 I'm the president of Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative. And I'm very pleased to have Main Audubon host us tonight and in this talk. It's a good location. And certainly, the right heritage for us to be here. So thanks to Main Audubon, Eric Copper. And I think, Bryce, where are you? Yeah, there. Thank you as well. Not sure who else is here from Main Audubon. Thank you. Also like to thank the Bank Order of Savings Bank Foundation for support for this project and for a lot of other work that we do at Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative. So SMCC is in its fifth year as a collaborative. We are the successor organization to the Portland and Norris Land Trust Collaborative, which was three land trusts. After five years, the Thelma Land Trust decided to go off on its own. That left the Oceanside Conservation Trust, which is mine, along with Shabee and Cumberland Land Trust, Ron and Brian over there, and probably more of you. And so we found that with the year that we had the last year of Portland and Norris Land Trust Collaborative, that two things, that two land trusts were probably not enough to support the fantastic staff that we have and Jess over there. But more importantly, we realized all the good that had come out of our work for the three original land trusts. And this was just too good not to carry forward. So we held a meeting in January or whatever year it was, 2011, I think. And we had 56 people, probably a number of you in this room, came to hear what we might go forward with. And then 23 organizations, 56 people at the Scarborough Library. And so we decided that this was a great indication of good support for what we were thinking about continuing. And then in October of that year, we held a meeting of potential funders. And we had real estate worth of people come and express interest in hearing more about us and offering their resources one way or another. So with that, we started off, I think, it was probably January 12th, I think. And so, hey, Mars, come on out, have a seat. So with that, we are one quarter of the way through our fifth year of SMCC. And we have had many successes. And we still have challenges. And we probably always will. But one of the things that has been the most fun for us is to hold events of various sorts and to basically offer those resources, which are from outside ourselves. And so we have that going on tonight. So I will finish up by reading our mission statement, which is, to accelerate conservation work in southern Maine by providing technical administrative support and expanding meaningful partnerships. And just yesterday, we voted to accept our board voted to accept our latest vision statement. And it's one we're going forward with. So our vision is to strengthen organizations committed to protecting our environment. We know that together we can do more. And our purpose is to create and expand meaningful partnerships among conservation organizations. By sharing resources, our collective impact will lead to better conservation and healthier communities. So that's what we're up here. Eric Topper, cheer up. My name's Eric Topper. I'm the Education Director here at Maine Audubon. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you all here tonight. I know many of you have been here before. One of the things I wanted to start with is we, at Maine Audubon, just welcomed a new executive director on March 1st, Oula Amundsen. It's not rolling up my tongue quite yet. I need more time for that. But Oula's here. We're excited to have him. He was really disappointed that he couldn't be here tonight. He had a prior conflict that he couldn't get out of. And so I was really excited that we were hosting it and wanted me to say hello and welcome you all on his behalf. And he looks forward to meeting, I'm sure, every single one of you, literally. Maine Audubon has been a member of Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative for about two years now. And I think it's fair to say that the collaborative, the original intent was primarily to support small, volunteer-led land trust with technical support and all sorts of other particular support. But I want to put a particular plug in and celebrate the benefit of SMCC for one of the larger organizations, like Maine Audubon, with a staff of 25 and lots of acreage and things like that, that we've also recognized the particular values of membership in an organization like this. First and foremost, these amazing technicians over here, Jess and Doreen. Organizations both that are volunteer-led, that are tackling particular ongoing administrative tasks or projects like accreditation or acquisition benefit from that. But so do organizations with 25, largely specialists. There are still gaps and things that we need to take on. And again, to have that resource of these two and all the wonderful interns and support network that comes with that has been invaluable to us, even in two short years. The other big thing that we're excited about is this idea of kind of teaming up to bring some of the big thinkers, the innovators, the scholars, the leaders here that we can sort of share those learnings together. In the two years that we participated, we've been involved in hosting, Peter, or SMCC has hosted Peter Forbes here. We've hosted Rob Baldwin here. Jates and I, these are big names in just two short years that independently, we'd all be fumbling over to try to provide that resource for the community. So that's really exciting for us to have a part. And then lastly, just a part of this amazing network. I mean, look around this room. We have incredible, really smart, really committed, really passionate people. And these are the networks that we all need to deal with these challenges that all of us are facing together and independently. So this is an incredible, we're just really, it's really, this is a really important part of our recent work is these collaborations and Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative is a really important sort of delivery vehicle and network for us to be a part of. And I definitely want to celebrate that a little bit. And I know there are people here from large organizations as well that are members as well. So hopefully we can expand that network and really, really celebrate those as well. So without, am I, okay. So anyway, I'll bring up just Burton to say more, but welcome everyone. Thank you. Well, that was great. Both Eric and Roger just covered pretty much everything I was gonna say, which is excellent in the way it should be. But I wanna echo the thank you for all of you attending. We have new friends and old friends, folks that we've been working with for almost 10 years now and then new members to our organizations and partners of all kinds. So thanks for coming to this speaker. Jay. So I'm gonna just say a few things about Jay. Jay is the sharp McNally chair of green and socially responsible business at the College of the Atlantic and Bar Harbor and founder of its Vanguard Sustainable Business Program. The College of the Atlantic has been repeatedly cited as a leader in sustainability, as we know. And Jay's work has been featured in the New York Times, fast company, Fortune, Money, and dozens of others. And he has been a speaker at TEDx. Some of you may have seen a great video. With experiences as an impact entrepreneur, academic and strategy consultant to Fortune 100 companies, Jay's research focuses on merging sustainability, entrepreneurship, and strategy. To that end, Jay created the Abundance Cycle, an actionable model that builds on a venture's competitive strength and weaves in the latest tactics, enterprises across the globe are using to maximize abundance for shareholders, the planet, and society. Jay also serves as a senior fellow in social innovation at Babson College and is a frequent speaker on sustainable innovation and enterprise. He has given talks to business and academic groups in the United States, as well as Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and the European Union. Prior to joining the College of the Atlantic, Jay was the Chief Operating Officer for O-Naturals, a natural and organic fast food restaurant group, which many of us know because of the founder of O-Naturals, which we loved. Jay has a wide range of work and life experiences. He has served in the Peace Corps in Mauritania, written an eco-tourism business plan for our college in Costa Rica, broke fundraising records for Rails to trails, conservancy, counseled Native American students, and taught at Marmel Education. Jay holds a BA from Colgate University and an MBA from Babson College and when not ensconced in the Abundance Cycle, Jay enjoys cooking, hiking in Acadia National Park and traveling with his wife Ursula and son Max. So I'm very pleased and honored to introduce Jay. Thank you so much for having me, Eric and Roger. Thank you for the introduction, Jess. Thank you for pulling all this together. This came together in somewhat record time. In some ways, well, every time I feel like I come back down to Portland from MDI, it's kind of like coming home, right? So we moved up to MDI about eight years ago. We definitely, I remember spending time here with my son, Max, when he was two years old and running around in here and checking out the discovery room and the other places. So it's great to be back here. So I intend to make you all work tonight. Are you all okay with that? All right, what else are you gonna say, right? So there is participation that is needed or it'll be a very, very long night. And I can go out and I'm a professor now. Been doing this for a few years so I can go on for hours and