Nature Calling: The Guide for Aspiring Changemakers to Forge Sustainability & Climate Change Careers

What does it really take to restore a forest and why is planting a tree only the beginning?

For more than a decade, One Tree Planted has turned a simple idea - one dollar, one tree - into a global movement. But as the organization enters its next chapter, CEO Hank Lynch is helping shift the focus from simply counting trees to something much deeper: restoring entire landscapes and creating places where people, wildlife, forests, soil, and water can thrive together.

Hank’s own journey helps explain why that mission matters so deeply to him. Raised on a farm and orchard, he discovered an early love of working with trees before building a career across horticulture, agriculture, biodiversity, and environmental conservation. Today, he brings those experiences to One Tree Planted, alongside a team whose shared commitment is to find practical ways to restore damaged landscapes and support the communities that depend on them.

In this conversation, Scott and Hank explore why successful restoration is about much more than putting seedlings in the ground. They discuss the importance of local knowledge, community involvement, healthy seedlings, long-term care, biodiversity, and adapting restoration strategies to the realities of different landscapes around the world.

You’ll discover:

• Why One Tree Planted is moving beyond its famous “$1 = one tree” model toward measuring meaningful landscape and forest restoration, including whether planted trees actually survive.
• How regenerative agroforestry can help smallholder farmers improve soils, retain water, strengthen biodiversity, and generate income from trees without having to cut them down.
• Why Hank believes the future of restoration depends on collaboration, passionate people, strong local partnerships, and making landscape restoration a much bigger global priority.

Play the episode to hear Hank Lynch reflect on One Tree Planted’s first decade, the lessons shaping its next chapter, and why restoring landscapes - and supporting the people who depend on them- could be one of the most important environmental challenges of our time.

What if the reason you cannot find your path into meaningful climate change work has nothing to do with your qualifications, your experience or the job market?

This short but powerful conversation between Scott Poynton and coach Nadene Canning explores a question that most sustainability career advice never asks: are you actually in balance with yourself?

We are taught from childhood to water only two of our four inner gardens - the intellectual and the practical. We get gold stars for thinking and doing. But our emotional and spiritual sides, the feeling and the being, quietly wither. And when those gardens are dry, no amount of ambition or hard work will take you where you truly want to go.

You will discover:

1. Why high performers in sustainability and climate change work are often the most out of balance, and how that imbalance quietly blocks their path forward
2. What the four threads of mental, physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing actually look like when they are in balance, and why all four matter for your climate change career
3. How regeneration is not a destination but a practice of coming back to yourself, and why that practice is the foundation of meaningful impact in the world

If you have been pushing harder and feeling more stuck, this conversation might be exactly what you need to hear.

What if the reason you feel overwhelmed by the climate crisis is that you are looking at it from too far away?

Greta Oost cycled 11,000 kilometres through the Andes, designed sustainable products in Australia, and then came back to a small town in the Netherlands with a simple but radical idea. You do not have to save the world. You just have to make your own little pocket of it more beautiful, more sustainable, more connected. Do that, she argues, and if enough people do the same, the world takes care of itself.

That idea became One Million Mini Missions, a growing movement helping ordinary people turn small local ideas into real sustainable action in their own communities.

You will discover:

1. Why feeling overwhelmed by the scale of the climate and sustainability crisis is actually a sign you are thinking about it the wrong way, and what to do instead
2. How One Million Mini Missions lowers the barriers to sustainable action so that even the most hesitant person can find their own mini mission and start
3. Why doing something small and local in your own community might be the most powerful sustainability contribution you can make right now

If you have been waiting to find the perfect sustainability career before you start making your impact, this episode will change how you think about that.

What if the thing driving you toward a sustainability career is the very thing that could derail it?

Mark Bjornsgard has built and sold multiple businesses, including Deep Green, a pioneering climate tech company turning wasted heat from data centers into free energy for swimming pools and schools. Along the way he has learned something that most passionate sustainability entrepreneurs do not want to hear: blind commitment to your idea is not a virtue. It is a risk.

In this conversation Mark shares the hard won lessons from a career at the intersection of climate change action, social entrepreneurship and sustainability innovation.

