. So I felt very validated
by the simplicity of it. The greatest challenges that I
have faced and our team has faced, is that people
(48:20):
get very, very nervous because they fear that we're talking
about dismantling everything that they do and throwing it all out.
And they've invested, in some cases millions of dollars in platforms,
and the last thing they want to do is have
somebody to come and tell them that it's all invalidated
and that they need to throw it all out. And
(48:40):
so the thing that we have to constantly explain to
people that we're not telling anybody to do their activities different.
We're simply saying that if you want it to be
understood easily understood, you probably need to come up with
a more holistic, easy to understand framework. I'm not going
to say the name of the global funder, but I
was in a meeting recently with a global funder that
(49:03):
has brought us into integrate EBF, and the global funder
said to all of the scientific institutions around the table,
he said, I feel very, very bad to tell you this,
because we give you all this money to put these
reports together, but nobody reads your reports because they're too
complicated and we don't understand them. And I know we
pay for them, and it's it's a requirement you have
(49:24):
to deliver that. And we do trust that you're making
great strides and the work you're doing, but nobody understands
your reports. And we hope, we're hoping that EBF is
going to allow us to be able to see this
international you know, this kind of Rosetta stone that helps
us to understand and in general terms, what you're doing.
When you look at the New York Times, Mitch, New
(49:45):
York Times is taught I mean newspapers, you know, beginning
whatever seventeen eighteen hundreds, they taught people how to how
to gather, how to absorb knowledge in a size format,
which is the headline, A little quote under the headline,
of like a sentence, and then it has like the
dateline like there's a Jakarta, and then it has in
(50:07):
the first sentence it lays out the mission of what
the article is going to be about, and then it
goes down and then at.
Speaker 1 (50:13):
The inverted pyramid and structure for introducing the topic, giving
a summary, and then breaking it down. And it is
our old way of understanding information.
Speaker 2 (50:24):
Right And you know, if you look at if you
think about that structure, anybody in the world can read
any newspaper, you know, if they understand the language and
understand where they are the orientation of that and basically
it is ninety percent of it of people are not
going to read the article, but they're going to just
glance at the headline. Another you know, three percent are
(50:45):
going to want to go deeper and they'll get to
the bottom of the page where it says contingent on
page twenty two. That's for the two percent of the
people that are actually deeply interested. And you have to
create scalable experiences that deliver the content and at different
scales depending upon people's interests. EBF is that EBF is,
(51:05):
this is the high level understanding of what they're doing
in these six areas. Now, if you go into air,
this is the generally what they're doing in air. Now,
if you go deeper into each one of those activities,
you're like, wow, this is the range of things they're
doing that positively impact air quality. But we don't ever
make the assumption that somebody wants to understand the totality
of something. It's more important for us that they get
(51:28):
the general understanding that there's six things that we need
to be leaning into that create that we should be
contributing to create positive impacts in these six areas. That's
what we should be doing. And so EBF is a
way to structure knowledge that allows a lay person to
have a deeper understanding in a standardized format of something
(51:53):
that if they understood more deeply, they would probably be
more deeply engaged in being part of the solution.
Speaker 1 (52:02):
Well, so you're you're doing the work with the BBC
to unearth the future and tell stories about EBF inspired projects.
How are you going to translate what you just described
that that orientation to the problem and the story that
relates to the solution to the problem for the viewer.
(52:22):
Tell us about that and when does the series appear
so people can start to dig into this thinking.
Speaker 2 (52:27):
Sure, So first of all, it's the it's a group
within BBC called BBC story Works. And while we are
deeply engaged with with BBC story Works on these stories,
I would not presume that we're going to be driving
the editorial side of it. That's great, nor saying nor
(52:51):
would I presume that we're going to be you know,
having EBF play out across all those areas. But so
in a way, I would say it's it's too early.
The cake is not in the oven. Our main role
is to part of what the Lexicon does is we
support people in their storytelling efforts and often they either
(53:13):
don't have the deep relationships with a lot of the
key players, or they don't understand maybe how those ideas
integrate into a common hole. For example, most you know,
most people outside of food don't know what the concept
of food as medicine is, or they don't know what
the concept of nutrient density is. And you know, these
(53:34):
are kind of real, kind of core drivers of really
massive decision making shifts that are happening in food. So
part of our rold with the Lexicon is always just
to provide, like whether it's BBC story Works or or
companies that deeper insight. But I think it's Yeah, I'm
(53:56):
curious to see how it's going to unfold. It'll be
the series of episodes will be delivered in the fall,
and you know, I'm hopeful that it's going to address
the things that we care most deeply about some of
the domain areas that I mentioned. And but yeah, but
(54:19):
we're still at the very beginning of a long journey.
