Finding Nature

Today's guest is a legend of Sydney's sustainability landscape - Lee Stewart. He's here today to chat about the release of his upcoming book titled How to Build Sustainability Into Your Business Strategy, but that becomes a proxy for him and I to chat about and discuss the progression and evolution of sustainability as a notion for organisation's of all shapes and sizes to grapple with for over 20 years. Where it came from, how it's changed and where it may be going.

Lee is someone who has been a literal pioneer here in Australia and in New Zealand who's worked across large multinationals, dominant domestic corporations, in consulting and also as a sole practitioner - and now he can author to that impressive resume. Lee's book is an absolute must if you're curious about better understanding how to see the trees through the forest and step back from the constant demands of the daily doing and the hamster wheel of constant requests and requirements to report any and all versions of ESG and sustainability information.

One thing I appreciated and valued speaking about with Lee was exploring how working in sustainability is deeply personal work. I know myself that ever since beginning to learn about the impacts humans were having on the environment as a kid, then my studies and later all the professional ups and downs that has entailed, this work I attempt is intensely personal. For many of us - once we have seen the world we are living in and heading towards, it's impossible to unsee that. I like to refer to people who are looking to change organisations as sustainability professionals as having some mutated gene that means they can both suffer the challenges of everyday bureaucracy and the disappointments of setbacks, but also hold the remarkable ability to don a proverbial cape and return over and over again, working tirelessly to make a difference, progressively altering the trajectory of wherever it is they work and continue to march along. Lee is someone who is absolutely of that make-up, and it was a pleasure to chat about this and much more with him.

Thank you for listening today, I appreciate it and don't take your precious time for granted. If you enjoyed this episode or any other, please offer a rating as the algorithms appreciate that type of interaction, share the show with friends or colleagues and let them know why you think they'd appreciate listening, and subscribe.

The event schedule for the rest of this year is available - head to the Finding Nature LinkedIn page for more details on this, follow there and also on Humanitix. One last place you can sign up is at  findingnature.substack.com where each month I publish a series of contributions from other professionals working in the sustainability and impact fields on what motivates them, their philosophies and how that informs their daily lives.

The theme for the next newsletter in August is mavericks, and I consider Lee to be just that. This quote from Alan Rickman appropriately captures the spirit of Lee's book and the ask he has of all of us as we seek to bring about a more beautiful, just and sustainable future - Maverick is a word which appeals to me more than misfit. Maverick is active, misfit is passive.

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Joe Steensma is today's guest and he comes all the way from St Louis, Missouri where he is a Professor or Practice at the Brown School which is part of Washington University. Joe has a diverse and fascinating background - a forest kid who came to admire and love birds, studied biology and chemistry and ever since has been applying his deep observational strengths and technical skills to address system challenges by using the lessons he has accumulated from the natural world. Joe is a Ted speaker and has started, run and sold dozens of businesses, and his applied research has seen him work everywhere from the US to Haiti, to Nigeria and here in Australia.

While here in town I was fortunate to grab a bit of his time while he's been delivering a series of 'capitalism for good' and what what biology has taught me about business lectures at Macquarie University.

This chat was not just so much fun, but revealing that the answers we seek are already all around us. The natural world - from the woodpecker to the powerful owl to the interactions and relationships within and between species - can be our teacher, if we let it. I came away realising not only is the disconnect from nature harming us individually and collectively, but what has replaced it - homogenised pictures and stories and ideas and practices of what a good and appropriate life look like - is narrowing our own ability to address problems effectively and create the world we all want to see.

This conversation is both fun and informative. My first foreign national guest which feels like a thing, and I'm grateful for what Joe shared here and helping me to remember and re-ground back into the obvious conclusion that nature is our teacher, our answer, our hope. I hope you enjoy listening. 

Thank you for listening today, I appreciate it and don't take your precious time for granted.

If you enjoyed this episode or any other, please offer a rating as the algorithms appreciate that type of interaction, share the show with friends or colleagues and let them know why you think they'd appreciate listening, and subscribe.

As I mentioned earlier, the event schedule for the rest of this year is available - head to the Finding Nature LinkedIn page for more details on this, follow there and also on Humanitix. One last place you can sign up is at  findingnature.substack.com where each month I publish a series of contributions from other professionals working in the sustainability and impact fields on what motivates them, their philosophies and how that informs their daily lives. The theme last month was meaning, while this month for July it is perseverance.

