Season 3 Episode 1: Rewilding Our Money: How Bioregions Are Growing Regenerative Economies from the Ground Up

What if money flowed through landscapes like water - nurturing life and creating abundance - instead of extracting value and leaving depletion behind? Samantha Power, regenerative economist and co-founder of the BioFi Project, reveals how "bioregional financing facilities" keep capital rooted in places like nutrients in healthy soil. From community-governed trusts to venture studios supporting Indigenous entrepreneurs, her four innovative models challenge the assumption that finance must operate in opposition to nature. Already transforming economic relationships from California to the Amazon, these approaches build local capital aligned with living systems rather than extracting wealth from them. Join this paradigm-shifting conversation to discover not just how to increase investment in nature, but how to fundamentally reimagine our relationship with capital to serve life itself.

Links:
Samantha Power's book: "Bioregional Financing Facilities: Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet"

The BioFi Project

Finance for Gaia

Commonland

Planet Drum Foundation

Capital Institute

Fritjof Capra's work on living systems principles

Transcript

David Meyers: [0:00] Hello, I'm David Myers, and welcome to another episode of 4Nature Podcast. Today on our episode, we're delighted to have Samantha Power. Samantha is the co-founder and director of the BioFi Project, and the founder and principal consultant of Finance for Gaia. She's a regenerative economist, futurist, and bioregionalist based in Oakland, California, on the ancestral land of the Ohlone people. She is co-author of the book, Bioregional Financing Facilities, Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet. Samantha believes we need to build a new layer in the global financial architecture to halt sixth mass extinction, and she is dedicating her life to doing just that. Samantha, maybe we'll start with just, could you tell us a bit about your background and how you ended up getting interested and involved and passionate about finance for the bioregional economy?

Samantha Power: [0:57] Yes, happy to. Thank you so much for having me here, David and Kim. Really looking forward to the discussion with both of you today. I admire your work very much. And I have been thinking about how we move financial flows so that they can be in service to life for at least a decade now. I started thinking about this when I was living in Southeast Asia shortly after college and falling in love with the rainforest there and witnessing the way that palm oil and other extractive industries were destroying the life in that place. And was also witnessing at the same time the lack of response from business and finance and governments. And I am trained as an economist. I've done both my undergraduate and graduate studies in economics. So I have been in this inquiry of how we design an economy that is in service to life for for some time now.

Samantha Power: [2:08] David, you will remember that I worked at the World Bank for a while, for more than five years, and did some work there to build out the nature finance agenda at the World Bank. I was a co-author on a couple of papers that were formative in the World Bank's thinking around nature finance and economic reform that can protect the biosphere. And yeah, after a few years of working with ministries of finance and central banks and big institutional investors, getting them to think about the risks of destroying the biosphere to the financial system and the economy, I moved to California and started working more with family offices and smaller investors that were working at the frontier of nature investing. So that's a little bit of my origin story. And I think we'll get into more of what I'm doing now shortly.

David Meyers: [3:17] Great. Yeah, that's a good background. And obviously, you know, we want to work with those leaders that are making those big decisions about, you know, how the economy works and where the funding flows. And so great that you had that background and chance to work with the World Bank and others, you know, because they do move a lot of money and they do move a lot of government action. But now you've moved to this innovative new approach by bioregional finance facilities, which I'm very much looking forward to hearing about from your mouth directly after reading your documents. What is it and why is it going to hopefully transform how we relate to finance and life?

Samantha Power: [4:10] Yeah, thank you for your enthusiasm around this, David. It has been a bit of a whirlwind ride the past six months or so. On the solstice, we launched this book that I was writing for about nine months prior called Bioregional Financing Facilities, Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet. And in that book, I summarize the theory of change that I've developed through my work at the World Bank with finance ministries and central banks and institutional investors.

Samantha Power: [4:50] But also smaller investors that are developing private equity funds and venture capital funds focused on nature regeneration and work with family offices. And I was seeing again and again us applying the same structures that I believe were deepening inequality and power imbalances to trying to solve this ecological crisis or the poly crisis. And I saw a need for communities that are connected to the lands and waters they're stewarding to be more empowered to decide how those resources are invested. I was spending a lot more time on land projects and with elders that were leading land projects that they had been a part of for decades and with Indigenous communities and was learning about their collective intelligence that they hold as a community and also as people that are listening to changes in the landscapes that they're a part of. And I saw that if we want to efficiently allocate capital, we need to tap into that collective intelligence of those people living in deep relationship with place.

