If David Attenborough still had both the camera and the stamina for one final season, I suspect he would be less interested in the Serengeti’s felines and more fascinated by an urban species that, until recently, remained invisible in those Sunday-before-lunch documentaries.
Planet Earth: Boardrooms, pilot episode, executive fauna confronting Nature. The premise is simple: a significant portion of European GDP depends on things that, for centuries, we simply called landscape, and that landscape, without warning, has begun appearing in balance sheets. The European Central Bank states, in a dry bulletin, that three out of every four euros in bank lending within the European Union are exposed to ecosystem services; European regulations increasingly encourage companies to disclose their dependencies and impacts on ecosystems; prudential stress tests now include water-related scenarios that, in 2010, would have been considered literary fiction. There are, naturally, demagogic voices presenting a recent methodological correction in climate scenarios as proof of widespread fraud, and the argument now reaches European auditoriums in hushed tones, delivered with the polished manners of those who like to position themselves as “the adult in the room.” The market, always more pragmatic, continues pricing in the worst, permanently operating in “bigger-better-faster-more” mode. But Nature has already entered Bloomberg terminals, discreetly, without a new ticker symbol, somewhere between the panic indicators coming out of Hormuz.
Now let us descend into three habitats within the same city, on the same morning, camera positioned low, in accordance with our series protocol.
Habitat A. On the twelfth floor of an old office building, a board of directors meets, one that could belong to many companies and therefore should remain unnamed. The meeting began precisely at 8:30 a.m.; late arrivals stay outside, as has been the rule for decades. The agenda proceeds with only the minimal variations required by the fiscal calendar. The chairman reads item one, the CFO consults the document he had already opened before the item was announced, and the nonexecutive director asks the question whose answer appears on page 23 of the document, receiving, with the courtesy these rituals require, a response referencing page 23 of the document. The minutes mechanically record that the issue was discussed in depth and that broad consensus was reached, formulations that, with minimal variation, have appeared in meeting minutes for the past forty-three years and that no one has ever proposed changing, because changing them would imply admitting entropy, and no one has yet checked the dictionary to understand what that means. Some people call this governance. The young assistant taking notes, after sitting silently for twenty minutes without having formally been introduced to anyone, writes a sentence in the lower corner of her notebook that will never appear in the official minutes: is everything really fine?
Habitat B. On the sixth floor of a very cool building, near an even cooler café where oat milk coffee is ordered without irony, a seven-person team gathers among three strategically placed succulent plants, maintained on a rotating basis by the Chief Vibes Officer. On the wall hangs a whiteboard, half covered with flowcharts and half with large capital letters reading OKRs Q3, and next to it, in smaller but carefully styled handwriting, Wellbeing Pulse Survey — Tuesday at 11. The CFO, recently hired from a larger company and still lacking an impressive title but carrying the childlike enthusiasm of someone who genuinely believes reports are meant to be read, projects a presentation titled Nature-related Risk and Opportunity. While he speaks, the Head of People & Culture writes down three mutually exclusive ideas that will nevertheless all be explored simultaneously: taskforce? working group? cross-functional pod? The Sustainability Champion, who returned this week from an offsite retreat in Marrakesh featuring guided meditation and optional cold plunges, suggests an empathy mapping session, while the Director of Mindful Performance, who joined the company eleven weeks ago and whose role nobody has yet managed to fully explain, proposes running it in parallel, with synchronized Friday check ins. Eighteen months from now, someone carrying a business card reading Chief Regeneration Officer will almost certainly walk into that room.
Habitat C. In an interior meeting room on the fifth floor of a mid-sized bank, windowless and illuminated by poorly calibrated LED lighting, nine people sit around a table designed for sixteen. At the head sits the Head of Risk, with Compliance beside him, both carrying the calm posture of people who learned long ago that time is an ally of method. Across the table sit three members of the newly created sustainable finance team, whose average age is roughly twelve years lower and whose technical vocabulary differs enough that a prior meeting between department heads was required simply to agree on terminology. The first half hour is spent confirming that both teams have read the document and that both have questions, though not exactly the same ones, because one side wants to understand how to integrate the new language into existing models, while the other wants to know whether the bank is willing to design entirely new products, and Compliance, with the professional calm of someone who has seen this movie before, merely wants to know whether there is already legal precedent. Short silences follow the right questions, and across the table there is also a shared but still unarticulated sense that this is the first of many meetings, and that the bank emerging from them in a year or two will not remotely resemble the institution currently sitting in that room.
The camera slowly pulls back. The frame widens, and what we see are habitats populated by different species moving through a process of divergence. The first drags itself forward at the speed of the world that created it, even after that world has changed. The second adjusts its feathers, but its essential identity, despite all the cosmetic effort, remains fundamentally intact. The third struggles with the GPS, reads the map imperfectly, changes the terrain itself, and in doing so redefines what successful adaptation will ultimately mean, assuming it survives the turbulence along the way. Different pressures create different equilibriums, and some trajectories stretch into a comfortable coma, which is merely the elegant term for the road to extinction, because in nature extinction is the rule and survival the exception, as Carl Sagan once reminded us.
What emerges in the final close up is that all three of these species, for entirely different reasons, are migrating toward the same destination, arriving on July 1 at Católica, where a session dedicated to Nature Positive: From Thinking to Acting will take place as part of Lisbon Sustainability Week. The first species attends defensively, perhaps pushed by the silent assistant who quietly placed the event on the calendar. The second attends out of opportunity, perhaps opportunism, but attends nonetheless, with the Director of Mindful Performance learning how to spell “ecological stress” on the journey there. The third attends out of construction, perhaps curiosity, with both the Risk Committee and the sustainable finance people registering for the same session. Different reasons, same migration, as so often happens in nature.
The final panoramic zoom out anticipates the episode credits. Down below, in a patch of garden spared from the landscaping obsession of planting as many exotic ornamentals as possible, an old cork oak pushes its roots deeper in search of water, unaware that it is simultaneously the agenda item of three separate rooms in this city, and that in a few months it will respond, with the silence characteristic of its species, by adding one more growth ring.
P.S. Dedicated to David Attenborough, who turned one hundred years old on May 8. This column was written using the camera he taught us all how to hold.
Nuno Gaspar de Oliveira, CEO of NBI, partner of CATÓLICA-LISBON’s Lisbon Sustainability Week