hours. But if you participate, I'll keep you to a reasonable timeframe. Does this sound fair? All right, great. So as I talked about, in many ways I feel like I'm coming home just to give you some context and we'll be talking a lot about context tonight. I just wanted to tell you a little bit about me and my background. So I grew up in Central Pennsylvania in Harrisburg. I was in the fifth grade when some of you may be familiar with this, right? Three Mile Island. That happened when I was in fifth grade and I remember the mayhem that went on as a result of that. Most recently, and somewhat, I won't say a full loop, but I just came back from Japan a little while ago and I was down in Fukushima and checking out what was going on there. And let me tell you, it is breathtaking. And I remember with Three Mile Island, and I took it from a perspective of a little kid and you would hear stories about people evacuating and a week off of school, which we didn't actually think that was such a bad thing when you're in fifth grade. And to see that, and the disruption that happened, and then you go to Fukushima and you see what has happened there and you're driving through towns where across every single driveway, road, any entrance to a business, there is just a fence that they put up so you can't stop. And you can just see life was frozen and you would go to the train station and there's bites, just racks and racks of bites and signs on the stage, do not touch. These have not been decontaminated. And seeing miles and miles of black bags that are like this and this high with dirt scraped into them. And that they're just kind of laying out fields. It's absolutely breathtaking. So to see kind of the other side of this. So one of the things I think that was a formative experience for me was through my life. Also, I loved and still loved to go camping and in the summers we go travel, Max and Urs and I and enjoy the beautiful places in Maine and elsewhere in the world. And when I was in college, I was very much, and I think I still am, but just in a different way, I was very much an activist and worked for the Perbs for those of you who are familiar with that, worked with Pennsylvania Wildlife Federation, canvassing and going door to door and talking about things like toxic use reduction. So how in the world did I end up in business, right? And for me it was really Peace Corps and this is a picture from Mauritania. Mauritania is in the Sahara Desert. It is a land of extremes. So in the hot season it goes up to 145 degrees. And the way we would describe it is you always knew how you felt when you were there because it was so extreme. In Mauritania, they abolished slavery in 1980. 1980, not 1880, right, 1980. And so when I was there in the early 90s, there were still villages and this is a pretty typical looking village. There were still villages where you had this kind of indentured servitude and slavery going on. And to me, that's really one of the ultimate evils of business, right? You are enslaving people and taking profit from their work. But on the other hand though, you had women and groups of women who would get together in these cooperatives. And you would see by having a business, suddenly they could earn money and improve their family's nutrition, healthcare, provide education, their social standing would improve. And you would see from that the positive sides of enterprise and that you could really, they could change their whole lives in the way they lived and improved both their station and their family's lives by having an enterprise. Now, the other thing I realized when I was in the Peace Corps was that business is everywhere. It affects every single thing you do, the furniture you're sitting on, the rugs in this room. Everything is related to business in one way or another. And as someone who was an activist and really interested in changing people's lives, what I realized, if you really wanna bring about change, probably the biggest lever you can pull on in the world is business, because it's the most ubiquitous activity on the planet. So as I was saying, so we'll dive some more into this, but as I was saying, context is really important. And so I wanna just spend a moment here talking to you about surfing. All right, so this is a person, I think it's a man, he's about five, six feet tall and he's out surfing. And now context really matters and changes things. So not only is he surfing, he's surfing right here, right? So this is a hundred foot wave, okay? So the wave is eight to 10 stories tall. If you don't surf correctly on this kind of wave here, it's pretty much a death sentence. And what happened was, in surfing, you have to understand the waves are coming in and they're constantly crashing on the shore and there's a pretty predictable pattern to how a wave forms, but when you're surfing something like this, and by the way, these were considered to be unrideable until not that long ago. And when the context changes and you try to surf like this, you not only need to understand the wave, you need to understand what's happening in the weather, you're traveling all over the world to try and find these, you're looking at undersea formations, looking at what's happening onshore and offshore, and what happened when you try to surf something like this, as the context changed, they invented all kinds of new technologies. So now there's tow riding where you actually are towed into this wave and you're dropped in so you're going fast enough that you can ride it. Different kinds of rescue, new equipment was invented and the context is constantly changing even though you have this churning. Now, the economy is a lot like this. The context is continually changing. And so in 1896, if you look at the Dow Jones industrial average, which catalogs the major companies in the country, it was really about in 1896, it was about agging commodities. And here are the companies that were listed on the Dow at that time, American cotton oil, sugar, tobacco, gas, national lead, right, the railroads were coming on. But fundamentally it's ag and commodities. And now if you look and using Bar Harbor as kind of a sample or a test case, these, this context, if you look at Bar Harbor back in that time, it was this ag commodity-oriented place. As was most of Maine at the time. And then, so even in a little teeny town like Bar Harbor, the context of the economy is affecting what is going on. Now, if we fast forward here and go to the 1920s, you see that retailing and manufacturing and radio are all emergent. So you have things like Sears and Roebuck, radio corporation, Nash Motors, et cetera. You can see these Bethlehem Steel, right? These were companies that people, I came from central Pennsylvania, right? There's a town's name here called Steelton, right? Where you can go and see a steel plant that's three miles long. And much like the industry in Maine, people said this would never, these will never go out of business, right? Because it's so sure that this will never change. And again, looking up in Bar Harbor area, you know, you got a Nash dealership up that way. And then if we fast forward again to 2016, it's really about knowledge and service industries, right? And so the whole context of the economy is shifted. So you have Nike, and Pfizer, and McDonald's, and Apple, Boeing, Exxon, Mobile, Dupont. But really a lot of knowledge and service industries at the heart. And again, if we go to MDI, what do we have? You've got tourism, right? Service industry, and we have knowledge industry with Jax, MDI, BL, College of the Atlantic, and those are the fundamentals of our economy. So again, this context that's all around us is constantly changing. So if you're a company, what you're thinking about is, what is next? And what is happening is if you look at the turnover in the thousand biggest companies, in the 70s, from 70s to 80s, about 35% of those companies turned over. If you go a decade later, it's 45%. And this continues up to the 2003 to 2013, in the 10-year period, 70% of those companies have turned over. Turned over in Dottie? They're gone, so they've been replaced by other companies. So what is happening is the economy is changing, and it's happening faster and faster and faster and faster. Okay, so is everyone with me on that? So you not only have change from all these different things, the context is shifting, but so is this rate of what they call creative destruction. So companies are constantly turning faster and faster and faster. And so what you wanna know, know if you're a company, you're asking what is next? Right, it's not what we're doing now, but where are we going? That is important. How is the context changing? And so does anyone, there's only one company that was on the Dow in 1896 that's still around today, GE, and it's GE, right? And so if you look, and here's what it looks like, you can see here how many people have survived all these different contexts. So American Tobacco made it one, GE made it through two, Standard Oil Changes to Exxon has gone through a couple. But so these companies are all wondering what is next, and the context has changed. So the new context that's coming around is explained by this simple graph, right? So the first time I saw this, it hurt my head. So what we have here, I'll try to go through it, is down here along the bottom is, you have the UN Human Development Index. And that is basically, are we living educated lives, a low check-in for mortality, all the things that you want when you're living and you're feeling like you have a good life, so you've got enough food, you've got good education, good healthcare, et cetera. And so according to the