You will discover:

1. Why treating your sustainability business or climate change project as an experiment rather than a mission could be the difference between success and failure
2. How Deep Green is solving one of the most invisible sustainability problems of our time by putting data centers where the heat is actually needed
3. Why looking after your own mental and physical wellbeing is not a luxury for sustainability changemakers but the foundation everything else is built on

If you are burning to make your climate change impact but feel like the walls keep coming up, this conversation will challenge how you think about passion, commitment and what it actually takes to succeed.

What if the solution to some of our biggest sustainability and climate change challenges was hiding in a forgotten crop that has been grown in West Africa for thousands of years?

That is exactly what WhatIF Foods discovered when their founder stumbled across the Bambara groundnut in a chance lift encounter at a conference in Malaysia. What followed was a remarkable journey to build a food company that does not just talk about regeneration but lives it from the soil up.

Andrew Reeves, commercial director of WhatIF Foods, joins Scott Poynton in Ghana to share the story behind the Bambara bean and what genuine regenerative business actually looks like on the ground.

You will discover:

1. Why the Bambara groundnut is one of the most nutritionally powerful and climate resilient crops on the planet and why the food industry abandoned it
2. How What If Foods is building a truly regenerative supply chain that puts farmers first, restores degraded soils and tackles climate change through a simple glass of plant based milk
3. Why doing the right thing by farming communities is not charity but the smartest long term sustainability business model available

If you have ever wondered what a sustainability career working on real solutions from the ground up actually looks like, this conversation recorded live in northern Ghana will show you exactly that.

Abdulai Abdul-Razak (Razak) is the Kasima Ghana Operations Manager for the regenerative Bambara bean agricultural project in the Northern Region of Ghana. Razak shares the story of his humble upbringing and his journey to his current position, and shares how a regenerative agricultural project can unfold for the project and the people involved.

In this episode, Scott discusses with Abdul-Razak (Razak), the Operations Manager for the regenerative Bambara Nut agricultural project in the Northern Region of Ghana. Razak shares the story of his humble upbringing and the journey to his current position, and shares how a regenerative agricultural project can unfold for the project and the people involved. 

What does it take to change the future of a community? Sometimes it starts with one person who was almost denied the chance to have one herself.

Lizzy Bashiru grew up in northern Ghana in a culture where girls were not expected to go to school. Her father did not believe in girl child education. But her mother and aunt fought for her, and that fight changed everything. Today Lizzy runs Hilary's Kids Initiative, a Pond Foundation program bringing learning kits, health support and women's income opportunities to farming communities across northern Ghana who are growing Bambara beans for sustainability food company WhatIF Foods.

You will discover:

1. Why education and women's empowerment are not separate from sustainability and climate change action but absolutely central to it
2. How Hillary's Kids Initiative is quietly transforming lives in 56 communities across northern Ghana one learning kit, one health facility and one income opportunity at a time
3. Why Lizzy sees this work not as a job but as a personal mission to give other girls the same chance she nearly did not get

If you have ever wondered what sustainability and climate change action looks like when it reaches the people who need it most, Lizzy's story will show you.

In this episode, Scott has a discussion with Lisa Boulton, the Ocean Regeneration lead for Purina, a company in the Nestlé family. Lisa discusses how she found herself in her current position and her passion for bringing change. 

What if everything the sustainability and climate change movement has been doing to change people's behaviour is built on the wrong assumption?

Scott Poynton has spent more than two decades in the room with some of the world's most resistant company leaders - the CEOs of the biggest palm oil, timber and food companies on the planet - helping them find their way to genuine change. And what he learned surprised him.

Arguments do not change people. Campaigns alone do not change people. What changes people is a fifty centimetre journey from their head to their gut, where they stop calculating profit and loss and start feeling what it means to be linked to deforestation, human rights abuses and climate destruction.

You will discover:

1. Why the most powerful sustainability and climate change transformations Scott witnessed had nothing to do with intellectual argument and everything to do with human connection
2. What the fifty centimetre journey from head to gut actually looks like in practice and why every aspiring changemaker needs to understand it
3. Why Jane Goodall agrees that reaching people's hearts through stories is the only strategy that creates lasting climate change and sustainability action

If you are an aspiring changemaker who wants to understand how real sustainability transformation actually happens, this episode will change how you think about your work.