[Full Interview] Money: In Service of Nature? - with Eric Smith

Lifeworlds

Eric Smith has spent his career working at the intersection of economics and nature.

Most recently he was the director of the venture capital vehicle Neglected Climate Opportunities (NCO) at the Grantham Environmental Trust, where he co-led over 40 direct investments in start-ups across all stages that can remove carbon and GHG at scale.

He was previously with SJF Ventures and worked for BlackRock on climate finance, and currently is Founder/CEO of Edacious, a company working to differentiate food quality and connect the dots between soil and human health.

Eric is also a dear friend and someone with whom I often converse on our shared focus of investing on behalf of nature.

We were both in Mexico for a climate investing conference and caught up, beachside sand rolling in, on everything from:

• His personal background in forestry and building certification frameworks around natural resource operations;
• Working in Costa Rica on their Payment for Ecosystem Services model;
• The tensions in regenerative agriculture and nature conservation;
• Why he supports EO Wilson’s Half Earth theory;
• If narrow metrics can ever be proxy enough for the complexity of a system;
• The intrinsic vs economic values of nature;
• Examples of start-ups and nature-serving businesses, and which ones are not suited for a venture capital model;
• And more…

Episode Website Link: lifeworld.earth/episodes/financeericsmith

Show Links:

• Finance for Nature: Lifeworlds Resource Page
• Regenerative Economics: Lifeworlds Resource Page
• Grantham Trust: Neglected Climate Opportunities
• Edacious
• Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures
• Payments for Environmental Services Program | Costa Rica
• Steward
• Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
• SPUN fungi
• EO Wilson Foundation
• Ground Effect

Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock, Ellie Kidd

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