18th Jun 2024 Gemini 1.5 Pro
This episode of The Regeneration Will Be Funded podcast features Alexa Firmenich, co-director of SEED at Crowther Lab, ETH Zurich, founder and principal at Ground Effect, an animist investment studio, and host of the Life Worlds podcast. The conversation centers around biodiversity, drawing on Firmenich’s insightful writings and her experiences as a wilderness guide, researcher, investor, and philanthropist.
Firmenich emphasizes that biodiversity is more than just a count of species.
One of the most evocative ways for people who might want to just have a more felt sense of the term is that, do you know polyphonic music? … It’s like the Balkan chants, or essentially, you have many different voices and they come together to create a chorus, and they all sing in a different tone, but then when they’re all together, it’s polyphonic music, and it’s beautiful. And many ancient cultures had polyphonic music, a polyphony of voices.
She describes it as an intricate and immeasurable tapestry of relationships between various life forms, genetic processes, ecological functions, and even cultural diversity. This interconnectedness is vital for the health and resilience of ecosystems.
Referencing her essay, “Extinction is Loneliness,” Firmenich highlights the often-overlooked emotional and relational dimensions of extinction.
Imagine what it actually feels like, and then 400 million years of a relationship with someone, and all of a sudden they’re gone, right? You said 200 species a day. We don’t even know. We don’t even know, but it’s just a death of a million cuts.
She underscores the deep interdependencies that have evolved over millennia, where the loss of one species leaves a void in the web of life, leading to a profound sense of loneliness and disruption in the intricate balance of ecosystems.
Firmenich discusses the challenges and opportunities in measuring biodiversity, particularly in the context of emerging biodiversity credit markets.
The way that that global measurement system or base layer is created will affect everything about how these markets are developed. What you measure will be implicated in all of the downstream effects.
She acknowledges the limitations of current measurement systems that often focus solely on above-ground species counts and fail to capture the complexity of below-ground diversity, functional traits, and cultural relationships. Her work at SEED aims to develop a more comprehensive and holistic measurement system that incorporates these often-overlooked aspects.
While acknowledging the potential of these markets to incentivize conservation efforts, Firmenich also raises concerns about the potential pitfalls of financializing nature.
Ideally, governments and financial institutions and where most of the global money is held, or not to mention the richest 1%, we’re just a unidirectional payments, a kind of nature UBI, universal basic income, whatever you want to call it.
She emphasizes the importance of approaching these initiatives with caution, ensuring that they are designed to avoid unintended consequences, such as further consolidation of land ownership, erosion of intrinsic motivations for conservation, and the imposition of external values on indigenous communities.
Firmenich advocates for a shift from a solely anthropocentric worldview to one that embraces a deeper understanding of our interconnectedness with the natural world.
Our narratives are very anthropocentric. We need to ‘fix the climate’ for human beings – even ‘fix the climate,’ right, what a stupid sentence.
She believes that transformation requires a fundamental shift in consciousness, moving away from a fragmented and individualistic mindset towards one that recognizes the inherent value and interconnectedness of all life. She highlights the importance of fostering experiences and practices that nurture this interconnectedness, such as ecological restoration, indigenous knowledge systems, and creative expressions that celebrate our relationship with the Earth.