Transcript: Advancing climate justice, with guests Sarah Wyns and James Perry
Onya: Hello, Onya Idoko here. Welcome to our new podcast Life of PIE: Prosperity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Life of PIE is an original podcast from UCL's Institute for Global Prosperity and features research by our MSc PIE students. Our mission is to start a different kind of conversation with researchers, practitioners, entrepreneurs and policymakers doing cutting-edge work, rethinking entrepreneurship and innovation to achieve structural and systemic transformation.
Manolo: Climate change, undeniably a crisis rooted in power and privilege. 92% of accumulated greenhouse gas emissions are credited to Global North countries that have exploited the Earth's resources to drive economic growth. However, these populations will not be as severely impacted by climate impacts. Approximately 3.6 billion people live in areas highly vulnerable to climate change, including smallholder farmers in the Global South are unlikely to face devastating impacts, such as increases in infectious diseases as well as malnutritions, death and injuries due to extreme weather events. So we can ask ourselves: “What is the role and responsibility of companies from the Global North who source their products from the Global South to advance climate justice?” This work engages with two concepts:
Sarah: Transformative climate justice and transformation to sustainability. Both of these recognise the need for a complete transformation of our socioeconomic systems to address the interlinked ecological and social crises.
Manolo: These concepts are particularly suited to the B Corp movement as it aims to transform the global economy to benefit all people, communities and the planet.
James: What I love about the B Corp movement is that it's actually, if you kind of go really deep in it, it's offering an alternative narrative, which is the narrative of interdependence.
Manolo: What is the potential of B Corps to advance a just transformation to sustainability in the food sector? How have these companies engaged transformative climate justice within their operations? What are the challenges they have faced in doing so?
Onya: Today I'm joined by two special guests: Sarah Wyns and James Perry. Sarah started her career in the fashion industry and moved on to work in community and corporate fundraising at Women for Women International, a women's rights charity helping women in conflict-afflicted countries rebuild their lives. Sarah recently completed the industry for Global Prosperity’s MSc in PIE. James is co-chairman of Cook, a certified B Corporation he helped to create. It now employs nearly 2000 people and is rated the number one food and drink company to work for in the UK. He co-founded the B Corp movement in the UK and serves on the board of B Lab Europe. He’s also a founding partner of Snowball, a fast-growing asset management firm that prices in the future. James is married to Jennifer and they live near London with their three children. Welcome Sarah and James and thanks for being here.
James: Thank you.
Sarah: Thank you, Onya.
Onya: Great. I'm excited that we get to have an interesting conversation about the research that you did, Sarah, looking at the potential of B Corps to advance a just transformation to sustainability in the food sector. So I'd like to start with you Sarah. Give us a summary of the problem, context, and why it's important.
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Thank you Onya for having me, I'm super excited to be here talking about my research. So the dissertation idea came from my interest in climate justice. And to clarify the term, I think the easiest way is that we often refer to the triple injustice of climate change, which is that those who have contributed the least to climate change will feel its worst impact and have the least capacity to adapt and respond to disasters. And to give you the stats, although Global North countries are responsible for 92% of greenhouse gas emissions, it is countries in the Global South that are the most vulnerable to climate change impacts. And that's also because the climate crisis exacerbates current patterns of inequality. So in a nutshell, climate justice is just about recognising that the climate crisis will impact people differently. That responsibility is not equal and therefore solutions should account to this. And the second part of this research was the realisation that climate justice literature and research has mostly been focused on what governments are doing about this, rather than corporations. So this is why I wanted to focus on the potential of non-state actors like businesses, the role they have to play in advancing climate justice. So that's climate justice. But in the research, I wanted to focus on a different concept that I'll clarify, which is transformative climate justice. And that's an emerging concept proposed by academics like Kosza and Newell. And it argues that to meaningfully address the climate crisis, yes, we need to focus on meeting the short-term needs of vulnerable communities, things like increasing community resilience, but we also need to engage with the longer-term transformation of our systems, which are unequal and unsustainable. So we're talking about our global economic, social and political structures that are at the root of climate change and therefore climate injustices. So more practically, it's about paying attention to how capitalism drives vulnerabilities to these shocks. And if I wanted to give you a more concrete example applied to businesses because I looked at businesses in the food industry, let's say businesses in the chocolate sector, it's a 100 billion-dollar industry, but a typical cocoa farmer earns about a dollar a day. So there's a huge power imbalance there. And we know that climate vulnerability is high in locations that face poverty, marginalisation, inequity linked to colonialism, et cetera. So this is why I also wanted to look at B Corps because the climate crisis is closely connected to our societies and economies. And so a transformative approach will allow us to go beyond these short-term responses and kind of change the way that business works. And that brings us to a just transformation to sustainability. Because to have a transformation of our socioeconomic systems, it's crucial that this transformation is inclusive and just. So mixing all of these concepts together kind of gives us a just transformation to sustainability, which very much applies to the B Corp movement, in my opinion, because it aims to transform the economic system to make it more inclusive and equitable for all. But I'll let James talk more about that.
