Purpose Disruptors

Most environmental work still treats nature as a subject: a backdrop, a victim or a cause to defend. We wanted to ask: what if nature isn’t the cause, but the collaborator? What if nature had creative agency? This was the theme of the workshop we ran with EarthPercent at Blue Earth Summit last week. Building on our joint session at The Klosters Forum, we gave people a chance to connect back into their relationship with nature and what followed was an energetic room filled with thoughts and ideas. We divided the room into thinkers, builders, creators and facilitators. Here is a taste of some of the ideas… The Creators talked about Nature as Director - letting her determine and take control of creative work and how magic and solutions are within nature already. The Thinkers centred on the idea of ‘what would nature say?’ using the voice of nature in decision making and including her as a stakeholder in teaching and research. The Facilitators offered the idea that Nature is also us and thinking of the human voice as part of nature not external brings new ideas. The Builders reflected on how living systems are within organisations and how the natural processes of birth, decay, death and rebirth apply to everything (not just nature herself). It was incredible to see how quickly this workshop opened up new ways of thinking in the room. The process provided a shortcut to new ideas when people connected to nature and treated her as a collaborator. This is a paradigm shift - where nature is not the victim. We came away convinced that this process is needed in every board room in every sector. It is a magical experience to be part of. The first workshop was on a mountain with people who work at the intersection of culture x nature. This one was in Woolwich with people from a broader audience across charity, investment, corporate, tech,  food systems, government, academia and many other sectors. Let us know in the comments who might find this workshop interesting and useful? Watch this space for more to come from our Agency for Nature project – and EarthPercent’s Sounds Right, two initiatives where nature stops being the subject of the work and becomes a key part of it – a collaborator and client.

Hurrah! Alexis McGivern and I got to 'soft launch' the fantastic 'Power Hour' creative campaign this week. The campaign, out more fully next year, is to encourage people to join Consultation Workshops, organised by Oxford Net Zero. The workshops will be designed to inform people how they can input into the Greenhouse Gas Protocol consultation to include the idea of "Serviced Emissions" in the planned revision. We will be targeting people working in sustainability within professional service sectors such as law, management consultancy, engineering, architecture and of course advertising. Many of these people understand that the biggest difference, they and their companies can make, is in the work they choose to do for their clients. They are working hard on projects that create change here. Yet, all of that work doesn't count. Because the GHGP ONLY recognises "Operational Emissions". By joining the Consultation Workshops - The Power Hour - they can influence the global standards to make all those hours of hard work matter. All in one hour. The creative campaign was developed by wonderful members of the Purpose Disruptors community, under the strategic guidance of Camilla Yates and Ben Essen and creative direction of Seb Royce and Martin Reed. Much more on this next year! Many thanks to Andrew Griffiths and Emilien Hoet for inviting us to launch the work at the excellent @CarbonAccountingAlliance conference on Tuesday. Rosie Kitson Pamela Noakes Lucy Usher Busola Lagoke Chris Dooley Jennie Mossman Helena Houghton-Casella Caroline Davison (Macpherson) Amanda Carpenter David Hunter Clarissa Salmon Katarina Wangler Björk Jules Peck Holly Alpine David Symons #CarbonAccountingConference

We’re so excited to be back at the epic Blue Earth summit. Are you there? Join co-founder Lisa Merrick-Lawless and Executive Director of EarthPercent Cathy Runciman for our workshop: What if Nature had Creative Agency? There’s a handful of tickets left. It’s a place to feel hopeful and be inspired. We’re looking forward to seeing, hearing, meeting and connecting with the incredible humans helping build the future we need. 💚

Yesterday was the autumn equinox when day and night are exactly the same length. Here in the northern hemisphere, the darkness gets longer from tomorrow. If you're in the south, it's the light that grows. Either way, it's a turning point. For thousands of years, this marked the moment communities gathered to reflect. What did we grow? What do we hold? What did we learn? The equinox served as a prompt to pause and look back over the season that has passed. To mark the moment, our team spent a day together, in an oasis of urban nature – Calthorpe Community Garden.  We reflected on our progress in bringing Nature consciousness into the heart of our company, whilst setting our individual and collective practices to progress this. By the end, we set some intentions: Each of us will choose to regularly visit an outdoor space and get to know it. We'll take more time outside and slow down, with proper lunch breaks and walking meetings. Every week we'll share a "nature glimmer": a small moment when we felt alive or connected to the more than human world. We'll gather together at every solstice and equinox from now on. We’re figuring all this out as we go and we'll be sharing the journey with you. If you're exploring something similar, we'd love to learn alongside you. So, what was your nature glimmer this week? #Eqiunox #NatureConsciousBusiness Robert McFaul Jonathan Wise Lisa Merrick-Lawless Ally Kingston Nadeen Ayyashi Dr. Natasha Parker Holly Wyatt Aimee Brewerton

One for our growing community in Australia. Follow our regional leader James Greet to keep in the loop and say hello if you're in Sydney.

