Ernesto, what I appreciated most about this piece was its attempt to move beyond both techno-optimism and collapse fatalism toward a more relational and systems-aware understanding of transition.
The framing around metabolism, simplification, and “hospicing modernity” resonates strongly with many of the themes emerging in current conversations about ecological crisis, social fragmentation, and the need to rethink how human societies relate to the living world.
I especially appreciated the emphasis on bioregional resilience, reciprocity, and the recognition that economies and governance systems ultimately exist within ecological realities rather than outside of them.
Most importantly, you appear to avoid easy answers. Instead acknowledging grief, contradiction, and uncertainty while still leaving space for responsibility, imagination, and the slow work of rebuilding deeper forms of community, meaning, and connection. Thank you.
Wow! I love the way you wove the ideas of several thinkers (who I follow) into one concise, coherent piece. You capture the weight and urgency along with the beauty and opportunity of this moment. I will share widely and look forward to chapter 2!
Lovely expression. You have clearly learned an enormous amount since Harvard - learned what needs to be known, and is gradually coming forth. This will help. I look forward to the next one.
Ernesto, thank you for introducing me to the Three Horizons framework. It helped me unlock something I had been circling around for a while - a way to make sense of the gross contradictions of nature finance. On the one hand, it's extremely creative and innovative and has the potential to redirect capital to nature. On the other hand, it just doesn't really work that well. But now I'm able to see nature finance for what it is - a Horizon Two innovation. This greatly helps explain its contradictions, which in fact all come down to one core contradiction: nature finance is trying to value nature from inside an economy built to undervalue it. In other words, it wants to redirect capital toward ecological recovery but it keeps using tools designed by the very system that made ecological recovery necessary.
And yet - and this is where your article also inspires hope - nature finance is still (probably) worthwhile. It's worthwhile because it could (potentially) serve as a bridge to a post-extractive economy – which we can think of as Horizon Three.
The key distinction, which I've since written about in Ecological Prosperity Lab, is whether a given nature finance project or mechanism is H2- or H2+. The former (H2- innovations) end up being captured by the old system and mainly serve to extend the life of the paradigm they were supposed to disrupt. For example, ESG policies that effectively amount to greenwashing. But H2+ innovations, on the other hand, actually help prototype the next system before that system has fully arrived. As in, they lay the groundwork for the thing that will eventually replace it.
I think this is very important for those of us working in the nature finance world to keep in mind. H3 is the long-term goal. To get there, we need to push projects in the direction of H2+ rather than H2-. (Currently, most nature finance projects are actually H2-.)
Fortuntately there are specific things we can do to make that happen.
I was especially struck by the distinction between solving the future and learning how to perceive it honestly. That shift — from control to attention — feels like the real threshold here.
The essay has weight, but it also leaves a narrow opening for agency. That balance is difficult, and well handled.
Wow! I've consumed many Substacks running this sort of future scenario theme, but none with the brilliance shown here. The nature anaologies make is much easier to understand than, for instance, economy-only rhetoric. Thanks so much!
One caveat: artificial intelligence. I suppose you will get to this is succeeding chapters? There are claims that emergent complexity opens new opportunities and is a grand attractor. I would guess you might disagree, and that AGI will solve all of our problems?
"A forest grows by reciprocity. The mycorrhizal networks beneath your feet — and they are beneath your feet, almost anywhere you stand on land that has not been recently bulldozed — move sugars from canopy trees to seedlings, move water between species that, in our taxonomies, do not even belong to the same family."
Ernesto, what I appreciated most about this piece was its attempt to move beyond both techno-optimism and collapse fatalism toward a more relational and systems-aware understanding of transition.
The framing around metabolism, simplification, and “hospicing modernity” resonates strongly with many of the themes emerging in current conversations about ecological crisis, social fragmentation, and the need to rethink how human societies relate to the living world.
I especially appreciated the emphasis on bioregional resilience, reciprocity, and the recognition that economies and governance systems ultimately exist within ecological realities rather than outside of them.
Most importantly, you appear to avoid easy answers. Instead acknowledging grief, contradiction, and uncertainty while still leaving space for responsibility, imagination, and the slow work of rebuilding deeper forms of community, meaning, and connection. Thank you.
Wow! I love the way you wove the ideas of several thinkers (who I follow) into one concise, coherent piece. You capture the weight and urgency along with the beauty and opportunity of this moment. I will share widely and look forward to chapter 2!
Lovely expression. You have clearly learned an enormous amount since Harvard - learned what needs to be known, and is gradually coming forth. This will help. I look forward to the next one.
P.S. The discussion of metabolism, especially, is new to me and very valuable.
Ernesto, thank you for introducing me to the Three Horizons framework. It helped me unlock something I had been circling around for a while - a way to make sense of the gross contradictions of nature finance. On the one hand, it's extremely creative and innovative and has the potential to redirect capital to nature. On the other hand, it just doesn't really work that well. But now I'm able to see nature finance for what it is - a Horizon Two innovation. This greatly helps explain its contradictions, which in fact all come down to one core contradiction: nature finance is trying to value nature from inside an economy built to undervalue it. In other words, it wants to redirect capital toward ecological recovery but it keeps using tools designed by the very system that made ecological recovery necessary.
And yet - and this is where your article also inspires hope - nature finance is still (probably) worthwhile. It's worthwhile because it could (potentially) serve as a bridge to a post-extractive economy – which we can think of as Horizon Three.
The key distinction, which I've since written about in Ecological Prosperity Lab, is whether a given nature finance project or mechanism is H2- or H2+. The former (H2- innovations) end up being captured by the old system and mainly serve to extend the life of the paradigm they were supposed to disrupt. For example, ESG policies that effectively amount to greenwashing. But H2+ innovations, on the other hand, actually help prototype the next system before that system has fully arrived. As in, they lay the groundwork for the thing that will eventually replace it.
I think this is very important for those of us working in the nature finance world to keep in mind. H3 is the long-term goal. To get there, we need to push projects in the direction of H2+ rather than H2-. (Currently, most nature finance projects are actually H2-.)
Fortuntately there are specific things we can do to make that happen.
Thanks again for opening this up for me.
This is a remarkably clear-eyed piece.
I was especially struck by the distinction between solving the future and learning how to perceive it honestly. That shift — from control to attention — feels like the real threshold here.
The essay has weight, but it also leaves a narrow opening for agency. That balance is difficult, and well handled.
Wow! I've consumed many Substacks running this sort of future scenario theme, but none with the brilliance shown here. The nature anaologies make is much easier to understand than, for instance, economy-only rhetoric. Thanks so much!
One caveat: artificial intelligence. I suppose you will get to this is succeeding chapters? There are claims that emergent complexity opens new opportunities and is a grand attractor. I would guess you might disagree, and that AGI will solve all of our problems?
One of the best pieces I’ve read of how we can cocreate and arrive at the future we know is possible. Love the ecological wisdom as well.
First comes a sophisticated understanding, and maybe this is the initiation document.
"A forest grows by reciprocity. The mycorrhizal networks beneath your feet — and they are beneath your feet, almost anywhere you stand on land that has not been recently bulldozed — move sugars from canopy trees to seedlings, move water between species that, in our taxonomies, do not even belong to the same family."
Perhaps the appropriate word here is "symbiosis?"