 I always like to think back on John and Sue Boathing was now about 35 years ago when George Burton, who Ann and I had an interest, we had an interest in fermented grape juice that we used to practice on a lot in those days. And they suggested that John and Sue had considerable interest with me and Ann and that we ought to get together for dinner one night. Well, at that time, the Center for Conservation Biology had been set up. It was aimed at doing things that now are being done very well by NACCAP. And looking at the entire, we wanted to look at how to conserve biodiversity, but that immediately basically took us into the entire world. There's almost nothing that human beings do that do not affect biodiversity and that don't need to be changed. And now, as far as I know, NACCAP is the only organization in the world really doing a great job at that. We're living in a country, of course, where we have a government that's struggling to destroy biodiversity as well as civilization and doing a very nice job of that. But when I think back on all this, I think back to the very first Boathing lecture, which was established because at the end of our drunken dinner, John turned to me and said, we really like what you guys are doing and handed me an envelope. And that envelope is what let the Center for Conservation Biology continue. In some ways, it probably also contributed to the start of NACCAP, and I'm very pleased that Gretchen has moved the two together here for the first time, I think, formally. The first Boathing lecture, which was set up to honor John and Susan, was held in 1989. Think about that. It was so far back, Haiti wasn't born for five years yet. And then, if you think, I like to think back on the 2002 lecture, which was given by a postdoc at that time, a very technical postdoc. And that was Gretchen Daly, and she gave it jointly with Luke Daly, which I thought was the first mother-son lecture given here, which was very impressive. And my main job today, of course, is to both remind you all of how great the Boathings were and what they set going. And then to introduce my boss, who was once my student, but now my boss. And that's Gretchen Daly, who some of you have met, but the rest of you will soon meet, who will introduce our distinguished speaker. Is Gretchen here, did she go home already? Welcome, everybody. Well, this is the closing session of the main part of the Natural Capital Symposium. And it's the opening session for the Boathing lecture. And it's a fantastic fusion. And I'm really happy to see everybody here and to help orient those who've just joined. We've had a fantastic three days so far, part of the symposium with about 400 people from about 30 or more countries working in many more countries than that. All trying to drive innovation to solve the problems that. And reach for a world that we'd be proud and happy to deliver to our kids and grandkids. And I can't think of anybody more fit to help wrap up the symposium and to sort of fire up the 30th annual Boathing lecture than Laura Huffman. And it's my great honor to introduce her. I got to know her a little bit ago and I was so impressed. I was desperately hoping she'd accept an invitation here. So a little bit on her background and then she can tell you about her crazy life. But she's her background's in political science originally. And just sort of hearkens to the many different disciplines and perspectives we're trying to bring together in working in the world we have today. She then went on and got a degree in public affairs. And she's worked a lot in the realm of both in cities and in broad landscape and coastal kind of restoration and conservation. Has played a huge role in really critical policy successes. Like in designing and passing that Restore Act. The biggest basically restoration funding source in the world now apart from in China but based you know following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. And the deeply affected Texas. She's also founding director of the TNC North America cities program which was a big move you know just recognizing the way humanity is becoming more and more of an urban species and we've got to reach people in their hearts in cities to help bring us to the world we're all seeking. But I met her on a kind of weird occasion. I was in Texas basically for my first time of really being there. This past October and went to this big book fair. It was the day of the dead, the big Mexican holiday huge parade going on in Austin. And we were teamed up in some things and it was incredible. There is no way to get like a latte or a cappuccino. And that's because there was basically no water. There had been heavy, heavy rains and Laura can explain more how it all works. That led to a ton of siltation into the water supply system. And so nobody could produce like an espresso type drink. And here was this massive parade, this big kind of global book fair going on. All the streets were shut down and stuff people milling about. But all the restaurants had you know only a few tables open to serve. But they're serving kind of with bottled water and stuff that they were you know somehow getting together themselves. So it was kind of a dramatic reminder of how much we take for granted the many services we sort of get both from nature and from all the city planners that build our infrastructure systems but how vulnerable all that is. And we've seen that you know not only in California with the fires and other kinds of disasters but especially in Texas with the dramatic flooding. And I want to welcome Laura though in the context of the not cap spirit of hope and realizing this innovation and change that we can drive together in new types of partnerships. She's doing it more than anyone and she's going to talk about her efforts with the title