Onya: Thank you, Sarah. That was really interesting. And one of the things that I observed in your research is that you highlight that certifications such as the B Corp can help foster outcomes that advance a just transformation to sustainability. But in order to accomplish this shift, other factors are needed. What are these factors?
Sarah: So I spoke to a few B Corps and talked about all of the advantages that the B Corp movement brings, Like having a community of like-minded, people to collaborate, to share best practices, having public recognition, which leads to increased consumer awareness, which is super important to win the marketplace. And then also the fact that it fosters transformation of the business conception, which is super important. B Corps are kind of leading the way and showing other companies what success can be in business and that it can be compatible with environmental and social goals. So these are all of the factors that really help in fostering a just transformation to sustainability. The two things from the research that I noticed could be limiting factors are in the strengthening private-public sector collaboration, and that's just from my sample, it seemed like engaging with the policy was a wish rather than something that was already done. And I can assume that that's because there's so much going on in the business. Fostering collaboration in terms of policy and influencing policymakers, is a different job in itself, but that's something that's super important to create systemic change. So one of the aspects is, really, they wanted to be able to… you know, they were doing a grassroots impact, but they wanted to impact policy at that level to really create the change that they wanted to see. And the B Corp movement is totally doing that. And then another one is that they really faced a lot of challenges and tensions with balancing impact and profit. So for example, they needed to grow sufficiently to succeed in the marketplace and to make enough profit to sort of pursue their social values and environmental goals whilst also acknowledging that production-consumption should be downscaled to solve the climate crisis. So there was kind of always this tension between if consumers are not willing to pay for the real value, that will impact demand and encourage competitors to sell cheap products. And so they were saying we need to be able to win customers because otherwise, we can't do all of this work because if the business doesn't exist, there's no point. So that was kind of an overall conclusion: because the current economic system still rewards businesses that just grow and grow without thinking about the cost of negative societal impacts, it kind of limits their true transformative potential and they're limited by current drivers of success.
Onya: Thank you, Sarah. That was super interesting. And I'm coming to you, James, in a second. Just in response to Sarah's findings, what Sarah highlights is that there's this tension that exists between market and mission-oriented practices that are hindering the transformative capabilities of the B Corp businesses. So while being a B Corp helps this still huddled, it seems there's still elements within the system that are keeping these businesses from achieving that transformative change that we're looking for. From your experience, James, and you're joining us as a board member of B Lab Europe, and as a food entrepreneur yourself, how do you think businesses can achieve this notion of transformative climate justice?
James: Well, that's a big question. Look, I think what Sarah has just said is absolutely spot on in terms of highlighting some of the challenges and the tightrope that we need to walk. So I'll start by just saying where I think the B Corp movement is valuable, but I'll also then go on to talk about where I think it has limitations. Ultimately, we've got the wrong idea of business, right? So business is conceived as a mechanism to make returns for shareholders, to drive prosperity for shareholders on the basis that shareholder prosperity is a proxy for societal prosperity. And therefore, the richer shareholders get, the richer society gets. All of the consequences of that profit generation are outsourced—responsibility for them is outsourced—to the government who regulates to mitigate and restrain the negative impacts and excesses of business. But the problem is that that doesn't work because the government has shown that it doesn't achieve that. So just look at the climate crisis. The government hasn't protected the natural world from the ravages of business. So what's happened by mistake, and I don't think it was intended, was that business has been, given this idea that it maximises returns for shareholders, it's essentially been turned into a plague of locusts that kind of romps around the world and extracts natural and social value and converts it into dollar bills and returns it to shareholders. Well, actually that doesn't work for any of us in the long term. The fix that B Lab has, and the B Corporation has, is to internalise responsibility for those externalities. So what we do is we say, the board of directors is responsible for the social and environmental impact that the business has. And therefore you think differently about what the business is there to do because it's there to create value for everybody, not just for shareholders: people, planet and profit. And it needs to take responsibility for that and for the future and for the impact it's having. So all good, that works. And what we're seeing is some fantastic stories of transformation and some brilliant examples of how business can be used to restore and repair rather than just extract. However, as Sarah points out, and she's completely right too, we all exist in a competitive context. So if we're involved in a race to the bottom, if effectively you can make good returns by dumping externalities onto society, then you will, because that's what business does. And if you're not doing that, then you're imposing costs on yourself that your competitors aren't and that means that you can't compete in the market. A really good example actually is in the food systems; we have an unsustainable food system which is destroying our planet, but it's also creating impoverishment in the