UN, you want to be between 0.8 and 1.0. Over here, this is the ecological footprint or the number of hectares per person, the bio-capacity of the planet. Okay, so in 1961, this little dotted line here, we had about four hectares per person. In 2006, we had about two. Now as our population goes up, for those of you who are Matthew people, that box keeps shrinking. And so where do you want to be, is you want to have high human development right over here and this is within the Earth's limits. Right, so, and what all those little dots are, those are countries, right? So the blue countries here are the European countries and the North American countries here are green. So you can see if everyone was living like us, you're talking, we only need four or five planets worth of resources, right? And so what you quickly realize is the new thing that is constraining economic growth is rapidly becoming the bio-capacity per person. And so because of that, it's starting to change the way people are thinking about their enterprises. Now this graph, just to give you a sense of that, was put out in the Vision 2050 report by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. So this was put out by large companies were looking at what is the future gonna look like and if you read the headline, you know, it's meeting human demands within the ecological limits of the planet. And so companies are starting to think about this and they're all, and people are, the smart ones are racing to figure out how do you get into this blue box here? Because they know ultimately destroying the planet is a really bad business decision, right? You are not, if the planet is wrecked, the economy is a subset of the environment. And so this context is changing. And so, all right, so here's what I'm gonna need you to work with me for a minute. And when you start looking at things in this new context, you start coming up with new ideas, all right? And so we're gonna do a little exercise here to try and see how can we deal with some of these things. So, all right, so you're gonna have the decision whether you can abandon or start a real industry that exists today that's had the following consequences after it's been in existence roughly 100 years, okay? So let me say, don't mention the industry. Someone will absolutely know what this is and they're gonna wanna say it, don't say it. Everyone got me? Okay, there's always a spoiler out there. All right, so, Cindy, you're gonna be, if you're running this industry, you're gonna be killing a million wild animals per week. You're gonna be killing deer, elk, birds, frogs, and tens of thousands of domestic pets. Congratulations. Yeah, Lucas, you're gonna be causing spectacular increases in emphysema as well as heart disease and bronchial infections. Congratulations. And Roger, you'll be emitting a quarter of the U.S. greenhouse gases, threatening global climactic stability. And Jody, you'll be creating 7 billion pounds of unrecycled scrap every year. And then Betsy, sorry. You'll be causing the U.S. to spend between 60 and 100 billion dollars a year in an increasingly hostile region and causes to maintain continual war readiness. And finally, Mike, since you knew about GE, you'll be requiring the public to spend about 200 million dollars a day to maintain the infrastructure to support this industry. Who wants to start this industry? The 1%. The 1%, all right? So if you knew about this industry, would you use their, would you use the product? No. Or go ahead. We're all using the product. We're all using the, all right, we are all using the product. What would, let me ask you, what would cause you to use the product? Coming to a talk. All right, coming to a talk, Mike, to carry on, all right. What else though? What would make it okay? What would make all of this okay for you? Survival? Yeah, need. Someone said convenient. Life the way we know it. All right, life the way we know it. So that's worth, you know, killing a million wild animals per week, maybe. Yeah, what else? What else would make you do this? Make your own. A cultural norm. All right, a cultural norm. It's something you don't think about, no question. Sorry, hunger? Hunger, yeah, that could do it. Short-term things, what you see versus what you see in front of you every day versus, you know, what you go further away from home to pay attention to. All right, well, let me give you, let me give you the other side of the coin here. Well, first I have to mention that you'll also be maiming or injuring 250 million people and killing more people that have died in all wars in U.S. history. Just a little icing on the cake there. Every year. No, I think that's total. I think you're talking about the government. Well, hey, hey, don't say it if I said as I said. Don't say it if you know it. So the other side of the coin here, again, don't mention the industry, is you're gonna employ millions of people, okay? You're gonna employ millions of people and gainful work. You're gonna sell a copy of your product every two seconds. So you just sold one, right? Just sold another, if you're a business person, right? You're a site, you're selling a lot of product. You're gonna provide consumers with undreamed-of levels of personal mobility. And you're gonna revolutionize pretty much every aspect of society from agriculture, urban planning, manufacturing, family vacation in the built environment to name a few. You'll also solve a massive solid-waste problem in urban areas. And if the sales from the five largest companies were put together and they were our country's GDP, you'd be the 20th largest economy on the planet. Right, so you'd be in the G20. So does that change anybody's mind? All right, well, so who can tell me what is the industry? Automobile industry. Yeah, it's the automobile industry, right? Killing animals? Well, driving cars and collisions on the road is killing animals. I mean, they're not directly going out. Cars are causing those deaths, yeah. So why do we drive cars? Convenience. All right, yeah. And ignorance of all the things you've just shown us. So everyone will be walking home, right? So you have convenience. I can't say that. All right, so convenience. But really, why do we use cars? Why do we buy them? Or why do other people buy them? We don't even say ourselves. It's our livelihood. All right, livelihood, because you need to get around and get to work. Convenience. All right, convenience, why else? There's no alternative. All right, there's no alternative out there. Great, why else? In some places. Yeah, some places, that's true. But why else do we drive? Why else do people buy cars? Everybody wants fun. All right, fun, status, what were you gonna say? Just fun. Yeah, fun, great. I would suggest we don't know the consequences. Yeah, for some people, certainly, that you don't know the consequences, so you don't do it. Why else? This is a pretty good list. One more? People think that me changing isn't gonna solve the problem if everybody else is doing it. Why should I convenience myself and stop? Okay, so it's not worth, there's like a hassle factor in there, right? So what if, so the question becomes here, and this is where you're starting to like, we're starting to get into the piece around abundance, is how do you change the industry? How do you change automobiles? What could you do to give people what they want? So the fun, the convenience, the status, be able to get to work, be able to still interact, how do you give them people what they want, but how do you reduce the negative impacts? What kinds of things? How would you redesign this industry? Because let's face it, when the auto industry started, people weren't thinking a hundred years down the road, right? I mean, they were talking about this strange thing called the horseless carriage, right? There was entrepreneurs who were starting this and they were just worried about keeping their doors open, and there was all this legislation about part backfiring and they were being beaten by horses and races, and was this odd little thing? No one would have ever said like, okay, here's all the things that's gonna lead to, but so the question is, we're here today to maybe understand the impacts, how do we change this around? What could we do to lessen some of those impacts, but still give people the kinds of things they're looking for? Well, they're sort of working on it now, the self-driving car. All right, so you could have automation. All right, so you could have automation, a self-driving car, yep, what else? Solar power, public transportation. All right, solar power, either for a car or for public transportation. Get away from oil. All right, get away from oil, find new fuel sources. Collective ownership. I'm sorry? Collective ownership. Collective ownership, like either peer-to-peer sharing or a company that has a sharing program. So restructure our communities in a way that we don't have to make the kind of traveling that we have had to do for all of our basic needs and for work and for other things so that everything's in closer proximity. Okay, so you have restructuring communities and figuring out how you can make it more walkable, livable, bikeable, et cetera, what else? Give everybody a smart phone, put them on a Wi-Fi bus. All right, give everybody a smart phone and stick them on a Wi-Fi bus, great. Other ideas. So you're getting the idea, so let me show you. It also, the one thing to think about now, we're talking about the five largest companies here are equal to the 20th largest economy on the planet. So these are very large, extremely powerful companies. But yet there's a ton of change happening out there. So just like the Bethlehem Steel