Samantha Power: [6:19] And that is where this idea of bioregional financing facilities came from. And in the book, we lay out templates for four different types of bioregional financing facilities, which I can speak to in a minute. We lay out objectives for them and attributes. And so we had this whole kind of proposal or provocation of how bioregional financing facilities could connect very decentralized financial resources with this on-the-ground web for generators. And so as the book was coming out, we decided we needed to launch an organization that would then implement the ideas in the book and start to build these bioregional financing facilities. So on the solstice that same day, we launched the BioFi Project, which is a collective of economists and governance experts and technologists that are working together to support bioregional organizing teams around the world to build these bioregional financing facilities and to capitalize them. So that's a bit of what we're up to now. I'm happy to get into all the details of what BFFs are and how they're coming into being.

Kim Bonine: [7:43] Well, I might jump in with a question. This is really interesting, and I enjoyed reading a bit all about this idea, this concept, and the need to have this connection to place. And I think a lot of that probably relates to having a greater understanding of impacts and kind of the feedback loops that we're creating. One of the questions I had is, how do you see this kind of bioregional level of organization interfacing or transforming our current, sort of levels of governance and political units kind of at the city and, you know, county and state levels. So how do you see those interacting?

Samantha Power: [8:29] Yeah, I love this question, Kim. And it's particularly relevant right now as we're entering into quite a weird time in America. I know all of us are feeling that right now, a lot of uncertainty and, you know, quite ambitious climate and environmental programs that were rolled out under the Biden administration that, you know, are really uncertain in terms of their continuity from here. And I think many of us are feeling the need to decentralize our decision-making around land stewardship and what regeneration programs we're prioritizing in a given place. And I see bioregional organizing teams as, you know, they're kind of emerging.

Samantha Power: [9:29] Civil society organizations that are often rooted in grassroots activism, you know, in the case of Indigenous communities. They're rooted in Indigenous governance and Indigenous kind of power building.

Samantha Power: [9:46] And they can work with existing authorities, particularly, I would say, subnational authorities to implement regeneration strategies that, you know, at the municipal level or the state level, those entities are carrying out. And one of the things we speak about in the book is that there is a lot of funding at the national level in countries around the world, but particularly here in the United States, that has been allocated to flow to communities that are implementing those programs. And a lot of that funding is not getting used because either the communities are not prepared with the right legal structure or administrative structure to receive and manage those funds, or they're not aware that those funds are available. There's this lack of connectivity between the funds that are being allocated and communities that need them. And so I see bioregional financing facilities as playing this connective tissue role.

Samantha Power: [10:55] You know, yes, between philanthropists and investors, but also public entities that are trying to get grants to communities that are implementing regenerative programs. And one of the things that bioregional financing facilities do is they bring together a synergistic portfolio of regenerative projects and they develop a strategy for those projects and initiatives to work together in a way that enables them to be greater than the sum of their parts. So it's not just everyone focusing on their individual land project or projects.

Samantha Power: [11:31] Urban community resilience project, but it's looking at how over 20, 50, 100 years these projects work together to regenerate a landscape or a watershed. So it's a much larger scale geographically, but also in terms of time horizon. And as bioregional financing facilities are playing that role of supporting communities to envision what is the regenerative future they want and that they're working towards, they can help to identify what are the most catalytic activities that should be funded at an early stage with that public money and help to organize a grant proposal to get those funds and report on how funds are used. So I very much see these bioregional organizing teams working together with local authorities. And, you know, that's already been happening in some places here in California where I live. I'm a part of a project in West Sonoma County that's been working with the local conservation authority and the sewage and water authority to develop a town square and to create rituals in the town square that help to weave community bonding and resilience programs.

Samantha Power: [12:51] And there's an envisioning component to the town square as well, where folks are kind of sharing the ideas for the future of this watershed in a shipping container in the middle of the town square that we're calling the Museum for the Future.

Samantha Power: [13:05] And the local authorities there have been so supportive and helping to get funding for that project.

Kim Bonine: [13:14] That's so interesting. So I just have a really quick follow-up question, David, and then I'll turn it to you to ask. And this is so interesting to me because I live up in far northern California in Humboldt County that has a lot of history of actually these sorts of movements and deep connection to land by many different communities. We have a lot of Native communities here, very strong in some of the work they're doing around everything from their traditional land practices to carbon programs that they're embracing. And we also have ranching communities. We have also very sort of progressive liberal conservation minded folks who all feel this connection to the land, but absolutely disagree on many political levels. And so I'm curious how these groups or how you see trying to overcome some of those political separations for groups of people who all are very vested and care very deeply about tradition and connection to land, but might see the solutions very differently.