Global South, for example, the producer countries, because they're at the bottom of the food chain. And if you're in the food industry, you need people to buy your product. And if you start doing things in the way they should be done, you are building in cost all across the supply chain which your competitors aren't, which the consumers might not value. So there comes the point at which the regulator and the fiscal system as well—the sort of system of tariffs and taxes and so forth—needs to start to intervene to level the playing field. And the problem that policymakers have, just to finish, the problem that policymakers have is that the minute they do that, food prices rise. Now, we all know there's a cost of living crisis and we know that voters don't vote for people to take bread off their children's tables. So in a democracy, it's very hard to see how politicians are going to be able to create the effectively political capital to intervene in the way they need to in order to create a sustainable system. So we are in a very difficult situationm which Sarah highlights. And yes, the B Corp movement is doing an amazing job in rethinking and redefining the purpose of business, but it can't do it in isolation of the rest of business. Which actually, just to finish, leads us onto one of the reasons why the B Corp. Movement has advocated so strongly for a Better Business Act, which is a mandatory change for all businesses in section 172 of the Companies Act, which actually internalises those responsibilities to the board of directors of every business. So that we're competing on a level playing field more.
Onya: Thank you, James. That was really incredible. And I'm so glad that it aligns with what Sarah highlighted earlier. And does this push or desire for businesses to shift from that shareholder maximising mindset to a stakeholder mindset, where, as you said, the responsibility for the externalities are being taken by the businesses? So my next question for you, James, is how do you see us moving forward? From what you've just described, whether it's quite idealistic, it doesn't matter. How do you see or think that we can move forward? That was one. Two, what role could innovation play in this? And can you give some examples?
James: Yeah. In terms of moving forward, I've come to the view that—and Sarah made reference to sort of the lobbying efforts of business and how the B Corp movement is lobbying for a Better Business Act. The truth, though, is that the lobby and the power behind the scenes, that business exerts on policymakers, and it's a very detailed and complex web of regulation and taxes that sort of governs the global economy, and they're sort of regulatory arbitrage. So if you don't like the regulations in one jurisdiction, you just move your business to a different one, which doesn't have any regulations, as we see, with things like tax, with things like Cayman Islands and so forth. So the problem is that business does, to some extent, write its own rules because it rules the lobby. That is a very difficult thing to overcome because it happens behind closed doors. And the power of these big businesses is such that if you sort of try and lobby. The other way, it's asymmetric warfare, because they have so many more resources, lobbying resources than you do, which basically takes me to a big conversation, actually, about democracy. So, we don't have a functioning democracy. We've seen that in the UK, we're seeing that in the US, we've seen that in Brazil, and there are lots of reasons why we don't. But in the UK's example, we have a democracy that's 250 and 300 years old. That's when it was designed, and sort of 1688. Your iPhone has an operating system that's updated pretty much every month. Our democracy hasn't been updated for 300 years. And that's why it's not functioning for people. Because when you actually ask people, would you like the world to be habitable for your children and your grandchildren? The answer is yes. We have a system of governance that does the opposite of that, which means the system of governance is not representing the people's wishes and it needs to be updated. I think there's a big conversation to be had about democracy and the democratic system, which obviously takes us into a whole new place. But without that, I think it's hard to see how the fundamental changes to the complex web of regulation and taxation globally will be accomplished, because the status quo is just so entrenched and there are vested interests that drive that. I think one thing we can do, though, is to change those duties of particularly investors. The global economy is really governed by investment capital, however many hundred trillion dollars of investment capital that is deployed by investment managers who believe they have a fiduciary duty to maximise the short-term financial interests of their beneficiaries. Which actually is the wrong idea, right? So what they need to be doing is maximising the long-term interests of their beneficiaries over generations. So they basically need to price in the future. And if you price in the future to investment decisions, you make a whole different set of decisions. So when it comes down to innovation… Look, I mean, I'm very excited by a lot of the technological innovations that are coming. I see, for example, if we can crack batteries, we know that we can generate power pretty much for free. I mean, renewable energy can be generated over time very, very, very cheaply from wind, from solar, from those kinds of things. The trouble is, we can't store it. So the minute that we can crack battery technology, we really do have some breakthrough opportunities to change the sort of whole global energy conversation which is such a driver of climate change. And there are innovations happening in every sector, agriculture, transportation and the rest of it. All of that is great, but until we innovate on what is the very dry and not exactly electorally popular subject of fiduciary responsibility, then we won't be directing capital in the way we need to direct it to create a sustainable future for the human race. So, for me, a lot of the innovation we need to see is in some quite dry and technical things which govern how we direct the $100 trillion of investment capital that shapes our world.