of the old days, there are things that are on foot that are changing and people are trying to figure out and answer the many of the things that you're putting out there. So here are a few alternatives. So this is an electric motorcycle that was put out so using a different power source, much more efficient. There are these, you talked about self-driving cars, there are these programmable pods in some places where you can get in and program where you wanna go and it will take you there. Either these were on a rail system but there's also other ones that are free-driving. This is a compressed air car put out by Tata Motors that was running on that. This is a crowd-designed car from Fiat, the Fiat Mio. You also have public transportation, so things like the bullet train in Japan and in Europe. Companies like Zipcar where you have car sharing that are out there and every time a Zipcar goes on to the road, several other cars leave the road and they found that people increase their likelihood to use public transportation to shop locally and so it's re-end and it reduces congestion. You also have the opportunity of using solar power and a lot of people don't know this, there's a movement out there around vehicle to grid. And so if you look at, what does your car do all day? Yeah, it's just sitting there. And if you looked at all the energy stored in all the car batteries, there's actually more energy in there than we're producing on the whole grid. So you can tap into those car batteries and then we also be recharging them using renewables. This is a really efficient truck that was designed by Walmart to help improve gas mileage. This is a bike highway that's recently been approved in London, so totally enclosed to make it much more accessible for biking and keep it separate from cars. This is a public-private partnership that's happening in Portland, Oregon to bring street cars back out and improve public transportation. Relay Rides is a peer-to-peer sharing network so you can rent your own car out to your peers. You have, this is a totally sustainably designed car that runs on hydrogen fuel inside parts of recyclable and using different materials. This is from New Zealand, it's called a yike bike and they go higher speeds like 15 to 20 miles an hour and you ride on top of them, but they're also foldable so you can carry them upstairs into your apartment. Of course Tesla, everybody has heard about. If you wanna think about opportunities, Tesla just, when they announced their brand new car, they promptly raised well over a billion dollars from customers putting in pre-orders. So talk about finding opportunity. This is actually a former student of mine, Nick Harris, who was making butenol, which is a drop in substitute for gasoline out of food waste. He's getting his PhD working on that now. This is a car that's about 200 miles per gallon, designed by ironically, given what's going on, by Volkswagen, and this is the Toyota i-Road and the idea behind this is you take your public transportation to a place and then you hop in one of these little three-wheeled motorcycles and it takes you the last mile so you can still get to work. And then finally you have programs like bike share programs that are sponsored by City Group and others. So there is a lot, a lot of change going on out there. And if we take a moment and zoom back out where we've been, is you have all of these stages of the economy, right? And every time you go through one of these new stages, you have these periods of chaos. And the last one, for those of you who remember when we went through the information age, you remember the early days of the information age, right? Dial up, you know, beep, beep and all that stuff. And I remember when it was happening and I was actually at Rails to Trials Conservancy at the time and everyone was saying, what is this thing? Do we have to pay attention to it slow? It doesn't work. And now imagine if 15 or 20 years now later, if you would have just assumed the internet was a fad. How different would your organization, and when I say business, I'm talking business or nonprofit, would your organization or enterprise even exist today if you had entirely missed the internet age, right? And so we're entering a new age right now because of these constraints. And it's this age of what I call abundance. What a lot of people call sustainability. And the idea here is that you have to operate and be able to produce outstanding environmental, fiscal, as well as social results. And if you're not doing that, and that is what is coming down the pike, you are gonna be replaced. And so what the idea here is, it's not about having just getting by. Or a lot of times, sustainability is an incredible concept. It's become fraught as it's become really popular. So people have just associated with like, I'm sustainable, I take a shorter shower and I suffer appropriately. And that's not what this is about. This is about finding new opportunities and figuring out ways that you can move forward. And so in the old model, this is what happens. And this is what happens going forward. And a lot of times you have this for-profit, non-profit divide, right? And the non-profits, in some sense, they get to be the punishers, right? And tell everyone it's like, these things are horrible that you're doing. And so you have a case like Volkswagen, right? And Volkswagen, when they reported on their emissions cheating, this is a chart of their stock, their value went down by 45%, right? And so you see how companies that are ignoring these ideas of abundance are being punished for this on the one hand. And that partially happens because today about 80% of stock value is based on what they call intangible assets. And intangible assets are brand, reputation, stakeholder engagement, strategy, business model, those kinds of things, not on owning large factories where you make stuff, right? And so when they found out Volkswagen was cheating on the emissions, you can see directly correlated just how much they suffered. And they went from being a company, kind of moving up here and looking at opportunity potential to one that was really exposed to risk down here. But in a way, punishing is one part of it, right? That's your stink. But there's a much bigger carrot out there. And so the idea behind abundance is we try to define what are companies and enterprises looking for? And so on the people side, what you're really talking about are some concrete goals. You're looking at improving the workplace, building community and solving social issues. On the planet side, what you're looking at is how do we reduce waste, use waste as a resource or build natural capital? Similar to an organic farmer, right? How do you take, how do you put back more than you take out? And then when you do these things right from the business side, what you have is you are reducing risk, right? That's that Volkswagen being punished. But for any company, what you're thinking about is how do I cut costs, how do I grow sales? And you can create this virtuous cycle putting all these things together. And so that when the company by growing it's doing good out there in the world and it's helping solve problems. And it's not an either or dichotomy, right? You're helping them realize where are the new opportunities that you can do this. And for most companies, they desperately need this outside perspective which everyone in this room can provide because you understand where the problems are which is also probably where the opportunity's led. Now, as I said, this is about redefining pathways and really looking for new solutions. So, if we were talking about alternative transportation in the city, right? This is one example of what you could do. So this is New York. That's theoretically, you know, you can theoretically ride your bike right here. You know, it's kind of a death wish. And, you know, I think, and as, you know, I have a 10 year old now. So, you know, that's something I might have done in my 20s, but I'm certainly not doing that today. But what you're looking for is not the least common denominator. But how do you redefine the very pathways that we're talking about and really maximize impact? And so the example that we have before of this bike highway from London, right? Where people have really reimagined, not just saying we need a lane for bicyclists, but how do we make it so people can really be in the city on their bikes and have it be an experience where someone doesn't want a car at all and they can be on their bike? And so what is happening here in a huge gap that you see, excuse me, with sustainability and businesses and nonprofits, is there's this language gap, right? So someone's talking about carbon emissions and, you know, not polluting and a business person may be worried about innovation and thinking about new opportunity. And so what people are starting to realize that if you can bridge this language gap, there is tremendous opportunity out there. So this is a 2009 issue over the Harvard Business Review, where they talked about how sustainability is now the key driver of innovation. Now, Harvard Business Review is not, you know, not exactly holding up the banner for green and sustainable, but even they're recognizing that, you know, and the authors of this article were talking about how sustainability is the mother load of organizational and technological innovations that yield bottom line and top line returns. Now to a business person, that's something to think about and you saw all those new opportunities that happened within the auto industry. Now, when you look at what is happening out there and for the companies that are embracing