Samantha Power: [14:29] Yeah, absolutely. And I have some dear friends in California that have been working on watershed restoration for decades, and they have a lot of frustration around this and battle scars. And, yeah, there's this acknowledgement that, you know, if we're able to zoom out to a longer time horizon, even 20 years into the future, all of these groups share a vision.

Samantha Power: [14:55] Share, you know, reverence for the watershed and the salmon and the trout. And they want to see the same things happen, but it's more a challenge of getting them to agree on what they think the priorities are, what the next steps are. And when you're planning according to very short time horizons.

Samantha Power: [15:18] I find that it's easier for a scarcity mentality to seep in and the pie feels like it's only so big. And you feel like if one group gets funding, like your group is not going to get funding. And that's where I think, you know, one, just community building and trust building through sharing space and spending time together, doing volunteer work together outside of a planning process is really important. And then the organization of citizens' assemblies and town halls, where everybody gets a chance to share their vision and their views and their tools and their toolkit that they can offer to regeneration in a particular place. And from there I think a long-term bioregional regeneration strategy is what we talk about in the book can be developed and once you start with the big picture it becomes a lot clearer what are the immediate steps to take and how that rising tide can lift all boats over time.

David Meyers: [16:33] Excellent. Yeah, the shared vision, you know, piece is to me so important that, you know, to really help align where we're going in the future and get people to work together towards that shared vision. I want to come back to the four different kinds of finance facilities and getting down to some technical details. But I just want to note that bioregional sort of approaches have been around for quite some time. I think it was the late 80s when I first encountered that. And so maybe in describing these four different facility types, you could also reflect a little bit on why this structure is going to make a change from general bioregional thinking towards this more longer-term alignment of interests and alignment of financial flows.

Samantha Power: [17:31] Yeah, thanks for that question, David. And maybe I'll just speak to what bioregionalism is a little bit for your audience members that aren't familiar.

Samantha Power: [17:45] Bioregionalism is certainly aligned with the way Indigenous peoples have been living on the land for millennia so I want to kind of start with that it's not something new it's kind of resurfacing and reinvigorating an old way of living in relationship with the land. But it really began as this new movement in the late 70s and early 80s with Peter Berg and Judy Goldhoff from the Planet Drum Foundation and one of my close friends and mentors and BioFi Project advisor, David Hanke.

Samantha Power: [18:26] Who started the first bioregional congress in the Ozarks in 1984, I believe it was. And bioregionalism is a sociopolitical philosophy that says we should be organizing ourselves according to the hard lines, soft lines, and human lines of the landscape. So geological lines, ecological lines, including watersheds and animal migrations and human lines being the cultural lines on the land, whether that's the historic cultural lines of where Indigenous communities were living and how their languages developed or the settler cultures that have come in since then.

Samantha Power: [19:16] And all of these layers together can help a community to identify, you know, what is this place and what boundaries make sense for us to lay down on the map to inform effective governance.

Samantha Power: [19:33] And so far, finance has been functioning, you know, according to political boundaries, right? Funds often you decide we're investing in these countries or these counties or these cities and I saw a need for financial flows to flow more with living systems and with how ecology moves in a given place and so we also noticed that the bioregional movement as it had this, you know, big surge in the late 80s and early 90s kind of went underground for some time. And we've been in an inquiry around, you know, why did it lose momentum? There is so much depth to the writing that was done at that time and their philosophy of how we govern our communities and how we govern the land that we're living on. And I saw that there was a lack of economic power in these communities that was able to support their work within a monoculture capitalist system that is very much working against what the bioregionalists and their bioregional congresses were trying to create.

Samantha Power: [21:01] And so I was inspired very much by Buckminster Fuller and his quote that, you know, you don't change the existing system, you build a new system that makes the old system obsolete, and decided that we need to create financial institutions that are in service to this new way of seeing and being that takes a much more holistic worldview in terms of how life on Earth works. And I have been studying with John Fullerton and another dear friend and mentor of mine from the Capital Institute, who in his critique of modern economics, looks at the roots of Newtonian physics in convincing humanity for quite a long time that we're living in a so-called clockwork universe and that life is just a, you know, a collection of separate objects that are working together in a mechanistic way. And we should structure our economies and financial systems with that as foundational.