Onya: Thank you, James. I want to come to you, Sarah. I kind of jumped the gun because I was excited about what you had talked about earlier. But I want to get a sense of these businesses that you studied and a sense of a bit more of your findings, if you like. So, one, what's the size of these businesses? What's the context? Where were they? Because you talked about how they had aspirations to influence, to lobby, to shape policy, but they couldn't. And without that, we can't see that transformative change that we need to see. So talk to us a bit about your case studies and the context.
Sarah: Sure. So I conducted a case study of three B Corps in the food and beverage industry, both based all of them were based in the UK and the US and they were small to medium-sized businesses. So I think that's absolutely right; sometimes there was a bit of a there was excitement about change and the fact that they're part of such important groups where they're all driving change together. And some days this feels amazing and then on the other side sometimes there was a sense of powerlessness. We're doing our best, but we're working against this huge system that is meant to extract and not to create value in the way that we see it. So the companies that I chose, it was because they were B Corps, and also because they had centred social justice in climate action and also engaged with the root causes of climate injustices. And their products were also grown in climate-vulnerable regions in Asia and in Africa and South America as well. So these were the three businesses that I looked at. And in terms of how they had engaged with transformative climate justice, for example, they used a series of techniques to tackle the structural inequities that drive climate change vulnerability. For example, fair trade certifications to alleviate poverty and contribute to community welfare. They also promoted education and training around women's rights, literacy and numeracy so that suppliers could increase participation in decision-making, which is super important. Ways to diversify incomes, to build resilience in case of climate shocks. A lot of climate-friendly agricultural practices to increase food security and income. But something that really came out strongly for me and that is called ‘transformative climate justice' is inclusive and participatory governance, which is basically about listening to farmers' needs and wants, including them in decision making. So for example, if you're running a community program they would see the community's input rather than it being imposed in a top-down manner, which seems very logical to us, but because the power imbalance exists, it's something that you need to pay a lot of attention to if you want to drive a fair and just future. Some companies had farmers on their board, and things like that really demonstrate the importance of rebalancing power because if you don't work on that sort, solutions will always reflect sort of a Global North perspective rather than the perspective of the people and the communities that are on the front line.
Onya: That's really interesting and cool, Sarah, because it aligns really nicely with the literature that we would have talked about in class that promotes this participatory governance approach as opposed to the business coming and that top-down type strategy. Now, what I'd like you to share with us, Sarah, is that one of the main findings was the tension between market-oriented practices and emission-oriented practices. Can you give us some tangible examples of this tension from your case study?
Sarah: There were internal challenges based in terms of operationalising transformative climate justice and then external. So I'll focus on external. Some of them were general market conditions. For example, with COVID-19, a lot of the company's efforts were set back, which is the case for a lot of companies, but for the ones that were putting a lot of capital into social and environmental programmes, that had to be cut back a lot. And then in terms of other tensions, it's really just this idea that the playing field isn't levelled, like James mentioned before. So how can we compete? It's very difficult when you're not operating with the same value system. So if supermarkets were saying, actually no, we're going to have a shelf full of products that are grown in a sustainable way where the company are making these efforts towards transformative climate justice, then it would be a completely different story. But I think it's mostly about fighting competition and sometimes having to underwrite the people and planet aspect to stay afloat and keep the business going. Because, again, if the business doesn't exist, we can't help farmers, and we can't do all these great things.
Onya: And that leads nicely to my question for James. I'm wondering, James, if you can pull from some examples that you know already, or from Cook, how do you manage this conflict or this tension between the mission and staying afloat? How have you or have businesses that you're aware of, how have they managed this tension?