Considering Joe's love of birds and this theme, there's no quote this week but the migration story of the arctic tern which epitomises perseverance. The arctic tern completes the longest annual migration of any species on earth - travelling each year from the arctic where they breed, south to Antartica, and all while weighing only around 100 grams and with a wingspan over just little over two feet.

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Today's guest is Mark Rowland - a man of many hats and bows, and this conversation is a gem. I promise that you're in for a treat today.

Meeting Mark has been a great gift of starting Finding Nature - he came to one of the events I held a few months ago and since then we've run into each other and chatted a number of times. From those simple introductions it's revealed to me in each conversation that there's another aspect of Mark's career and personality that I have great regard for. A Brit who was accidentally employed by Price Waterhouse (before the Coopers was added), a transformational experience learning systems dynamics at MIT in Boston followed by a year in Korea putting that training to the test. Senior strategy roles, CEO of a big food business, shoe retailing, a leadership position at the US Air Forces' innovation catalyser with an annual budget of US$700 million, to reprising the original Greenhouse challenge platform the Australian government mothballed in 2009. The past few years Mark has played a pivotal role in establishing the remarkable Greenhouse here in Sydney - a lighthouse of climate action and enabling ecosystem that is already making a big difference here. I can't put into words all Mark has undertaken, done and achieved. We get into parts of it today.

Beyond that though is a man of poise, grace and stillness. His commitment to honest self appraisal, evolution and service was a gift to listen to and chat about. Behind the man that builds, connects and makes magic from nothing is someone I didn't expect to be so affected by.

This one really challenged me to contemplate how I think, feel, speak and act - I know there is often inconsistency in those and a lack of alignment between how I want to be and how I am, what I hope to move towards and the actions that follow. This is part of my own journey as both a professional and a person. It is clear to me how important that integration and alignment is for Mark to then be able to enter and be in the world with such vitality and openness, and what he has and is creating is testament to the importance and value of the inner work, of coming into contact with and giving space for him to find and activate his true nature.

Mark's mix of optimism, wisdom, determination, curiosity and authenticity is a gift, and this conversation is one too. I really enjoyed that conversation, and I hope enjoyed listening.

Today's show is delivered with Altiorem. Use the code FindingNature10 to get your first month free on their gold and platinum plans.

Today's show is delivered with Gilay Estate. Add Finding Nature to your booking reservation for a free dinner and breakfast for each night you stay. 

Thank you for listening, I appreciate it and don't take your precious time for granted.

If you enjoyed this episode or any other, please offer a rating as the algorithms appreciate that type of interaction, share the show with friends or colleagues and let them know why you think they'd appreciate listening, and subscribe.

With that in mind, and Mark's insights on confidence and the poise with which he carries himself, this quote from legendary US basketball coach is a good one “Poise and confidence are not possible unless you have prepared correctly. Failing to prepare is preparing to fail. Poise and confidence are a natural result of proper preparation."

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Sam Kernaghan is someone I've had the very good fortune of spending quite a bit of time with over the last couple of years and I'm grateful for that. Sam is the Resilience Director for the Committee for Sydney - an urban policy think tank that has the rare opportunity of being able to work above the challenges and messy interactions of problems, risks and opportunities the city faces. Sam does this after more than 20 years working in similar fields - from his time in Sri Lanka helping with post tsunami reconstruction, to working on and leading a lot of the early Rockefeller 100 Resilient Cities work across the Asia Pacific in countries like Indonesia, India, Japan and New Zealand, before returning to lead this important work back in his home city.

Resilience has been and can be a jargon heavy term - it's had it's time in the sun too just like regeneration seems to be everywhere at the moment. Most simply though I appreciate the simple premise of the word and it's value to what many of us in sustainability and social impact think about - how to withstand pressures and how to adapt and evolve into something stable, healthy and able to be counted on. I think one thing that can be difficult about the term is its wide applicability - everything from individual mental health to the ability of complex urban systems to handle and respond to any number of shocks and stress events. Sam is just the person to be speaking about this though as he has seen more than most as this field of urban resilience has developed and evolved since the mid 2000s as more thinking and effort has gone into better understanding the interplay between how increasing urbanisation, a changing climate and more development highlights or exacerbates existing inequalities and problems in a specific place.

In this chat we cover a tonne - his role at Committee for Sydney and some great work he and his team have been doing on flood and heat perils and risks, the profundity of his time in Sri Lanka in his 20s then the fascinating and important work he's been doing since. There are a lots of valuable insights in this one, I know you'll come away more knowledgable having listened.

I of course loved being able to spend this time with Sam, and his wisdom on the dynamics of power, the virtue of patience and the necessity of preparation all really struck me. I hope you enjoy it.