Speaker 1 (54:22):
Well, I'm really looking forward to seeing those those shows. Douglas,
You've been very generous with your time. How can our
listeners follow your work and spread the word about EBF.
Speaker 2 (54:32):
I mean, we made a decision long ago that we're
not really to spend a lot of time on social media,
So we don't really and I would I would much
rather work on being, like you know, helping our partners
tell their stories that have been hopefully empowered or partially
(54:52):
enabled by our contributions. So we're not really social media focused.
I mean, obviously I am on LinkedIn and uh, from
time to time I will share parts of what we're doing. Certainly,
if people want to understand how to integrate frameworks like
the ecological viguage framework or to really understand how to
(55:14):
how quantitative and qualitative data can be can coexist and
make them help people make better decisions. Then I'm always
here to you know, to support people and help them
and to help them integrate the work. All of the
work that we do, Mitch, has all been people have
(55:35):
come to us. We don't really, We're just pretty focused
on trying to deal with the work that we have
in front of us and getting the adoption on the
ground from our key the key players and partners that
we're working with. But so if any of if any
of your listeners fall into that, into those buckets, and
you know, we're certainly here for them and we would
certainly love to help them and furthering their and deepening
(55:58):
their ability to express their activities and lean more into
these positive impacts in areas that we've discussed.
Speaker 1 (56:06):
Well, I'm glad that you're staying focused and that to
you are valuing depth over that surface stuff that we
see on social media. Douglas, thank you so much for
your time today. It's been fascinating.
Speaker 2 (56:18):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (56:26):
You've been listening to a conversation with Douglas Gaton, Chief
Lexicographer at the Lexicon, a creative organization that developed the
Ecological Benefits Framework and that is now testing that model
with regeneritive programs around the world. You can learn more
about the Ecological Benefits Framework at Ebfcommons dot org. EBF
Commons is all one word, no space, no dash, Ebfcommons
(56:48):
dot org. And you can discover the story behind Douglas
and the Lexicon at the Lexicon dot org. The Lexicon
is also one word, no space, no dash. That's the
Lexicon dot org. The Ecological Benefits Framework, as we heard,
is a work in progress, but that's understandable because we
still we know so little about nature and the universe
(57:09):
that we live in. Even as we're learning more all
the time, we recognize the gap between where we are
and where we really need to be, and the idea
that the EBF and bodies is a basis for making
practical decisions about where to invest limited resources in regenitive
programs in order to make the biggest impact, biggest positive impact.
(57:30):
Those decisions must be grounded in real world experience, and
with twenty four projects operating in diverse settings around the planet,
Douglas's team is doing the hard and time consuming work
that can make the EBF a useful guide to understanding
the positive impacts we can achieve in the race to
restore nature. Douglas described the EBF as a Rosetta stone, which,
(57:52):
when it was discovered by archaeologists, provided a bridge between
modern and ancient Egyptian languages. It created a bis for
understanding a lost language. To a degree, we've lost our
connection with nature, and EBF is the beginning of how
we re engage with the reality that we live in.
After all, humans are still just beginning to see into
(58:14):
the complexity the myriad systems that add up to what
we call nature. We need a basis not just for
measuring environmental impact. We need a language to talk about
and to debate the means that humans will invest in
to restore the planet and preserve a healthy human society.
For centuries, either because we were ignorant of or chose
(58:35):
to ignore the price that the planet pays for our actions,
advanced economies have treated the world in which we live
as being separate from us, as externalities, as the bookkeepers
like to put it, that need to be struck from consideration. Now,
the dawning realization that we're intricately integrated into the world,
not a visitor who has carte blanche to take home
(58:56):
whatever souvenirs we want from the system of the world
without any concer sequences. In the face of that, EBF
can be a more than a bookkeeping mechanism. It can
become a basis for any decision that will impact the air, water, soil, biodiversity,
carbon and human communities we rely on for survival, and
(59:16):
it can be the foundation for investing to create a thriving,
nature aligned society. So stay tuned. We'll keep track of
the EBF as it continues to evolve, and I hope
you'll take a moment to share this or any of
the more than five hundred episodes of sustainability in your
ear with a friend, with a family member, or somebody
that you mute on the street. Folks, writing review on
your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us.
(59:40):
You are the amplifier that can spread more ideas to
create less waste. So please tell your friends, your family, coworkers,
those people on the street that they can find us
on Apple, Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of
podcast goodness they prefer. Thank you for your support. I'm Mitracliffe.
This is sustainability in your ear and we will be
(01:00:01):
back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks,
take care of yourself, take care of one another, and
let's all take care of this beautiful planet of ours.
Have a green day.
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