all people all in leading the charge for a livable planet. So please welcome me and please join me in a very warm welcome. You were there at an interesting time. So the backstory to this is it was it was raining really hard but it wasn't even historical raining in Austin it was just heavy rain. And it was churning up so much silt in the freshwater supply that the process that removes silt to create drinking water was taking two or three times as long as it normally would. So the bottom line is the process could not keep up with the demand and so that we just had to shut it down. Restaurants had to stop serving because they couldn't cook with the water that was coming out of the tap. Now I was telling Gretchen earlier the interesting subsequent tale to this story is that just a few weeks ago people started calling the water utility saying this water smells funky and it did it smelled like fish. But it really smelled like with zebra mussels. Zebra mussels are an invasive species that are getting into all of our freshwater lakes and one of the reasons we worry about them is because they love to jump onto that infrastructure and the smell of zebra mussels created for the second time in a year a huge source water issue for the what the 12th largest city in the country. And it just goes to show you how razor thin the edges between what we think we have and what we have. So that's a little bit more on the water story in Austin. Look it is such an honor for me to be here today. It was an honor to spend time with Gretchen in Austin. She's a folk hero in our chapter at the Nature Conservancy. I think we call you Gretchen at all because they love to read your articles. But I'm super honored to be here. It's neat to be among so many people that are thinking from so many different angles on some of these complicated problems that we're facing in this world. I'm a native Austinite. So I want to tell you a quick little story about the place that I grew up when I was growing up in Austin. So Austin's a place that's been doubling in size every 20 years for 100 years. So for those of you that visited it 20 years ago, it really doesn't look like it looks today. And when I was growing up in Austin in an urban neighborhood, there was a creek that ran behind our house. It was called Shull Creek. And as children, we could literally go collect duck eggs. My father was a professor at the University of Texas. And our pal's down the street. He was a university professor also, he's a chemist. And he would teach us how to hatch these duck eggs. And it was kind of a ritual for the neighborhood kids. Well, I'll tell you what, today that creek is a very different place. Today, you want to stick your big toe in that thing. And what I'd like you to think about as we set forth in this 45 minutes is, was there a really special place that you associate with from growing up? Some place in nature that was special to you. And as you think of that place today, what's its current condition? Has it degraded? Is it even gone? Is it there? I think at some level, what our conversation about when we're talking about how can we maintain? First of all, we got to gain some ground and then maintain the ground to have a livable planet is how do we, how do we take these beautiful special places and keep them that way or recover them and keep them that way? So what I want to talk about is the collapse of these natural resources, especially freshwater. I could go on all day about freshwater. But as our global population, I know you guys stay focused on these numbers, but as we swell from seven to now, it looks like 10 billion people. In just a few decades, it's going to affect everything from childhood asthma to national economies. It's even going to affect national security. We aren't just watching our favorite places disappear. We're actually watching the collapse of our cultural and economic foundation. We're ignoring climate change and the evidence is mounting. And it's up to us to do something about it because the institutions that we've always counted on aren't going to, at least not right now. And we don't have time to wait. And so I want to talk about a group of people that was facing dire circumstances and did something about it because they were very clear-eyed about what would happen if they did nothing. Tom Brokow, the renowned journalist, came up with the term the greatest generation to describe the cohort of Americans who grew up and addressed the needs of our country during World War II and after. Many were fighting in the war. Others were staying at home, making sure that our economy was healthy. But here's what they did when the war was over. They took a step back and they thought about our weaknesses and they invested. They did something about it. They did not get everything right, and I think that's important to say. There were a lot of social equity and inclusion issues that did not get addressed appropriately, but they're called the greatest generation because of the investments they made that we still use. They built establishments for higher learning. They passed the GI Bill and more young Americans went to college than ever before on any place in the world. They built the Interstate Highway System, which is still the backbone of our transportation system today. They created the Apollo Space Program, put a man on the moon, and spawned massive technological advancements. We are driving on the roads they built. We are going to their schools. We're receiving health care services in their hospitals. We are enjoying the economic prosperity that was enabled by the investments that they were willing to make. So, where are we today? We, the children and grandchildren of the greatest generation. Well, and I know you guys are in a really good mood and we'll get to some happier stuff, but