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

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.

What does a regenerative revolution actually look like on the ground? Sometimes it starts with a set of scales.

When Scott Poynton and his team arrived in farming communities in northern Ghana to buy their first harvest of Bambara beans, they brought something the farmers had rarely seen in a commercial transaction: a weighing scale and a fair price. What followed changed everything.

In this episode Scott shares what unfolded during the second half of 2022 as the Pond Foundation and What If Foods worked alongside nearly a thousand farmers across 25 communities in northern Ghana to grow, support and buy a crop of Bambara beans - and what the experience revealed about what genuine sustainability and climate change action looks like at the frontline.

You will discover:

1. Why paying farmers honestly for their crop and showing up when you said you would is still considered radical in the sustainability world — and what that says about the food industry
2. How ancient biochar technology is delivering 26% yield increases for farmers in northern Ghana while putting carbon back into degraded soils and tackling climate change from the ground up
3. Why word spread so fast that farmer registrations grew from 980 to 6000 in a single year - and what that tells us about the hunger for a different way of doing business

If you want to understand what a genuine sustainability career working on real climate change solutions from the ground up looks like, this episode will show you exactly that.

What can one person actually do about climate change? It is the question Scott Poynton gets asked more than any other, and in this episode he answers it directly.

With heatwaves, floods and fires now part of daily life across the planet, the temptation is to blame governments and oil companies and wait for someone else to fix it. But that approach has a hidden cost - it gives away your agency, your ability to act. And agency is exactly what aspiring changemakers cannot afford to lose.

In this episode Scott introduces the three Rs framework for credible personal climate change action and explains why the offsetting model that most companies and individuals rely on is not working.

You will discover:

1. Why blaming others for climate change feels justified but quietly destroys your ability to do anything about it - and what to do instead
2. How the three Rs - reduce your own emissions, help others reduce theirs, and remove carbon from the atmosphere - give every aspiring changemaker a practical sustainability action framework they can start today
3. Why traditional carbon offsetting is not credible climate change action and what the Pond Foundation's My Carbon Zero program does differently

If you have ever asked yourself what you can actually do about climate change, this episode will give you a clear and honest answer.

What does it actually mean to do sustainability differently? Not in a report or a mission statement, but in a community under a meeting tree in northern Ghana at forty degrees, talking to farmers who have been promised things before and never seen those promises kept?

This is the origin story of the Pond Foundation and WhatIF Foods' Bambara groundnut project in northern Ghana. Scott Poynton shares what he found when he first visited seven farming communities in late 2021 and what happened when one farmer looked him in the eye and asked how they were going to be any different from all the companies that had come before and disappeared.

You will discover:

1. Why the global food system is broken for the world's 500 million smallholder farmers and what a genuinely regenerative sustainability alternative looks like from the ground up
2. How a partnership built on seed, technical support and fair prices instead of extraction and empty promises led to 1600 farmers registering in the first season alone
3. Why addressing water, health, education and sanitation is not a nice add-on to a regenerative sustainability project but the foundation without which nothing else works

If you want to understand what a sustainability career working on real regenerative solutions looks like at the frontline, this episode will take you there.

What if the solution to one of the world's greatest environmental crises was already there, hidden in plain sight, waiting for someone to look differently?

In the early 1980s, Tony Rinaudo was a young agronomist working with World Vision in the desperately degraded landscapes of Niger. Where everyone else saw barren wasteland, Tony noticed something growing. Not dead. Not gone. Just suppressed. What he did with that observation became one of the most significant regenerative sustainability breakthroughs of the last century.

In this conversation Tony shares the story behind Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration, the low cost community led approach to landscape restoration that has now regenerated millions of hectares across Africa and beyond and won him the Right Livelihood Award.

You will discover:

1. Why the forests of the Sahel were never truly dead and how Tony's simple insight that life was already present changed everything we thought we knew about land restoration and sustainability
2. How Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration puts communities at the centre of regenerative change and why that makes it more effective and more lasting than any top down planting program
3. Why Tony believes this approach to regenerative sustainability can be applied far beyond Africa and what it could mean for climate change action at a global scale

If you've ever wondered whether one person with one idea can genuinely change the world, Tony Rinaudo's story will answer that question with a resounding yes.

What if the biggest obstacle to a more sustainable world is not apathy or ignorance but the pursuit of perfection?

Stephanie Lentz was a teacher, a baker, a singer and a mom in Seattle who wanted to stop bringing trash home from the supermarket. What started as a simple personal frustration became Scoop Marketplace, a zero waste grocery store where customers bring their own containers and buy everything from laundry detergent to pasta without a single piece of packaging. Then she started teaching others to do the same.

In this conversation Stephanie shares her journey and the philosophy that drives everything she does: progress over perfection, imperfect action over paralysis, and celebrating every small step toward a more sustainable life.

You will discover:

1. Why the all or nothing approach to sustainable living is driving people away from climate action and what the progress over perfection mindset does differently
2. How Scoop Marketplace is proving that zero waste sustainability does not require sacrifice but actually improves the quality of your life and the lives of your community
3. Why Stephanie believes that sharing knowledge openly and building communities of aspiring sustainability changemakers is the fastest way to accelerate the transformation the planet needs

If you have ever felt that you cannot do enough to make a difference, this conversation will give you permission to start where you are and keep going.

What if the experiences that shaped us in childhood are still influencing the way we lead, work, and try to change the world today?

Alex Postolnig built a successful career in corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions, working on complex projects in the banking sector. But after a life-changing experience on Mount Kilimanjaro, where she discovered how people working in tourism could be exploited, she began questioning whether her career was aligned with the reason she was here.

Her journey from banking to social entrepreneurship took courage. She cycled from Cairo to Cape Town, launched a social enterprise focused on responsible travel, and learned through some of life’s most difficult moments that perseverance can open doors we never knew existed.

Along the way, Alex began exploring something even more personal: how childhood experiences and unresolved trauma can shape the adults we become. Her own healing journey led her to a powerful hypothesis—that greater awareness of trauma could help social entrepreneurs and leaders understand themselves differently, become more compassionate, and potentially make different choices about the impact they have on the world.

Now, Alex is developing the Global Healing Project, an emerging initiative focused on bringing greater awareness to these connections and encouraging leaders to explore their own stories with honesty and compassion.

You’ll discover:

• How a childhood marked by family struggles, independence, and a deep connection to other cultures influenced Alex’s later drive to create positive change.
• Why Alex believes awareness of childhood trauma may help social entrepreneurs and senior leaders understand their motivations, challenges, and capacity for meaningful change.
• How Global Healing aims to move beyond blame and finger-pointing by creating space for leaders to reflect, heal, and use their experience, skills, and influence to contribute differently to the world.

Play the episode to hear Alex’s extraordinary journey from investment banking to cycling across Africa, social entrepreneurship, personal healing, and her emerging vision for a more compassionate approach to global change.

In this podcast, Scott talks to Nigel Majakari, the founder of Ca'lyah, one of The Pond Foundation's founding members. Ca'lyah is a furniture company that was founded to create design and art objects by bringing together award-winning designers and traditional artisans/craftspeople.

In this podcast, Scott talks to two of the founders of Kijani Forestry, Paul and Beau, about their fantastic project and the impact that they're having. Kijani Forestry is one of My Carbon Zero's project partners who produce sustainable charcoal in Uganda to save old-growth forests and better local livelihoods.

In this podcast, Scott interviews Emma Gallagher, cricket manager at Cricket Victoria. Emma discusses how sport shaped her idea of family, identity, and community in Australia; and how these experiences affected her wellbeing over the course of her life.