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Warning: This episode contains conversations about abuse and exploitation, domestic and family violence and some other topics you may find distressing. If those are difficult topics for you then I suggest skipping this episode and coming back next week. There are a number of resources and support services out there including 1800 Respect, Bravehearts, Lifeline and beyondblue where you can access free counselling in Australia.

Hello and welcome to or welcome back to the Finding Nature podcast. My name is Nathan Robertson-Ball and this is my show where I explore the stories, philosophies and missions of change makers who are looking to bust paradigms and contribute to creating a more healthy, just and beautiful world.

Today's friend of the pod is Anna Bowden and she certainly fits this bill. A career spanning nearly two decades across responsible and impact investing with a focus on delivering meaningful outcomes for the most vulnerable in our society. Her role now as the CEO for the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children Australia - or ICMEC - which entails work exactly as it sounds - the protection and safeguarding of children both here in Australia and overseas.

This episode is one I had a few reservations bringing to you but I took comfort in the knowledge that only ten years ago domestic and family violence was a topic often too taboo and stigmatised to discuss in public - this has changed though there is still much more work to be done. Some of the issues Anna and I discuss today like child sexual exploitation, child sexual abuse materials and sexploitation are pervasive and endemic societal issues for many children and adults in our community, and it feels both right and important to do this despite the awkwardness and discomfort. My ask of you as the listener is to give this a go - it's not easy hearing topics like this, and we all wish we didn't have to not only listen to stories like Anna's but also consider the invitation to begin to play a part in preventing these types of incidents occurring in the future.

Anna shares warmly her own personal lived experience as an abuse survivor, as well as helping me to better understand the convoluted and challenging world that she exists in everyday looking to create and ensure a safer world for kids both here in Australia and overseas. We discuss the emergence of artificial intelligence and how it is accelerating these issues, the ways fear and shame keep this problem field relatively invisible, the importance of collaboration but also the frustration of inertia that sits within the system of actors who do have agency to influence and alter the trajectory of these issues, while knowing that there are accessible actions that can thwart the threats of child exploitation and abuse.

Anna speaks a little about trailblazers in this conversation, those who have lit a path in efforts to raise the profile and significant toll domestic and family violence has had and continues to take on mostly women and children in this country. Anna is a trailblazer in the child protection movement. Recent media stories regarding deep fake nude imagery in schools offers an insight into the tip of the iceberg this issue poses for children, their parents and families, schools and teachers, regulators and law enforcement agencies.

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Today's friend of the pod is Rory Martin. Rory has a great title - Vice President of Group Sustainability for Frasers Property, based in Melbourne here in Australia. That is probably the least interesting thing about him though, and the life he's lived til now and the stories he reveals in this chat about his incredible life to date - the highs and the lows - reveal how he has come to be one of Australia's leading corporate sustainability thinkers and practitioners.

Rory grew up in Ireland and trained as an architect, before curiosity got the better of him and he moved to Australia and then evolved his career into the sustainability field, where he's been awarded many recognitions and made even more valuable contributions to many areas of his and our shared professional lives - sustainable finance, climate risk and resilience, passive Haus and australia's terrible home building standards, biophilic design, carbon abatement and how to think about and build buildings that enhance human health and wellbeing. For over ten years Rory has had fingers in a lot of pies, and the achievements and awards he and the teams he has been a part of is recognition of the quality of his thinking, his actions and the person that he is.

I didn't expect this conversation to go into just about every area we did, and Rory shares a remarkable, vulnerable and life changing experience from when he was 21 and travelling across the world from Ireland to Australia before becoming dangerously unwell in Thailand.

I've known Rory for the best part of ten years and what he shares I didn't know about, and most others don't. This conversation is about the gifts of tragedy, the power of curiosity and the virtue of humility.

There was so much that I enjoyed chatting to Rory about as we're about the same age and similar points in our career trajectory, and the ability to reflect upon and contemplate where the corporate sustainability movement and individual is at now, where it has come from and what may lie ahead is such a fascinating one for me. I was reminded that this work and the characteristics of the people who work in this space is part science but seemingly lots of magic too. To make sense of complexity, to build stories to influence and persuade, to constantly be learning, to be pushing the boundaries of what hasn't been done and the imagination involved in that - it's exciting to step back and realise my every day gets to exist in those realms and mindsets which I love and am grateful I found this profession, despite the challenges and disappointments it throws up on a near daily basis.