James: Yeah, all of those businesses are operating in a competitive context, so customers need to choose to shop with them. So what I'm seeing is—and I'll tell you a bit about what Cook is doing—is that the sort of higher end the business is, the more effectively a luxury brand it is, the easier it is, because there's more margin to invest in those things. And the customers they're talking to have the luxury to make those sorts of choices. And people make choices out of desperation in their lives all the time because of global inequality. We have an inequality crisis, we have an extreme wealth crisis. That's a climate issue, that's a health issue. It's an issue around pretty much everything, because if you're making choices out of desperation, if you literally cannot heat the house or feed your children, then you're not going to be thinking about the environmental consequences of your decisions—you’re making desperate choices. So until we address that issue we're not going to be able to really get ahead of these problems—that’s the first point. So with Cook, we're operating in a competitive context. There are things we can do ourselves. For example, we can buy exclusively renewable energy, which we do. We can generate our own energy with partnerships with community groups to put solar on the roofs of our production units, which means that any surpluses go back to the community. We can do all of those good things. We can have a sourcing strategy which seeks to replenish rather than extract. It's not an easy thing because there are certain areas where it's easy. So we can source, for example, oils that we use in our cooking from local farmers whom we know how they farm. They're effectively regenerative farmers and it's a fantastic relationship. There are other things we need to buy over which we have much less control through the supply chain. So to some extent, we're participating in an unsustainable food system through our existence and we need to decide whether we just have to shut our doors because actually, by getting out of bed we're having a sort of negative impact somehow. Or whether we think we can evolve out of an unsustainable food system into a sustainable one, which is kind of the journey we're on. But it's very challenging because, at the end of the day, we're putting a product in front of somebody that they're going to have to choose to buy with their money when they could go to buy a similar sort of product or a competitive product from somebody who doesn't have any of those considerations. So that's where you can do so much and there is an enormous amount you can do. And the other thing I'd say by the way, is big business isn't closed to the idea of a climate emergency. So we are seeing really good progress in some of the bigger businesses as well who are sort of embracing the challenge. So for example, we wanted to move to fully recyclable packaging and we couldn't do it without the industry moving because the stuff that we were buying, our supplier said, “Look, we can't make a special one for you—you have to buy what everyone's buying.” So we tried to lobby the industry to move and eventually the industry did move. Not—I don't think so—because of our lobbying efforts necessarily, but the industry moved. And that means that we can use exclusively recyclable packaging. But that's an illustration of how so many of these problems are kind of industry-wide and it's very difficult to move alone, which is why we so desperately need government intervention. And that's both on the regulatory side. But I think it also needs to be on the incentive side. We need to start penalising bad behaviour and incentivising good behaviour through things like the fiscal system. I'll just give you one example of where regulation just needs to start catching up—we use a lot of refrigeration gases in our business because we’re a frozen business. There are two types of refrigeration gas, one of which has a very, very detrimental impact on climate because one of the things about refrigeration gases is that they do occasionally leak—it’s just a fact of life. And one of them, when it leaks, has this terrible carbon effectively carbon effect. And the alternative has a very negligible carbon effect. The trouble is to move from one to the other is a very, very substantial investment—millions and millions of pounds. So we could make that in isolation. But effectively, what we're doing is we are weakening our business substantially by making such a big investment in something no one's ever going to see. It would be easy for the government to outlaw the wrong gas, right? They could say, “From 2025, it's illegal to operate with that gas,” and then the whole industry would move. It would cause a bit of inflation because we'd all have to pass some of that cost on. But it would mean that we’d all be playing on a level of playing field. It's very difficult for us to make that decision on our own because we're putting ourselves at such a competitive disadvantage. We're investing millions of pounds in a gas no one sees, rather than say, millions of pounds in marketing our product. So we really need the government to get much more active and proactive on the detail of every industry so that they're moving people out of these unsustainable practices. But again, the government would say, well, it's all very well us doing that in the UK, but if we're doing that in the UK and they're not doing it in other countries, then Britain becomes uncompetitive. So that's where you get into a sort of need for a sort of global approach to this, which gets very complicated from a systemic kind of governance point of view.