I do actually think it's important in this conversation about climate that we strike the right balance between scaring people in ways that they have actually become inoculated to and pretending that the optimism is so great that we're just this close. It's neither of those things. It's something in between. But we are, as I stand before you today, we might be the first group of people that leaves the future generations worse off than they were before. In fact, even the Paris Climate Accord isn't producing the goals we'd hoped for. The countries that stayed in that agreement, and I'm talking about the coalition of the willing, of which we were once one, they're not even achieving the goals that we were trying to achieve through that agreement. And we do not have plausible deniability. You all know more than anybody. We actually have a crystal ball, or at least enough of one, to know what will happen on the current path. Here's a look at that future. Food and water safety will be compromised because of rising temperatures and the resulting increase of water and foodborne disease. Look at the story we just told about Austin. This is happening fast. Agriculture will increasingly be disrupted by extreme events. We're talking about fires, drought, downpours and heat. And if we fail to act, climate change will continue to break down our infrastructure, threatening our health, our economy, our very way of life. How do we know this? How might we have learned this? Well, it turns out that our very own government told us so. Last year, 13 federal agencies published a study that pointed out these very dire consequences of doing nothing. And they added to it national security, not just food supplies, national security. We are facing our own market crash of 1929. We can anticipate our own Pearl Harbor. The difference is that the results of climate change are happening slower, which makes it easier to do nothing. So are we out of crossroads? I think we are. I think you could probably make the argument that we have blazed past the crossroads. But there are things that can be done. And so that's really my message today. I want to talk about a new way forward. I want to talk about not waiting until our institutions decide to act. Because whatever that window of time is, and none of us really knows what that is, bad things are happening and the evidence is mounting. So what I want to talk about are what are those things that actually do already work? We know some successes in this world. How is it that the governments that are willing, that the public sector, the private sector, NGOs, religious organizations are actually moving the needle? My message today is that in the absence of good national problem solving, we, the people in this room, we have to be, well, great. So how are we gonna do that? Well, what we know is that, I'm gonna talk about four things. I'm gonna talk about four things that are structural in nature and replicable all over the world. They are ways that we have found already to be successful in our current context. My first one, and I have a, water is my favorite substantive issue, cities are my favorite intervention. So succeed with cities is the first thing I want to talk about. I happen to be in bond journey for the climate conference. Right after the president announced we were gonna go on ahead and leave the Paris Agreement. And truly, the most amazing thing happened. So it's a complicated international conference. I'm sure many of you have been to them. But literally, people from the private sector and local governments and who else was there? Oh, industry. They erected their own separate conference facilities. It was blow up igloos. It was the most confusing thing for a Southern woman to walk up on. But here they were. They built their own forum and they held their own talks. They held their own debates. They did everything. And they called it America's Pledge. And what they asked of cities and the corporate sector that were willing to stay in the game was to make a measurable commitment at their level, at whatever level they could intervene at. Cities are leaning in. It's actually a renaissance for cities in the world right now. I like to joke that mayors may be the last beloved elected officials left. But cities are where you can get it done. They're willing to do the hard work of talking about problems and then selling people on the solutions to those problems. I wanna just give you a quick example. It is a water example. And it comes from where I live. Austin and San Antonio, which are the seventh and largest cities in the country. So these are big urban places. By the way, Texas is not rural. 86% of Texans live in a big city. And as our population goes from 25 million to 50 million people, they're not moving to the country. They're moving to all the Texas big cities. Anyways, this we call Central Texas has been highly dependent for its drinking water supply on what's called the Edwards Aquifer. So it's underground water supply. But these cities have been growing like crazy really for the last 100 years. They are almost always characterized as one of the top five to 10 fastest growing areas in the country. And you know what that means. That means more concrete, more roads, more driveways, more buildings, more homes, more parking lots. And all of the pollution that results on that can be quickly washed away in a rainstorm into the drinking water supply. So that's the problem that we were trying to solve against. And in 1997, voters first authorized initiative by the city of Austin that invested in protecting the Edwards Aquifer by protecting the land on top of the aquifer. So that when those first drops of rain fall, they go into soil and they stay there and do a little pretreatment why some of those pollutants are coming out of it. And