So with Rory's experience of Guillain Barre syndrome and the rapid onset of paralysis it induced and the life he has lived since, and with the theme of meaning in mind, this quote from Victor Frankl seems apt “We can discover meaning in three ways; firstly, by doing a deed, secondly, by experiencing a value, and thirdly, by suffering.

This was a special conversation, and I was moved by Rory's personal and professional reflections. I hope you are too.

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Here's my questions for you - how are you treating and looking after your body? That same body you rely upon to withstand the daily stresses of living each day? The body you want to take you over mountains or through the ocean or into races or to train in gyms? Well, for me. It's been a bumpy ride. Physical health and exercise have always been a part of my life, but as a result I've gotten injured a lot. There along the way for me for over 15 years has been today's Friend of the podcast - Dr John Panagopoulos.

Pano is someone I have a very deep admiration of and going back to starting this podcast he was someone who was on the 'must chat to' wish list - and here he is. He's one of the best thinkers and greatest professionals I've had the good fortune of spending time with over the years, and he's kept me sane and working and literally moving - something that is vital for my own wellbeing and ability to show up as the attempted change maker I try to be. I have spent literally hundreds of hours with Pano over the years, and his medical records on my time in his practice must be very extensive.

But why is a physio on the Finding Nature podcast? Well - we all need movement, we're born to move as humans and we do. As well though, not only do we need to manage the load of injuries from moving but when we're sedentary we're shifting into postures that can often induce musculo skeletal problems. Sore backs, sore jaws, sore shoulders, sore knees, sore ankles. Tune in now, where do you feel a soreness? A tightness? Somewhere that sparks up every time you try to do a certain movement or exercise? We all have them.

And today's show is about expanding your aperture of how to think about and treat your body, what good physiotherapy is and enables, as well as what healthy behaviours and practices look like to take care of yourself.

I could go on about Pano all day. A great friend, a wise counsel, a sage professional. He's treated tens of thousands of people over the course of a 25 year career.

It's our job to make sure we can show up as best as possible to take on the challenges of our professional lives, and we all need help. Very few people have helped me as much over the years as Pano has.

This chat made me so happy, and I'm so happy to be sharing Pano with you. A true master of his craft who is both someone to learn from in how he has built his mastery, but also the role a healthy body plays for any and all of us who want to go after our activities and goals and competitions, whether that's hiking in nature or being a weekend warrior.

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Camille Goldstone-Henry is today's guest, and her story as a conservation biologist turned nature tech founder and CEO holds lessons for all of us. An upbringing characterised by the normalcy of self sufficiency and localisation  before her tertiary training in conservation biology followed by beginning her career working on the frontlines of species protection and loss.

Like we've been hearing increasingly from the climate scientist community regarding their fears, grief and disdain for the seemingly intractable and repetitious political battles, Camille had her own analogous experience in coming to know intimately the gloomy and despairing statistics and issues facing many of Australia's most threatened species. In this chat we speak to this painful experience and how it acted as the catalyst to look outside her comfort zone and usual environments to enter business school in the hope she could elevate her own skills and capabilities within the conservation and animal preservation sector. From there, and five years later, Camille has founded and is the CEO of Xylo Systems - an exciting and growing Sydney-based nature tech business that is helping address one of the most common barriers to both any form of action and action that is effective - the disjointed landscape of wildlife, species and ecology data.

In this chat we get into more detail about Xylo Systems, its mission and how it offers tangible and accessible ways for basically any business and decision maker to get into action and play a role in reprising and restoring native flora and fauna. We also explore her experience as a female entrepreneur and the subtle yet insane ways by which gender stereotypes and contextual cultural factors remain prevalent on a day to day basis for Camille and her team, the cognitive dissonance that exists between everyday nature loving quiet Australians and the prevailing apartness of our relationship with nature and the progressive decay in ecological and biodiversity indicators both here in Australia and abroad, and the power that we all have in playing a role in reversing this - from our own apartment balcony planting decisions through to corporate asset landscaping protocols like Google's no lawn approach and efforts to provide habitat for the monarch butterflies on their remarkable voyage across North America.

This chat with Camille highlights her and Xylo Systems' approach to nature and species preservation, conservation and rejuvenation being based on the principle that progress matters over perfection, a reminder that that every decision holds within in it the power to positively or negatively affect nature. To move beyond the paralysis and helplessness of feeling a lack of agency in this problem and remembering that there is the potential for the stacking and accumulation of positive decisions, that over time build resilience, vibrancy and health back into all environments where biodiversity exists and can flourish.