Sarah: Could I just add to what James said and the fact that social equity and the climate crisis are so interlinked? And I have an example from one of the companies; one of the internal challenges that the companies face sometimes was convincing farmers to switch to more climate-friendly agricultural practices. And that's not because they don't want to, but it's because their first need is to feed their families, right? So if they've been doing a specific technique or growing vegetables in a way for centuries and generations and generations, they're thinking, “Wait, you're coming here and telling me how to grow my vegetables and that it's going to be better for the environment, but am I putting my family at risk whilst doing that?” So it's really this idea that you need to tackle short-term priorities as well as long-term priorities to enable transformation. And that's when, again, these incentives kind of from the government come into play because the company was saying, wouldn't it be amazing if the government was actually paying farmers to switch to these alternatives? And so the incentive would be there—you’d have more money to switch to these and farmers will be rewarded for conserving natural resources because at the moment they are doing that, but they're not getting the income with it. Sometimes they are, but they're not being more competitive than other farmers, even though they are conserving natural resources and preserving the environment.
Onya: Thank you, Sarah. This leads to my last question for both yourself and James, but I'll start with you, Sarah. So now, what are the implications of your findings for entrepreneurs, corporates, governments and even citizens?
Sarah: Good question, again. But I think something that kind of resonated with me in the literature is that to achieve this transformation, we know that we need a very large share of markets to become sustainable. Basically, we need all businesses to become B Corps. And that will mean a big shift in the socioeconomic system again, so that more businesses can make choices, just fairer choices about, “Okay, I can become a B Corp and I will be competitive.” And something that I wrote about was that this would require a shift in purpose, perspectives, practices and power relations. So if I look at those for-purposes shifting from maximising shareholder wealth towards prosperity, wider well-being goals—which B Corp is doing by promoting stakeholder governance—perspective is just changing, [as well as] the mindsets of people and how people see business. And going again to B Corp, that's by creating a positive alternative and business as a force for good. The practices is the policies—the things that we talked about before—is shift in the practices of a system. And that can only be done through collaboration with other movements, activists, and organisations, to really drive the policy change that we need and the legal changes that we need. And the fourth one is power relations, which I think is the most complex, to disrupt the existing power dynamics that really produce vulnerability. And that's the one that I think we can—I mean, practices and power relations—is the one that we can work on more. For example, an idea that I had for B Corps would be that some of them foster inclusive and participatory decision-making mechanisms. But why not make it part of the certification? That actually you need to have farmers on your board, or if you really want to share wealth more and power more equitably, then maybe that could be a solution. And then in terms of policy—I think we talked about it a lot—influence policymakers and create a supportive policy that can influence policies and achieve systemic change. And then the last one would be research. Research, especially in transformative climate justice, because it's such a new concept and just transformation to sustainability. There's not a lot of research out there. There's a lot on transformation to sustainability, but not a lot of research has been done on how to make sure that these are inclusive and just. So I would say we need further research on how to assess, evaluate and promote a just transformation to sustainability. And the further part of that is how businesses can do so. How can they promote, a just transformation to sustainability? That's very new in terms of transformative climate justice. So I would love to see more research on that.
Onya: Thank you. Sarah and James, your final thoughts. Now what?
James: Well, I agree with everything that Sarah has just outlined. I suppose my reflection is that when you take a big step back… like, I was reading Sapiens by Harari and he was talking about narrative. And actually, as a human race, I suppose, we buy into a narrative and that's what kind of shapes the world. And for the last 50 years, the narrative that we've all bought into is the narrative of individualism that says “I promote my own self-interest and in some ways that somehow promotes everybody.” It doesn't work. It's failed us, and we need a new narrative. And what I love about the B Corp movement is that it's actually—if you kind of go really deep into it—it’s offering an alternative narrative, which is the narrative of interdependence. Like Ubuntu, “I am because you are. I do not exist in a vacuum. I exist through my connections with people and the planet, with nature and with other people and the community.” And if you come from that point of view, it does change everything. It changes power; it changes business; it changes your approach to things like the role of government, the role of everything, really. And I feel that without cultural transformation, where people buy into a different narrative to the narrative of individualism, and the answer is interdependence. It has to be. We are interdependent. The truth of our interdependence; until we can somehow do that as a society and as a global community, I don't think we're going to make the changes we need to make. So I think there's a massive opportunity for culture formers and for us all to start to create a different cultural narrative that basically lands with regular folks. And I think then we might start making real progress.
Onya: Thank you, James. Thank you, Sarah. It was such a pleasure having you both on the show. I wish we could carry her on this conversation, but obviously, we all need to get back to work. But it was such fun having you. You've given us a lot of insights and food for thought for entrepreneurs, corporations, governments, and even citizens. So I want to say a big thank you to you for coming on to the Life of PIE show and hopefully, we might be able to organise a part two, if that's something you'd be interested in.
Sarah: Thank you for having us.
James: Yeah, thank you.