since 1997, from Austin to San Antonio, the cities in between and the counties around them have approved a grand total of nearly $1 billion in investment in the Edwards Aquifer. We have protected 20% of the recharge zone in San Antonio. This is a city that is still drinking untreated groundwater, which is a remarkable thing to say about a major American city. Time and time again, we put these ballot initiatives on the ballot and they're approved. In fact, in 2015, San Antonio, we re-upped the Edwards Aquifer Protection Program by 80% of the vote. That's pretty significant. In fact, I'd say 80% agreement on anything in this country at this time is worth analyzing and replicating. So when with cities, let me say this because I wanna drive this point home in several ways. That body of work, which by the way has become mayor-proofed, it's become city council-proofed, it's institutionalized in the communities, and it is because we won the hearts and minds of people in Austin and San Antonio and in between. We showed them what the future would hold if they stayed on the current path. So we actually took that and reshaped the trajectory for those fast-growing cities because we all know a bad water supply will undermine economic success faster than almost anything. So when with cities is a way to change trajectories and cities are leaning in, man. These are places where we can get it done. The second thing I wanna talk about, when with women. A lesson, yes, thank you ladies and gentlemen. I don't wanna make assumptions. Another lesson we can learn is that when we empower women, and there's a great publication called Project Drawdown, winning with women is actually one of the best ways to fight climate. If women and girls have access to education and economic opportunity, that is one of the better climate fighting strategies out there. If empowered, women can change our trajectory. Think about it, it's about half the population. Here's an example of how this works real time. We know when women have, for example, secure land rights, they have higher economic gain, the land is treated better and the agricultural practices and return on investment increase, they go up. I wanna show you an example that is on our minds at the Nature Conservancy of one woman who changed both her own trajectory and then those around her. As just a small example of how you can win with women. Today, Leah is someone who lifts up other women, teaches them how to do much of the same thing that she did, win with women. So we've talked about succeed with cities, win with women. The third thing I wanna talk about is build and rebuild better. Again, as our population swells, trillions, trillions, nearly a hundred trillion dollars are in play to build the homes, the businesses, and the infrastructure that it will take to house that population. In other words, the investment is happening so our job is to figure out how to do it differently because the way we used to build infrastructure won't work for this planet. I wanna give you an example from China who's taking on urban resilience and I think a very clever way. They're building something called sponge cities. You may have heard about this earlier from my colleague Pascal. They're creating dense natural areas that literally flip the building paradigm instead of planting trees and cities which is what we've all been doing for a long time. They're actually planting cities and trees. Is the image up there? Yeah, you can see it. By 2020, China's goal is that 80% of its urban areas will absorb and reuse at least 70% of their rainwater. And you can see from these images, they're just greening everything. Roofs, walls of buildings, they're putting canals and waterways everywhere. They're using nature to capture stormwater so that it doesn't flash flood into their homes and buildings. They're using nature to capture stormwater so that it gets some level of pretreatment in natural soils and it's working. It's working. We know that nature can help cities. We know it can help with the flashy parts of a flash flood. We know from the work that I talked about earlier in San Antonio that it can help remove pollutants from water supplies. They're leaning into this and it's both a national, a local, and a private effort. The national government's gonna only put in about 15% of the money that it'll take to do this. The public sector, the private sector, the building community is also participating in this and then of course local governments are a part of the funding program there. What I find interesting about this is they're taking investments that are happening and they're reshaping them. Again, they're taking a trajectory that we know makes almost everything we care about look like this is a curve and they're doing it differently in order to get a different outcome. Point four, finance with the future in mind. It's related to the third point I just made but it is a little bit different. So I wanna talk a little bit about how we can work with the public sector, the private sector, and philanthropy. I wanna first talk about the public sector. There's no question that public sector interventions work the best because they're one of the few things that can cross through sectors. That's why when we talk about climate change, the focus was on national activity. That's how you can cut through retail and oil and gas at the same time. It is important but they're not making public investments right now, not in the ways that we see the necessary investment. Private philanthropy is also important. I wanna emphasize that. I mean, you're here because of private philanthropy. Private philanthropy helps us get the science right. It helps us get the proof of concepts right. And increasingly we're focusing on how do we develop out those scaling mechanisms that can