Getting to know Camille through this conversation I related to her experience of despair and disappointment as a conservation biologist, and reminded that for most of us most of the time, change is only possible when pain is present. It's a difficult and inconvenient lesson, but as Camille demonstrates, change becomes available when the pain of the circumstances exceed the fear of change.

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Today's friend of the pod is Adam Verwey, someone I was really pleased to meet towards the end of 2023 and he began sharing with me his work at SIX - Sustainable Investment Exchange - and how it was going to deliberately combine the worlds of activism and change making with that of retail wealth management. I was immediately excited to begin to appreciate how Adam and his team are looking to extend the ethical investment world into something that leverages the passion and enthusiasm of everyday people to drive intentional and deliberate change within large listed businesses.

Over my career I've come to appreciate that change is largely only possible in big corporate institutions with the buy in and support of top executives and board directives. Something that has been difficult to access and work towards in busy, myopic and short termist organisational cultures where shareholder primacy and obligation management are most important. At the same time, the advent of many disclosure frameworks have created a pretty strong, and in my opinion inaccurate, signal that issues like climate change and modern slavery are being managed effectively. I'm firmly of the belief that institutional capital has an enormous potential to be directed into or away from creating the societies and economies we want to exist in. Its opportunity to intervene in meaningful ways to alter the trajectory we as a species are currently on is incredible, only matched by the incredible barriers and challenges that exist in breaching the mindsets and psychologies that keep the current system largely locked in place.

Enter SIX, and the likes of Adam Verwey. A financial services maverick who for two decades has been pioneering new ways of thinking about and investing for meaningful change. He spent nearly a decade at Australian Ethical Investments, before going on to co-found Future Super - Australia's first truly no fossil fuel exposed super fund. A couple of years ago he took a sabbatical and is returning to the scene at the moment with his very exciting new venture SIX.

We speak about SIX, going through what they're doing, how they're doing it, why they're doing it and what that means for you as a customer. We get into some of Adam's background and origin story and why and how he's managed to sustain himself, where ethical investing has come from and is possibly going towards, as well as the opportunity for you to participate in their open crowdfunding process. head to Birchal.com/company/six for more information on this and join the expression of interest registry.

I really enjoyed this conversation with Adam, and I appreciated the time in a really busy week for him and his team. I came away reminded and encouraged that people like Adam continue to press and seek to persuade change in systemic ways and that it's possible to use the existing tools of the system to do this. I hope by listening you're able to gain a new perspective on what might be right under your nose to attempt to use as a vehicle for action.

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Today's friend of the pod is Paul Oosting - someone I was thrilled to chat with and learn from based on his career to date as a successful social and environmental change activist and advocator. I want to learn more about how change can be designed and organised and made possible and I know few who have a record like he does.

Paul's professional career started out in the volatile world of Tasmanian forestry politics and community dynamics where he worked as a leading figure during the 2000s as part of successful campaign to halt the destruction of huge swathes of ancient Tasmanian forest through the logging activities of Gunns. Anyone who has a memory of nature conservancy and the preservation of wild places likely remembers not just the significance of this campaign individually, but the novel and innovative campaigning strategies and tactics Paul and The Wilderness Society developed by working through the value chain of Gunns' financiers where they succeeded in changing the lending decisions by ANZ in a time before ESG and responsible investment was at all a recognisable way of making decisions. This catalysed a new form of campaign activism here in Australia and beyond which has placed greater focus on the lending and investment decisions of large banks and other financial institutions.

The second part of Paul's career that we spend time chatting about is the decade he spent at GetUp, including seven years as its CEO. Again, Paul found himself designing and implementing successful social and environmental change campaigns, growing GetUps membership beyond one million members and in many ways forging the path to the more diverse political system we now see in Australia after a record number of independents won office in 2022. In this chat we talk about not only the powerful and broad church Paul and GetUp built by binding regular Australians who shared similar values and desires for action on climate change, the humane treatment of refugees and the very reasonable ask for the effective scrutiny and accountability of our political system and its actors, but the enormity of fronting GetUp though this period when there were sustained attacks by conservative politicians and captured media interests - or is it the other way around that the politicians are captured by these media interests?

Either way, Paul has been on the literal frontlines of significant, successful and society-altering movements in Australia for two decades and I was thrilled to spend some time getting to know him but also how his way of thinking and acting in the world could help me and you understand how to make change possible. 

I came away invigorated from this conversation and how my own daily practices can be altered using what he shared with me, and I hope you are too by listening.

Today's show is delivered with Gilay Estate. Add Finding Nature to your booking reservation for a free dinner and breakfast for each night you stay.

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