this, what they're finding is for a business, you wanna have these competitive advantages. You're looking at ways to find new opportunity and all of the things up here that you see that are as a result of embracing this abundant perspective are things businesses wanna do every day. So everything from restructuring costs to customer loyalty, to having employees that are more loyal, to understanding unique competencies. And if you reduce waste, which a lot of this is where it starts, is reducing waste, essentially you're reducing costs, right? So as you embrace this abundant perspective, there's lots of business benefits. And what you're seeing this is a, and you're seeing the real results out in the stock market. And so here are the returns for the standard enforced 500 over a 10 year period. So essentially a double. If you look at these firms of endearment, here it went up by 16 times. Now what these firms are, these are ones that who value stakeholders and much like you all have stakeholders for your various organizations. And when you think about stakeholders in the business sense, you're talking about the people who work for you. You're talking about your suppliers. You can be looking at the environment. And so they're saying that firms that actually look at the broader perspective are outperforming their competitors. And so here's an example of who these people are. Are these good guys or some good and some bad? Sorry, I don't. Yeah, well, I mean, so these are companies that are what they're doing is they're looking beyond just saying the traditional mantra in businesses you want to just maximize profit, right? And what these folks are saying is, well, we're actually interested in looking at how are we treating our people? How are we dealing with our suppliers? What are we doing for the environment? These are all good guys. Well, I mean, it gets more complicated, right? Nothing, it's not quite good and bad because I think everyone probably, everyone, nobody's perfect. So these I would say are people who are trying and doing some good stuff, but undoubtedly they can improve. Just like we all can, right? But they're doing some pretty amazing things. So the question that I oftentimes hear is like, okay, all this sounds great theoretically, but where do I start with this? How do I actually move the needle? And if you look, there is a set of tactics that companies like these and others are using that are proven out there in the world. And as we were looking at the auto industry before, you see this one up here, waste is food. So how do you take something that was, that you were just throwing it out before and how do you make that into a productive resource? And so the vehicle to grid that we were talking about is taking sunlight, turning that into energy and doing that. The sharing economy, we talked about relay rides, right? So peer-to-peer sharing is another way people are doing this. Using less, radical resource productivity is what they call it. But how do you do more with less? How do you find out, what am I wasting? Right, every time you're wasting something, that's something you're producing that you really don't need to be producing, right? So you can cut that out and save costs and find new opportunities. Building natural capital we talked about with organic farmers, biomimicry, right? How do you, nature has been dealing with an inordinate number of issues since the beginning of time. And so looking at nature to see how they have solved problems. And so companies are looking like the hummingbirds beak here is what the front of the bullet train is based on. Now, and today they're designing wind turbine blades based on whale fins and how they pass through water. Looking at how do you solve problems and not sell it, instead of selling a product, I'm gonna solve your problem, right? So Zipcar solves a transportation problem rather than selling you a car. And now you have Ford talking about we're not gonna be selling you a car out there in the future. We're gonna be providing you with a transportation solution. Unbundling, looking, breaking apart the industry and looking at what is the little thing we can do in a very specific area, instead of providing the solutions for everybody, look at something very specific, like the Toyota, Ireland. On Micro Enterprise, you see these changes. This company here is called Clean Engines. They work in the Philippines. And what they've simply done is they have all these two-stroke motorcycle engines that are really highly, highly polluting and they've converted those to four-stroke engines and figured out ways to make them less polluting so they run more efficiently for the people who own them. The compressed air car that I showed you was a vehicle that was originally designed for the Indian market. So people who had much lower levels of income could still afford this new kind of transportation that runs on air. Looking at people crowding and looking at people for ideas or money to find solutions. And there's been tons and tons of examples of that. Coming up with new entities. So now there are B corporations, low-profit limited liability companies and all these kinds of corporate forms that align people's values with their legal structure. The service profit chain is being used by companies like Tesla. And this is an incredibly complicated business tactic which says, all right, this is gonna just amaze you. Are you ready? So it says, if you treat your people well and teach them what the customer wants so they can exceed customer expectations, your customers are gonna be happy and they're gonna come back to you. And in turn, that's gonna help grow your company. Right, incredible. Right, like totally shocking. So, you know, and this is being used by companies like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's and other people who are leaders in their industry. And so you have regenerated marketing. This one is new and just kind of coming onto the scene where you start to say, how can we use our marketing dollars to actually be regenerated? And so here you have a bank who's sponsoring the bike sharing. And what can we do with our marketing dollars when we put them out there in the world and still use them to get our name out there but use it to solve social or environmental problems and raise awareness in that way. And really get creative. Collaborative exchange is another thing that's going on where people are looking at alternative currencies or using time as currency and exchanging hours of work. And so like in the Berkshares, their currency is called Berkshares. And so you can use your Berkshares to go like pay for a taxi or other transportation or whatever you need. And then finally looking at impact investment. And where you see is companies like Honda and Toyota are starting to look at not only selling you a car, excuse me, not only selling you a car but looking at how your whole house could be a battery. And you could come home and use your house to then charge your electric car that's in your garage with this through the solar panels and other things. And lots of companies are investing in these different things. And finally, there's also opportunities to think about your own tactics. Now, and I wanna, so we're gonna, I just wanna talk about the abundance cycle for a moment here and then we're gonna loop back to what does this mean for all of you. But I just wanted folks to see that, you know, this idea of abundance, it's you can help and be a part and parcel of creating a better world. So for businesses and actually for all of your entities that you operate, all the nonprofit for profit doesn't matter, there are these, this discrete set of activities that happens. So, and I'll go through them very briefly. So inbound, you bring stuff in. If you think about all the materials and things you bring into your office every day in operations, the next one here, you convert that into other things. Then you distribute it in an outbound, you have marketing which you're all very familiar with and then you have service, you know, the service that you provide after a sale or after someone has joined your organization. And then finally, what we've done here is we've added in this thing called unsold production, traditionally called waste. So everything that you throw out is stuff you are producing but you are not selling, right? Which is a really bad business proposition. If you think about your offices, everything that you're producing in that office isn't being put to a good use is really unsold production. And so what you do is with every enterprise, for profit or nonprofit, you can apply that abundant perspective to that and start to say where are new opportunities and things that we haven't thought of before. And so I just want to go through this quick five-step process. So if you were working with or collaborating with someone or thinking about this yourself, you would really be looking at doing a couple of things. With the abundant cycle, thinking about what is the purpose of the organization? Why does it exist? All businesses and all entities were founded to solve a problem, help people do something. And so what is the purpose of what they originally set out to do? And get back in touch with that. Figure out which part of this cycle, where are their competitive strengths? Like everybody does something a little bit better, right? So you have companies like Zipcar who've talked about, you know, they're really focused on the outbound distribution of cars around the city. In your organizations, whether you're doing advocacy or buying land or depending on what you're doing, you probably have an area of strength here, either