take a good idea and get it to the point where it actually moves the needle. The final thing though I wanna talk about is the private sector. So what's going on there and how can we get the private sector to move a little faster? There are some interesting things happening and I wanna mention a few of them. First of all, our number one job is just to insist that business as usual is bad business. We just need to repeat that as consumers and as shareholders as often as we humanly can. We need to make sure that every project that is planned, every distribution system that is designed, anything that's manufactured, that it's being done with resilience in mind. And we need to insist on that. And we have in some ways and it creates some pretty marvelous results. Think about lead building standards. I was in city management when lead building standards came out. It's voluntary by the way, don't have to do it. And I remember the development community insisting that it would never, it was too expensive, nobody would do it. It would ruin a development pro forma. I have never been to a lead building where the CEO himself or herself did not want to show off that building. It has been completely adopted. It has become part of the bragging rights for companies. Forest, Stewardship, Council, FSC and other certification programs are awesome because they show consumers how they're getting what they get and whether or not they want to invest in products and services the way those things are being produced. Bee corporations, I think, are pretty interesting things right now. It's a pretty new tool, but it is a way for a company to publicly announce and commit to how it's gonna create both bottom line and address important social problems. I think of this whole suite of things as businesses getting a little bit more serious about their social license to operate. And I think the more that we insist on them behaving in a socially responsible way, the more we'll see businesses adopt these kinds of tools. Impact investing, our CEO, Mark Tercik, loves to talk about this. He probably said a bit about this this morning, but the ability to find ways where you can just reconfigure investment, the example that I like right now in the nature conservancy is the Seychelles. We did what's called a debt for nature swap there in 2016. The nation basically traded over $20 million in debt for the protection of nearly one third of its ocean area. Put quite simply, it turned debt repayments into conservation funding. And I think anytime we can do that, we should. And then reimagine money. We just have to take every opportunity there is to think differently about money. So I'm a little pumped up right now, and I'll tell you why, because the Texas Senate, which how many of you think of that as a progressive governing body? Okay, just checking. By a unanimous vote earlier today, they created what's called a statewide flood recovery fund. I don't even know that there is any statewide fund in place in the United States. It is scheduled to be $3.2 billion, and it absolutely enables both traditional and green infrastructure. And by the way, the conservation community is responsible for making sure that green infrastructure got green lighted. Why are they doing this? Harvey. Every single architect of that bill understands and even said this morning, they could have been at this conference. There's only two words they didn't say, climate change. Everything else they said, that is not a question of when, but when, but where, that the storms are becoming, how many times have you heard this phrase? They're coming more frequently and more intensely, and we will see more of them. They acknowledged everything about what's gonna happen to that state, and then they invested. $3.2 billion is a lot of money. And what I loved about that investment is they are insisting that after every storm, after every drought, whatever it is, we're not just gonna go rebuild, like it's, we're not gonna party like it's 1999. We're just gonna do it a little bit differently. And they're insisting that we rebuild with resilience in mind. So I think that's pretty interesting. And there are plenty of opportunities. By the way, New York did a little bit of this after Sandy. But anytime these communities or these states or these regions are investing money after either a natural or a man-made disaster, those are game-changing moments in time. You have people's attention and you can get real change done. So we've talked about all of it. We've talked about succeeding with cities, winning with women, reimagining the money, and building and rebuilding differently. These are four big areas where you can make a difference time and time again while we're waiting to get the rest of the world on board. What we do now, it matters. I believe that we can be one of the greatest generations. I believe we can be the people that put a stop on doing nothing and started doing something to remind them that there was a time when our country invested lovingly in solving future problems. And by the way, they never saw the returns on their investment because the real returns of those investments came generations later. We're still enjoying those returns. I think we can get there. My commitment to you is that the nature conservancy is gonna continue to seek those big solutions, finding ways that you can intervene in a system, whether it's a water system or an ocean system or an agriculture system, and find big solutions that improve lives. That's our job. That's what we're here to do. Here's the reality that I wanna say to you. You're one of those rooms that people who are solving big, complicated problems kind of dream about. Your thought leaders, your innovators, your educators, one of you is the press I met earlier. When people are trying to solve