Samantha Power: [22:11] John instead has a provocation that we need to see the world as alive and interconnected and relational and complex, and we need to design economies and financial systems that are in service to that. And that is what we're setting out to do with bioregional financing facilities, which is why the first attribute of a bioregional financing facility is that they align with living systems principles and Indigenous wisdom. And Fritjof Capra's work has been very inspirational to us here. He is a physicist that has developed living systems principles that look at the inherent creativity and regenerative potential of life. And in that, it's like a very strong investment case. There's so much we can invest in if we really acknowledge the potential for regeneration.

David Meyers: [23:08] Excellent. Thanks for that background. Really great. Right. And so, I mean, I kind of want to maybe stay with these big ideas, but I do want to at least get down into some detail on the four different types of facilities and how they could achieve this vision. Because one of the things I love about what you're doing is that I've been working with blended finance and there's a big push to get more private investment in nature, but there's challenges to that because all that money comes from international sources or outside of the bioregion. It comes in, it seeks a return, makes its profit, even if we're successful at identifying you know, return-based projects or investments, and then it takes the money out. And so, you know, what I love about what you're doing is you're, in a way, building, bioregional capital, building capital at the local level that is, as you say, aligned with life and the systems that support it. And so, yes, I just want to understand how this would work in real life. Yeah.

Samantha Power: [24:20] Yeah. Let's get into the nitty gritty. So we lay out three objectives for bioregional financing facilities that they drive the decentralization of financial resource governance. And we've talked about the why behind that, that they organize portfolios of synergistic projects. And we've also talked about the need for that and that they support the transition to a regenerative economy.

Samantha Power: [24:45] So, you know, as you've said, David, like many of us have witnessed these very well-intentioned funds going into a particular landscape, but their ultimate objective is to generate their return and to get out, not to catalyze the transition to a more place-based, resilient, sovereign economy over time. And bioregional financing facilities are going to hold that as one of their objectives. And there are four templates that we lay out in the book. A bioregional trust, which essentially functions as a catalytic grant facility, but can include all kinds of innovative governance structures and fund structures under it, including commons governance structures. And my colleague Austin Wade-Smith has been working on what he calls ecological institutions, where a river or a buffalo herd can have its own wallet where it holds its own contracts and financial assets using a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organizational structure. So that's like one of the building blocks we're looking at under the Bioregional Trust.

Samantha Power: [25:58] And also, we think it's important that most Bioregional Trusts have a portfolio of funds that are flow funds and are governed by the community where you have really wide participation in voting, how those resources are allocated so that we can learn to start stewarding resources as a community again. And we believe there's a lot of benefit that just comes from engaging in that activity. The second bioregional financing facility is a bioregional venture studio, which incubates a cohort of entrepreneurs that are working to shift a particular system in a bioregion. And we, you know, have witnessed that a lot of incubators and accelerators take an approach where each entrepreneur is kind of working on their own social enterprise or venture. And we saw the synergies that can be generated when all those entrepreneurs are working together to create kind of an organism that addresses a particular system. And food systems transformation is a great example here. So you'll need, you know, some businesses that are yes generating a return and are making a profit through a private sector model, but then you'll also need some commons assets that are supporting all of those businesses. And there are entrepreneurs that we need to lead those as well.

Samantha Power: [27:29] So that's one model that we're looking at. And the bioregions that we've talked to that are most interested in that are working on developing Indigenous-led bioeconomies where Indigenous communities are growing and harvesting foods and medicines from their traditional territories and are selling those, you know, often case in this case, it's still to markets in the global north. And we can talk more about that in a minute. But that's the Bioregional Venture Studio. The third is the Bioregional Investment Company. And this would come in kind of phase two after you've set up either a bioregional trust or bioregional venture studio and you've kind of grown the investment opportunities in the bioregion a bioregional investment company can invest in larger portfolios of projects that are generating a return but we are very careful to apply a four returns framework where we look at what Commonland includes and their returns that they look at, Commonland, an awesome organization your listeners should check out if they haven't read what they're up to yet. But they start with inspiration returns and then they look at how inspiration returns flow into ecological returns and how those flow into social returns and then financial and economic returns. So we, try to take a holistic view to how returns are generated.