bringing in resources to make a purchase or being in touch with a big membership base and think about, you know, what are your areas of strength? So you can then look at those areas where you're strongest and start playing with those tactics that we brought up there and saying, well, what would happen if we tried this new tactic here and you can iterate different solutions? And then where things oftentimes break down is this communication piece, right? Where I'm trying to talk to you in my language and you're speaking another language because you're in operations and I'm in marketing or you're an environmental advocate and I'm a chief financial officer. So you're talking about carbon and I'm talking about dollars. So you've got to really work hard to bridge this communication gap. And this is, and especially, you know, where you've had traditionally non-profits and for-profits oftentimes were in adversarial roles. Say, wait, what can we do together versus how can we be against each other? How can I help you discover a new opportunity versus, you know, versus just telling you what you're doing wrong? And then finally, you know, you've got to measure, report and repeat this. And now Jason Clay, who's the senior vice president of World Wildlife Federation who's done a lot of work with companies. I think what he talks about here is really important. This notion that sustainability has got to be something that we all care about. That the groups need to have the collaboration even if you've never had it before. And we really do need to manage this planet as if our life depended on it because it does, right? And so it is not good enough for everyone just to stay in their separate silos and say, okay, this is what we're doing over here and you do your thing over there and occasionally we'll bash heads or maybe we won't interact at all. But, you know, this is gonna take the efforts of everybody if we're gonna, you know, we started with that little blue box right over there in the corner. And, you know, if we're gonna get things down that it's gonna take all of us working together and coming up with new solutions and not just saying, like, you did that wrong, you need to do it differently. And so what is starting to happen is you've got, people are coming together to collaborate and they're doing exactly what we talked about and looking, moving from just saying like this is a bad thing and this is a risk to finding these new sources of value. And so this was a piece that was put together for a private equity firm that buys out companies and they started to say, what happens if we don't just look at environmental risk and look at risk mitigation, but what if we look at finding opportunities over here? What would that look like? And the unlikely players who teamed up to make this were the Carlisle Group and Environmental Defense Fund. Right, and they're working together to figure out how can they, how can this be mutually beneficial and the Carlisle Group, for those of you who don't know, is one of the largest private equity firms on the planet. And Environmental Defense Fund, I'm sure you're all very familiar with. They've been doing a lot of really good work in this area. And so if you're interested in starting to collaborate and come up with these new solutions, there's a couple of best practices that are out there. So, first, this piece of language, right? You've got to, you've really got to sit down and try to get that together. Because if you've ever spoke, if you've ever traveled or been to a foreign country, right, that's what this is like. You've got to figure out how people speak the language and use that so you can get aligned. The attitude to take with this is generally that you, yes, you're gonna have some goals, but there's gotta be a good deal of flexibility because just like in a startup company, sometimes you think you're going this way and then suddenly the road turns. And you want to make this timely and put it on bounds around it. So you know where you're going and you know how long it's gonna last and it just doesn't hang out there forever. You know, oftentimes the folks who are talking about this and there's a great article in this in the MIT Sloan Management Review where they just did a report with Boston Consulting Group on collaboration and that's where I'm pulling these out of. And they talk about having the board be engaged on both levels. So the leadership, it's not, it's great if you have engagement at other levels but you also need to engage at the top level so you really have the commitment. And thinking about this is how you enter this and more importantly like how do you break up when it's done, right? So you have a good entrance, a good engagement and then understand what happens at the end of this, where do we go when we're finished working together and what is that gonna look like? And of course you wanna do diligence on the organizations on both sides and be really clear about what are the resources you're committing to this, what are they committing to this, what is joint, what is not and what is independent. And I'd say lastly the people piece is so key and they talk about you have to have teams that are gonna be willing to trust each other and they're gonna wanna work together and so it's gotta be a coalition of the willing, if you will. Now, so we've been talking about this in terms of the auto industry and isolated business cases. I wanted to just briefly mention this place right here. So this is a picture from Samso Denmark. If you wanna see what the power of a collaboration between business, nonprofit, community can look like and where it can go, this is a great example. I was there the fall before last with a group of students and with a group of people from the outer main islands and the main islands as you may know have some of the highest energy costs in the country. And so we were going to Samso because this is a carbon negative island. So it's about half the population size of Mount Desert Island and they were arguably the first carbon negative community in the world. And so on Samso, they produce more renewable energy than they consume. They have restructured their entire, they have district heating plants where they're burning local agricultural waste, stuff that just used to be sitting there rotting in the fields and they're now bringing it in and using that to heat homes and putting more money into millions of dollars into the local economy rather than sending it abroad. But this partnership would not have happened without nonprofit organizations engaging with the community and then also engaging with businesses. So for example, these are the onshore wind turbines here but they have 10 offshore wind turbines. Those turbines, some of them own, some of a few of them are owned privately by groups of small investors but the majority of them are cooperatively owned where people own a share or two in them. And the way they were able to make that work is the banks, the local banks were willing to loan people money to buy a share of that wind turbine because the banks understood, they knew exactly how much energy those turbines were gonna generate after the studies and they knew what the power and the energy was worth so they could make a long-term loan because they understood what the returns would be on that investment. And so the local banks enable local people to buy shares in these wind turbines to help, again, create this kind of abundance and for them this has been a real piece of economic renewal so you can do it with businesses and have those kinds of collaborations but you can also have remarkable results on a community level. So with that, I'll take the break but if you don't know about SAMSO, it's an incredible example. There's actually an article about it up here that was just published recently and if you're looking for more information you can go to the website abundancecycle.com or check out some of the articles or the TED talk. Thank you. Anybody has questions? Questions, I went to an observation and I was really glad to hear your focus on waste, something that I'm really familiar with and you're absolutely right, it's a place where business should start but we found back in the 90s, early 90s, that while I got into it, to start with and saw a cost savings it didn't stick with it, Jay. And I'm curious to know why we got into a recession and I don't know why it became less attractive because it was all about saving money. Well, and you point to one of the things that there's a lot of forces at play here, right? It's not clean. So you can have the best of intentions and things can go wrong. You can have a CEO turnover and that changes priorities. You can have a desperate cash situation so maybe you don't have investment. I think one of the things, if I can build on that a little bit, that you see that I think is so important is you really do need business and policy and activists all, it all needs to be going in the same direction, right? So it's not to say one is more important than the other but so for example, in Europe, you have take back laws. So if you sell a computer or a television as a company, you're taking that product back. You own it. You own it through its entire life cycle and so what happens is as a company, I suddenly stop designing things so they can be thrown away. I start designing them, right? So I can bring them back in and harvest all the precious metals and everything out of them. And so you need those things working together to make sure that's gonna happen. And so in some cases, the business case completely works and in other places you also need policy to keep that going. Yeah. You just