Last week, we were at Dalston’s Rio Cinema for the final preview screening of Super Nature. Super Nature is a feature film shot entirely on Super 8. Director ed sayers sent vintage cameras to 40 filmmakers across 25 countries and asked each of them to film the nature closest to them. The result is “mother earth’s home movie” as someone put it- an epic, playful, totally enchanting portrayal of our living world. Our strategy lead Ally Kingston hosted the Q&A with a room full of filmmakers. We talked about what a two-way exchange working with the living world is - how it becomes as much a co-author as a subject, and how you never know what to expect. The audience asked about synchronicities and sacredness as well as the intricacies of filming on a medium like Super 8, not to mention weaving a feature out of 40 personal stories. It was an evening that made clear how so many of us - the urban Dalston-dwellers as much as anyone - are yearning for this experience of aliveness with the living world, and see nature as a powerful muse. We'll be exploring more of these themes on the Agency for Nature blog over the coming weeks, but in the meantime, we recommend finding a local screening - more info in the link in the comments

Every so often something lands that feels like it came straight out of the conversations we keep having here. SUPER NATURE is a feature documentary shot entirely on Super 8, stitched together from the footage of 40 filmmakers across 25 countries. It moves across land, water and air to sit you inside the planet's ecosystems rather than lecture you about them. What draws us to it is where it comes from. Director ed sayers spent years in advertising, from Saatchi & Saatchi to the T-Mobile Dance campaign, before turning that craft toward the natural world, and you can feel it: this is persuasion pointed somewhere worth pointing. A reminder that the skills the industry runs on can be redirected to help people fall for Nature rather than sell them the next thing. It's in cinemas across the UK and Ireland from 4 September, with preview screenings and director Q&As running beforehand. Ed has also been talking about the film on the Kermode on Film podcast, if you want to hear the thinking behind it. Have a look, find a screening near you, and let us know if you go.

The World Inequality Lab's new Global Justice Report does something unusual: it sets out a fully costed plan for staying under 1.8°C while closing the gap between rich and poor. Shorter working hours. A wealth tax on the top 1%. A shift towards sufficiency, the idea that people can live well without endlessly accumulating more. Under their numbers, close to 90% of the world's population would be better off. It's ambitious, and it's meant to be. But the part worth sitting with isn't the economics. It's the argument that decarbonising and closing the inequality gap can't be done separately, that tackle either one on its own and it won't hold politically. Full report in the comments.

Britain likes to call itself a nation of nature lovers. The truth is more awkward. We are also one of the most nature-disconnected countries on earth, and somewhere between the bird tables and the balcony herbs a lot of us, especially those between 18 and 30, have quietly filed Nature under "nice, but not for me." At Agency for Nature, our creative experiments have shown that once nature starts showing up in youth culture, something clicks: the possibility that “people like me, do things like this”. We believe giving nature fresh energy in youth culture gives a new generation a chance to remember: we belong here, and we were wired to feel alive in nature.  Ally Kingston has pulled together five things two seasons taught us about giving Nature fresh energy in culture. Read it on the Agency for Nature site. Are you working to give Nature fresh energy in culture? Have you got different ideas about what’s working? We’d love to hear them. Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments. #agencyfornature #culture #nature #advertising

Missed Monday's briefing? You haven't missed your chance. The online brief for One Hour to Change the World went out this week, but the recording is available, and the two sessions that matter most are still to come. If you can watch the replay and get in the room, there's a place for you. This is the team turning a creative idea into a global campaign to change the rules of advertising's climate reporting, built with Oxford Net Zero . Two in-person sessions remain: a creative review at Iris on Wednesday 9 September, and a final presentation and celebration on Thursday 24 September. Watch the briefing back, come with your thinking, and you're in. We're still after designers and art workers, copywriters, social and digital strategists, and movement makers, working alongside strategy lead Camilla Yates and creative lead Seb Royce ,  It's a short, sharp commitment with a genuinely global payoff. Watch the recording and register via the link in the comments. Doors are still open, but not for long.