Samantha Power: [29:03] And then the fourth bioregional financing facility is a bioregional bank. And here we took a lot of inspiration from community development financial institutions, CDFIs that are all over the United States and are doing incredible work. These organizations provide low-interest loans, lines of credit, technical assistance to various types of organizations businesses but also non-profits and the bioregional bank we suggest could also support the development of a complementary currency or credit pooling mechanism that brings in a theory of value that aligns with the values of the citizens of a bioregion and starts to move the economy away from dependence on fiat currencies.

Samantha Power: [29:57] So those are the four institutions. We've also received plenty of requests to develop a template for a bioregional insurance company, which is something I hope to maybe work on in 2025. But that's where we're starting. And with the around 12 bioregions we're hoping to work with in 2025, We'll be starting with developing a bioregional trust or a bioregional venture studio or a combination of the two. One bioregion we've been in touch with wants to develop one venture studio and four bioregional trusts under it where the bioregional trusts are connected to bioregional hubs in this particular area. Forest. And the trusts are kind of surfacing the regenerative organizations in the place where they're located. And then the venture studio can provide seed capital to those that are ready for it. And the Bioregional Venture Studio would also work on building relationships with potential buyers in the global north.

Kim Bonine: [31:10] Really interesting thank you for going through all of those all of those pieces and something really resonated with me when you were talking about sort of reversing the sequence of how we're counting returns kind of you know starting from ecological to social and kind of you know thinking about financial and and it just struck me how much How we count things matters and what we count and what we measure has an enormous impact. And there's been a lot of movement recently around really questioning how we think about development, how we use metrics like GDP, trying to more explicitly recognize these things like social capital and interconnectedness and natural capital and those sorts of measures. And I recall talking with someone once from an island in the Pacific, and she was saying that their government was told that they're sort of a poor country because their GDP is at a certain level. And she was reflecting on that, and she said, but we don't have any homeless people. You know, everybody's taken care of, but we're poor, so we have to try to develop more and do these things. And so it just really struck me how you're describing, reframing how we think about prosperity and how we think about how these capitals are working for us. And that in itself is an enormous transformation.

Samantha Power: [32:37] Thank you for that, Kim. And one of the early steps that we take in bioregional financing facility design is engaging in an asset and risk mapping process. And when we're looking at assets, we're looking at multi-capital assets, relational assets, ecological assets, and engaging the community to think about which of those assets they want to grow and invest in and certainly retain. Recognizing that taking a monetary approach to how we assess wealth is not accurate. It's not very useful often.

Samantha Power: [33:22] And certainly we're engaging with investors and philanthropists that have amassed a great deal of financial wealth within this existing extractive economic system that we're in and realize that they've been kind of amassing optionality tokens, as my friend Daniel Schmachtenberger likes to say. But on a dead planet, those optionality tokens aren't worth very much. And so there is certainly a kind of worldview shift there. That engaging in these bioregional financing facilities, both for communities that are running them and stewarding them and receiving investment from them receive, but also for the investors where they start to think about returns beyond just financial returns and realize that there is value to things beyond just generating more zeros in their bank account.

David Meyers: [34:25] Well, that would be a fantastic outcome of this process, because the incompatibility with the current financial system and how we really need to manage and invest in the planet is so great that, as you're saying, by providing an alternative system, maybe we can show that this can work and we can build this transformation that we need to a regenerative economy and planet. The challenges are so overwhelming in many ways but I love the fact that you're, putting this out there and saying let's try this and and so very happy also you got this community of practice that's developing and people will be piloting and testing these what do you think which element is I mean and I also love the fact that you're bringing in all these innovative approaches you know of everything from the rights of nature through to bring in how does a CDFI or existing approaches, how do we apply that to nature? So really love that mix. But how do you think the, what element of what you're doing is going to really move the needle in terms of the change of consciousness and perception around financial flows and really make the greatest, Visionary change, I guess, in how people think about financial flows.

Samantha Power: [35:54] Yeah, thank you for that question, David. It's a big one, and I think the answer is we don't know yet. It's emergent, and we're listening for it. But what I'm feeling right now is that for the communities that engage in the process of designing and creating and stewarding a bioregional financing facility, it will support their empowerment it will help them to remember the value of the work that they do and I think the work of regenerating our lands and waters and our cultures is the most urgent work in the world right now and you know those folks leading those projects have often been operating on a shoestring and so I think there is empowerment that comes from being resourced and recognized for their work.