big problems, minds like this are hard to come by in one place at one time. If every single person in this room thought about a trajectory that they could influence through their work, through their philanthropy, through their investments, that alone would create measurable change in this world. And here's the deal. We don't have to agree 100%. I think we get so caught up in 100%. We don't have to agree 100%. And we're not gonna get it right every time. We're even gonna fail because we're innovating. We are seeing new problems. We're trying to find new solutions. But none of that, fear of failure, fear of the fight, those are not our obstacles. FDR himself said, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. We've seen this before. And I love this because I see younger generations in the room. You guys are getting on board. You are no longer gently tapping us on this old shoulder and saying, we'd like for you guys to get your act together. You are now protesting. You've taken it to the street. There was over a million young people across 125 countries just last week that literally stood up for boldness, greatness, and change. So my challenge to you is that in everything you tackle, do it with the intention at the front end that you're gonna change a trajectory. Don't hope that you can figure it out at the back end of whatever it is that you're working on and please do not assume someone else's thinking about that. And remember, there are real examples from all over the world where we have moved big needles. We will, we must work with anyone that's able and shares our clear-eyed commitment. All are welcome. But for those who aren't prepared, we're just not gonna wait. We don't have time to wait. So here's what that means. We will be the face. We will be the voice. We're gonna have to be the ones that stood up. This is gonna be our mission, our goal for our planet. So let us be great. Thank you. You want this? Ready to take up your challenge and stand up? Let's see if anyone wants to. I bet they're flying outside. Make a comment or ask a question. Who wants to start off bravely here? You. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Ever the brave, okay. I see trouble. It's just a comment to tell you that one of your predecessors, as a speaker here, was the person who invented debt for nature swaps, Tom Lovejoy. Ah, nice. It's a wonderful tool. Can't be used all the time, but when it can be used, it moves at the speed of light. But it also highlights just the power of connection and the way the ideas get generated and taken up over long periods, but in really impactful ways. Stephen. So Bill Cronin is an eminent environmental historian. He wrote a book, Nature's Metropolis, which talks about the growth of the Great West and Chicago and how they're really two parts of the same system. He also says to do right by the country, you have to do right by the city first. So in Texas, we have obviously, like most of the United States, a very different rural and urban kind of culture. So, but in your work, have you seen much opportunity to do right by the country by doing right in the city and build that relationship between what has become a very divisive kind of set of geographies? Are you talking about the divide between urban thinking and ex-urban thinking specifically or just the latter up from local to national? The former, more rural or ex-urban versus the urban. Well, that divide is getting bigger. And one thing that I have noticed is that there are people out there that are trying to fund solutions in highly, highly ex-urban areas where access to healthcare and education and all of those things is just tanking because so many people are moving to cities. And quite frankly, the tax base is eroding. So there's very little money to invest in those. There have been some, life delivers a lot of ironies. There have been some oil and gas investors in rural Texas that have actually made investments in educational systems. Here's what I worry about like on a global basis. The world is urbanizing. There's not gonna be that many people left where you're describing. I mean, I think one day we will redistrict in Texas and someone's gonna have a high rise as their district, you know, or they're gonna have a two block area of Houston and then some other guy that's living out West Texas is gonna have a hundred counties. He's gotta drive around too. So it's definitely getting more dramatic. But here's what we need to worry about. We need to worry that our rural areas don't become back of house for our city areas. So what would back of house look like? Ah, we'll just pull all the water. We'll put all the energy out there. All those things that people don't really wanna see. And so we worry a lot about how those, because by the way, these are sort of the iconic landscapes that we wanna protect. This is where a lot of the biodiversity is. So programs like doing energy by design, because even wind energy can be a problem if it goes in the wrong place. We love it for some reasons, but it can contribute to some bad biodiversity outcomes if we're not careful. So I think you have to manage all of that. And then there's a whole suite of social issues that, you know, that's not my specialty, but I know there are people that are paying attention to access to healthcare, education, all of those things that can really take these rural areas and just collapse them. The question you didn't ask, but I just wanna touch on a little bit, because I think, you know, when we think about scale, I've got a lot of opinions about everything, but scale I think can be confusing. I think we have to honor scale at a lot of different levels. What I would say to you about the city's work is I think you guys are systems thinkers. I'm sure most of you have either studied systems thinking