mentioned the word policy and I think that's one of the main restraints is a combination of inertia and policy. We need to work as a group to make these things move forward either publicly or privately or in a combination. But with the current power brokers that having say over policy with people and admittedly it's the public who has a real issue with urban planning and making these decisions to build a bike highway or all these that we need to overcome. And so it seems to be a difficult. Yeah, the policy environment is terrible, right, which you all know, right? And it's just atrocious. So I have less in the short term, less and less hope for policy and more and more hope for enterprise trying to do this. And I actually do at College of the Atlantic we have, we have been sending students to all the climate negotiations. And I knew things were really changing when one of the professors who was a big advocate of policy, he came back from one of the cops and he said, you know, the negotiations are just going nowhere. And he said, the only thing that I saw that was interesting was what the business community was doing. And in the business community, let me be clear, they're not doing this out of, it's not altruistic. They see opportunity here, but in a way that's great because that's where they're going to pour their energies. And I think, and the question mark in my mind is, so if we're shifting towards this abundance or a sustainable economy, will the shift happen fast enough? Is the $24,000 question, which I don't have an answer to. But I think, again, you need all people pushing, but the policy right now is terrible. So I see more and more students and others devoting towards enterprise, either for profit or nonprofit. Yeah. Question that kind of does dovetail a little bit off that. And that is that you get a lot of really interesting examples of different forms of transportation. And then also that interesting island in Dana Shiland that had been able to get, essentially negative resources. I'm curious, have you seen many good examples of where some of that interesting technology has broken through and really kind of hit some of those critical economies of scale that go beyond kind of those small kind of pilot kind of efforts where it gets more mainstream? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I mentioned Zipcard, that's one great example. They were recently bought out for $500 million Uber. And there's a lot of controversy around Uber and I know that, but they're also using the sharing economy model. And if you look at how they're being valued, you know, they're being valued very far above what, you know, way above the whole transportation sector. Airbnb is another example. The sharing, so the two huge opportunities here that I've seen are waste. Like you said, and using waste as a resource because as you may know, we're incredibly wasteful. Like something like along the lines of 99% of everything that's dug up, produced, made, is thrown out or buried within six months, right? So the opportunity there is staggering. The other is in the sharing economy, either peer-to-peer or companies offering solutions. But, and there are lots of examples of those kinds of things, you know, now taking off at seven years ago, then, you know, Airbnb seven years ago, then exist. Now it's got more hotel rooms than any major hotel chain in evaluation higher than all the legacy brands. And they're using resources more efficiently. Yeah. So thank you for your presentation. I worry about the natural world side of things. So from your presentation, it seems to me that you could succeed if you got all the businesses to do what you wanted to do. And we would still have impoverished the natural world in very significant ways. Because your only, your tagline is natural infrastructural. And your example was organic farming. And so this is very much about the parts of the natural world that are of use, direct use to businesses. So how do, so what's the stop? What's the, what's the insurance on this model in terms of the rest of the non-utilitarian part? Well, let me give you an example. So this is a little utilitarian, but it kind of gets that. Because, you know, the businesses understand as well that there's a whole set of ecosystem services out there that they're getting, you know, be it air or water or other things. And so you have a brewery in, I'm trying to remember if it's in Columbia, it's Bavaria brewery since it's in South America and they were having problems with water, water, yeah. And so there are rather, water is a rather important part of beer, right? And so, and there had a couple of different options. One of which was you could have a plant that purifies all your water. That's, you know, millions of dollars to build. Then you can get in the water as crappy as you want it and it could come out looking beautiful on the other end, theoretically. But instead, what they did was they invested in preserving the environment around the headwaters and changing local farming practices. And so it resulted in environmental preservation in which clean the water in and of itself just by having more land preserved and then, you know, gave them what they were looking for. So part of it is getting people to see what are the different benefits. I pursue that though. So if my interest were in spectacle bears which live in that area where the watershed is, clean water doesn't need spectacle bears. In fact, it doesn't need a lot of the things that are living there. I could still get you clean water. So that's my concern is that kind of a logic which is market driven, might not produce the results that I'm after. Yeah, and I'm not advocating for solely market driven logic. What I'm saying is, you know, if you have that ecosystem preserved, you're gonna have habitat for the speckled bears. And yes, are there some things in nature that we shouldn't be valuing? Yeah, of course. Do you need preservation? Do you need conservation and land trust and land set aside and those things? Absolutely. But you know what? Right now at the rate the economy is chewing everything up and spitting it out on the other side, I'm not sure that's gonna be enough. And so I would much rather be in a world where you have all the, it's not to say do one and not do the other, right? So you still want that preservation and no, not everything is market-based. It's not all market-driven. You're not gonna put a value on every banana slope. But if you're not, if the economy isn't functioning the other way, so it's looking at how do you value these things and how do you incorporate them into your business and make them more regenerative, the other, it's almost like tilting everyone else. Does that make sense? Sure. We can talk later. Sure. All right. Thank you. Yeah. I know, on a very large scale, what impact does the change in population to get up or down have on the abundant cycle? Well, you know, I'm sort of, so there's been a lot of studies on this. So there's Jefferson's paradox that says like the more efficient we get, the more stuff we end up using up. The question then, if you go one step back from that as well, like how are we picking our stuff that we're using? Right? Obviously, you have more population. As more people, as there's more prosperity, you're gonna have greater resources. The question is, what are they using? And the one piece that gives me some hope is the waste piece. And that, you know, there are companies now that are looking at mining, you know, landfills. And we have wasted so much that, you know, the planet could be supporting a whole lot more people if we were using resources, you know, much smarter. If everyone lives like we do in the US, I mean, it's game over, right? You know, it's like you need five planets. So my hope is not only, and you can become efficient to a point, right? But what happens with the problem with efficiency is like we're running 60 miles an hour towards a cliff. Now we're running 30, because we're twice as efficient. Now we're running 15. So we're still heading for the cliff. We're just going slower. What you really have to do and the reason the abundant cycle is closed is you're looking at how do you create that closed-loop production system so you don't need new inputs coming into it. And the waste that's out there, as you said, you know, that's the biggest area where you can be deriving new inputs to put those in. But, you know, it's just a question of will it get there in time? You're the part of the question I had. It's kind of scary, and I know you're not a candidate, but does the government have a role in this? Yeah, I mean, you'd hope, right? I think based on what, and what this gentleman said back here, I mean, the current policy situation is poisoned. You know, people hear climate, and they say, you're gonna kill the economy. Well, that's not really true, you know. And market-based carbon pricing, well, you know something, you know where that comes from? That comes from us. Like, we did that with acid rain when I was a kid. And it worked really well, and in fact, all the solutions were way cheaper than anyone thought they were gonna be. But in the current policy arena, like, forget it. And one of the reasons I would talk about abundance instead of sustainability, is sustainability has really become associated with a scarcity mentality. Like, we have to preserve it for the future for the other people, so I gotta take my shorter shower. Versus saying like, no, wait, you can live more comfortably. You can have a better life, and you know, you can have the growth. Like, what you saw on SAMHSA, that was all economic growth, right? They put up turbines, they had