Samantha Power: [36:52] And for folks that are engaging in what probably feels like a very stretchy investment for them, whether that's philanthropists or impact investors or governments that are providing public grants, I think the worldview change comes from recognizing the need to take a more holistic approach to how we assess value, how we assess returns, how we assess risk, certainly.

Samantha Power: [37:25] And then where these two communities come together and learn together and co-design and create together, and that's something that we're hoping to facilitate in this BFF Accelerator that we're launching in 2025. There can be kind of a collective learning journey where both of those communities are realizing that they need each other and how they can work together and how we can move beyond a sense of othering that I think is so widespread in our existing system where there are people that control capital and there are people that are locked out of the capital system that are doing the work of stewarding lands and waters. And I think there's an opportunity for them to see how they can support each other and to move into more of a sense of collective stewardship of our beautiful garden planet that we have inherited. So that's kind of the intention that we're holding.

Kim Bonine: [38:44] It's terrific. I do have a question. I was really curious how you see the bioregional economies engaging in trade. And when we're thinking about globalization, we're thinking about global trade. And we know that humans benefit from trade. We know that trade is as old as human civilizations. You know, we go into archaeological evidence and humans love to trade. We like to get things from other places and benefit from things that can be grown or made in other parts of the world with other resources. And also global trade for all of the sort of maybe negatives or criticisms, it's also been credited with lifting millions of people out of poverty. And so I'm curious how you see kind of bioregional economies still having the opportunity for the enrichment that comes from trade versus being more isolated and closed systems.

Samantha Power: [39:42] Yeah, we absolutely see any borders around bioregions as porous, right? We talk about ecotones rather than hard borders where one ecosystem meets another. And there is a lot of diversity in ecotones in nature and in cultural and economic ecotones too. And we believe that these ecotones need to be managed with a lot of thought and careful engagement with the forces that are coming in through those ecotones. And we say in the book that absolutely bioregions should move towards greater sovereignty, particularly sovereignty around food and water and medicines and necessities. But from that place, they should be able to also engage in non-extractive trade with other bioregions.

Samantha Power: [40:49] And certainly, you know, the most delicious cuisines on the planet are a result of trade of spices, right? And different plants coming together in new and unexpected ways. And that will continue. But I believe we need to do that in a way that is free of externalities, where right now our global economic system often pushes externalities to the global south, to vulnerable communities, even in the global north. And we don't see the impacts of the purchases that we're making. And in bioregional economies, you have a more localized economy, so there's less room for those externalities because it's your neighbor who you would be harming with the creation of those externalities. But from there, I believe that bioregions can engage in business. In trade that is reciprocal and is aligned with regenerating the earth.

Samantha Power: [41:52] And certainly to reverse the flow of capital from the global south to the global north, I think that communities in the global south are going to need to sell regeneratively produced commodities, these foods and medicines, and hopefully also eco-credits or stewardship credits to buyers in the global north.

Samantha Power: [42:20] And these communities, of course, we're doing some work in the Amazon.

Samantha Power: [42:26] Are stewarding an ecosystem that we all depend on, that is a global public good. And us in the global north had been consuming the ecosystem services from the Amazon at a much higher rate per capita than the folks living in the global south particularly the Indigenous folks that are stewarding that amazing forest and so how do we start to compensate them for their stewardship services I think trade of foods and medicines from that place education around their cosmovisions and how they take care of that place are all very important things that they can share with us and can support the well-being of people far beyond the Amazon.

David Meyers: [43:15] Well, I love that vision. And one of the things I heard recently was how we were talking about benefit sharing, you know, for carbon financing and things like that. And the point made was that actually the Indigenous people understand that as they're sharing the benefits of the forest and of the ecosystems. And so they didn't even kind of see it as money coming to them, but they're providing these incredible services of which we're all dependent upon. So I really hope the vision of being able to compensate them for the effort that they're making is realized. So much more to talk about. We'd love to continue this conversation, but I want to thank you so much, Samantha, for sharing your vision with us and sharing it with the world and encourage all listeners to download the book and to contribute to the community of practice and wishing you just amazing success and the best in what you're doing. So thanks again.

Kim Bonine: [44:18] Yeah, thanks so much, Samantha. Really, really enjoyed the conversation, learning more about your work.

Samantha Power: [44:24] Yeah, looking forward to continuing to explore how we can do this work together.

David Meyers: [44:29] Perfect. Looking forward to that.