Sherpa for sustainability

SI: So the advice you would offer would be to look for nature to offer primary guidelines and inspiration?
RA: There’s one other thing that nature provides: [billions of] years of R&D that’s proved what’s effective. So that’s another whole facet of the sustainability movement: looking to nature for how we design products and processes and so forth. 

SI: What comes after 2020?
RA: The challenge is to stay there and not slip back down the mountain, and then to move beyond to become restorative, to put back more than we take and to do good for the Earth, not just no harm.

And what we hope to do is become an example that shows you really can do this, and it really can be good business to do it, [and asks] So why aren’t you doing it? So it becomes a model or example that attracts all of industry to this better way to make a bigger profit.