district heating plants installed, they had local jobs that were produced, and in turn, and they were also, by the way, building a local economy, and they got carbon totally out of their system. And now they're looking at how they eliminate all fossil fuels off the island entirely, because they're still bringing in some but they're a net carbon producer, or they're net carbon negative. So now the next step on this is, how do you get rid of all fossil fuels? So you're not using those inputs. And that's the question, throwing back to the population growth, right? How do you change what we're putting into it so we get something better out on the other side? Yeah, Jason. So when I think about the abundant cycle, it seems like it applies in a lot of the levels of the work that we do, and I'm sort of checking this with you for your reaction. So we can do it, I can do it in the office, with Noreen, we can sit down and talk about, okay, so we recycle this with paper, we throw this step away, and we should change some of our practices, and then I can think about it with our board and our organizations, and think about how we think about what we're trying to do, either as the individual groups with the missions that they have or as a collaboration. But then I think we can also take it a little bit at a broader sense around the community issues, and that's sort of where land conservation as a movement is sort of trying to go is thinking about our role as larger community players and addressing larger community needs. So it may be a way to kind of turn our conversation to how can we better sort of support these abundant opportunities that we have, is that? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And so I did a presentation a while ago for Gross Farm, Maine, and looking at this, the whole abundant cycle model can actually be reconfigured so instead of looking at it like an enterprise, we can look at the community, right? And because the community has the same things happening, and like stuff is coming in, things are being produced, right? You're distributing goods and services out in the community. And so yeah, you can take it and say, and go from just what am I doing here to how do we engage with the broader community, and how do we use conservation and ecology to help improve lives for everybody? And if you look at all the sustainable business stuff, it's all based on ecology. Like that's where it's coming from. This didn't come from the business community, right? This is coming from people who have this mindset of folks sitting in this room, saying, wow, we can look for new opportunities and figure out different ways of doing things. And you need the mindset that's sitting in this room, you need to get that out there to help other people come around and you need to think about how do you do that in a way so when we engage with the community, the community also sees it as a positive, not as someone just saying, you need to just do this better, this is the right thing to do, right? Which it may very well be the right thing to do when you might get the solution you want, but let's try and get everybody on board with us. So you can have, it'll just make it less of a headache, essentially. So yeah, absolutely. So yeah. I've been at a conference like, it was a three day conference and you may have been co-sponsored by the School of Forestry and the Business School. Yeah, it was on this very topic and there were, you know, parallel workshops for three days of multi-tracks in every sector from energy and water and waste and agriculture. You know, it was, and each one of them was business driven, you know, businesses that are working in all of these sectors on all of these principles. And it was really one of the most hopeful experiences I've had in years to kind of come away and sort of feel like, holy cow, you know, we are living in these sort of parallel universes where we think that the political debate is really where we are and that there's all this resistance to these ideas and that we're so polarized and that we're never gonna, you know, move from step A to B and then there's this business reality, you know, the corporate reality and these were not just, you know, the ubers and the whole foods of the world. These were GE and British petroleum and companies that are so far down the road in thinking about sustainability to use the hackney term but in a way that makes the bottom line better. And, you know, so I really, I just, you know, I kind of left feeling like, wow, you know, maybe there is hope. And I mean, that's the, you sort of go between hope and despair, right? Right, absolutely. And so, you know, on the one hand, you see all the problems out there and it's easy to say like, oh, and I deal with this with students all the time. They come in like, there's no hope. What am I doing here? Like, I go into every class and everyone tells me how crappy the world is. Like, it just sucks. And then you turn around on the other side and you say, wow, wait a minute, there's amazing things going on out there and I see this with students starting enterprises. I've given this talk based around all kinds of different industries. Industries, I would have never, like the fashion industry that I would have never have imagined is doing stuff. And there's amazing things happening out there in every sector. And you can get, you know, there's a company called Evocative Design that's making packaging out of mycelium, right? So it's a biodegradable packaging that's growing basically out of mushrooms. There's, GE is doing incredible stuff. They have a whole, their eco-imagination, their eco-imagination division, which is all about efficiency, solar, renewable energy. That division of GE is a Fortune 150 company. So that little piece of GE is one of the 150 largest companies on the planet. So, I mean, you're right. I mean, there is incredible stuff, but you've gotta, so you have to look for it. And you know what, these people, the people who are doing this stuff, they want to engage. And they want to engage not in a way that's, hey, we wrote you a check. Cause that's the sort of old model, this corporate social responsibility where I'm a good citizen. Look, I wrote a check, you know, in there. I mean, which is great, right? Don't get me wrong. I'm sure everyone here wouldn't mind another check. But people are also looking for a more meaningful engagement that can help them figure out how do you navigate these waters? How do you think about this stuff? Because they haven't been spending the time doing that because they're focused on running the enterprise. And so that's the different perspective that people here can bring. And perspective guides everything else. The questions you're asking and the perspective you have guides the opportunities you see, right? And so that is one of the key things that they're looking for is help figuring out what is a different way to look at this in a way that's accretive, if that makes sense. So yeah, I mean, the example you said, I've always, I've been really amazed by what's out there. Just to follow on to it, though, I think there's a lack of awareness. You know, these stories aren't what we talk about, but we still think that we live in this hopeless sort of world. I'm not a Pollyanna about it, but I just feel like we hear so much about the political controversy and clash of ideology and paralysis that we don't hear, you know, that there really is a reason to... In one place, actually, there's a new network of journalists that are working on telling stories of people who've come up with solutions, and so there's a whole solutions journalism network that's out there. And these are people who are writing for the New York Times and other really reputable publications and they're telling stories of positive things that are happening all over the world, precisely because all you hear about is gloom and doom usually. Yeah. You said what I was just thinking, which is it's the media, which is pervasively telling us about disaster. Yeah, and there are places, other websites, I mean, like Triple-Hundit, Green Biz, there are the Carbon War Room. I mean, there's really, there are places you can get this information. But again, you know, if you're working in an area long enough, you tend to get siloed in, right, to thinking about things a certain way and getting information from a certain place. So you gotta get out there and explore. Yeah, I think this is the last question. All right. It's a comment. I didn't see medicine introduced at all in an extending life cycle. Where does that fit into your picture? I mean, it absolutely fits in there. You know, if this was, the problem is there's too much to talk about. I have a whole nother, if you wanna stay, I've got a whole nother talk that I just deleted to come here to talk about this. But all around abundance, but it absolutely fits in. And there's amazing things happening now, especially around telemedicine and bringing medical care. And particularly, the tactic they're oftentimes using is that unbundling, right? They're finding out what are the critical care pieces that we really need that will make a difference and then focusing those in. If you go to the abundance cycle website, you'll see examples from the medical industry. I mean, there really are examples from all over. The other thing I should say is, the examples are from little teeny tiny startups to great big giant corporations, to for-profit and non-profit. So I don't really differentiate between those. What's the website? Abundancecycle.com. Thank you. Yeah, sure. Yeah, it's this one right here. Great, okay. Yeah, great. Well, thank you all so much.