or are doing systems thinking. One of the things that causes you from going to sort of an incremental tinkering at the top of a system to like doing real change is when you change hearts and minds. And that's what I like about what's happening in cities right now, because they are coming up with value proposition after value proposition and the public is eating it up. And I think that that can become the basic building block of laddering up to good state policy work. And then you've got what you need in order to move right back into the federal solutions. And there are some things that can only be done federally effectively. But the Harvey's a great example. It was a local storm, you know, but what it's done is it's caused the state of Texas to create something they never even imagined before, which is a flood recovery fund. And $3.2 billion is not nothing in a state that prides itself on low tax and low service. Fantastic. Okay, let's have another question or two and then we'll head out this beautiful evening and chat outside some. Hey. Can you explain a little bit more about B-Corporations? Yeah, yeah, I can. I guarantee. So there, I think we had a logo. You know some of them. I got really interested in this. Yeah, it's all the ones that give something away when you buy their products, right? So you know who they are. It's the Tom Shoes, the Warby Parker, something popped up on my Facebook the other day about Ben and Jerry's Tau Ski Resort is a B-Corps. And what they're trying to show people there is that you can enjoy this beautiful place and we're gonna make money but we're gonna give back socially. So for me, it's a type of certification but they have to make real commitments. So at Tau's, for example, we, the Nature Conservancy, have a contract to do some forest thinning to prevent forest fires because forest fires produce a lot of ash that go in their freshwater supplies which are surface water lakes. And that completely shuts down their treatment plants. So it's real. Okay, so again, I did some non-profit work and they had a, they were saying that a lot of the corporations that are giving to Washington now that treat uses like that are actually spending local opportunity businesses out of here. Oh, that's interesting. That's interesting. That's how you have to be in so far, like they're being more closed going and then local people can't agree. Well, so the law of unintended consequences, right? Yeah, well maybe, you know, what that tells me is that as these tools and efforts of all, we wanna be careful that what feels like socially responsible investing isn't creating an unintended economic consequence for enabling and it's probably would highly interfere with enabling economic opportunity for women in the instances that you just said. Fair point, thank you. Great, one more comment or question from anybody? Okay, look, okay, one more in the back. Gotta get. Thank you. Oh, I was curious about your, in your instance of the sort of synergies of empowering women and that having positive outcomes for the land, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how that went about in that case. In that particular case? Or other cases. Here's what the evidence shows, because I love to, you know, I've loved strongly held opinions, but I think facts are super important also. That may have been a political statement. What the evidence shows is that when women own land, they treat it differently than when men own land. They pay more attention to things like soil health and crop productivity. They just, the evidence shows they're better stewards. And so the effort, I mean, it's a, you know, conservation can get kinda complicated and it can feel like you're, you know, zigging to zag and sometimes we are. But the idea there of empowering women economically is what's at the core of that. There is a conservation benefit because of how they steward land, but the real difference is empowering women economically. And what I love about the story of Leah is, man, she took that show on the road. She made herself the change agent. And so the benefit that she derived from getting the land that she was entitled to in the first place, she passed that learning on to other women. That's why I said earlier the thing about scale is, wouldn't we wanna honor the scale at which she succeeded? Why wouldn't we? We're talking about it here at Stanford University. It made a difference for a lot of people. It's not gonna change the trajectory of climate change impacts, but it sure changed the lives of a lot of people. And I believe that those kinds of things can have, you know, sort of a cascading beneficial effect. It's education too, by the way. It's not just access to, and the third one is in the project drawdown. I think the top three things in their first list, I think it was the list of 20 don't pull it affect me on this, but I think the three interventions that involve women that made their top 20 list of things to do to solve climate were education for women, economic opportunity for women, and access to women's healthcare. So it's not nothing. What fantastically inspiring examples. And I can say just from that couple of days I had in Texas, there's so much more going on in a state where things are politically fraught and where it's hard to say those two words starting with the letter C. And yet, huge changes happening, and Laura, we really have to thank for a lot of it. So what I'd like to do is welcome everybody to head outside, chat some more with Laura with one another, and mostly I wanna thank you all for coming. It's been a tremendous week and now it's a tremendous sort of close to the main part of the symposium. And please join me again in thanking Laura and look to the future with all our good work we can pursue together from tonight. Thank you. Thank you.