A few days before the election, Rep. John McGuire (VA05) told a rally in Albemarle that immigrants are why a house in Charlottesville costs half a million dollars (Velazquez 2026). By the time you read this, the 5th District will have voted, and whatever it decides, the housing problem will still be here Wednesday morning. I want to spend a little time on why McGuire was wrong and a lot more on what a serious answer would look like, because nobody in this region has one yet, including the people I agree with.

Let’s with McGuire’s claim. About one in ten residents of Charlottesville and Albemarle was born abroad (U.S. Census Bureau 2024), and our housing was expensive long before 2021. McGuire’s figure comes from a Dallas Fed working paper that President Trump misread (shocker). The paper estimates that unauthorized immigration raised prices in the average metro by about 6.6 percent between 2021 and 2024, found no meaningful effect on wages, and attributes the price effect to the fact that nobody was building (Wilson and Zhou 2026). Immigrants are a quarter of Virginia’s construction workforce (FWD.us 2025) and two-thirds of construction trades workers in the Washington metro (Frost 2026). Refugees and asylees paid $581 billion in taxes against $457 billion in services over fifteen years (HHS 2024), and the Congressional Budget Office estimates the recent immigration surge will cut federal deficits by about $900 billion this decade (CBO 2024). McGuire knows the real cause, because in May he celebrated voting for a housing bill his office said would address a shortage caused by zoning, permitting and regulatory barriers (McGuire 2026). He had it right then.

What bothers me more than McGuire, though, is that the people who run this region have had that diagnosis for years and have not fixed it either. We have plans, we have pledges, and we have funds. Yet we have very few new houses.

What we’ve tried, and what it has produced

The city did the hardest thing first. In 2021 it adopted an affordable housing plan with a moral commitment of $10 million a year for ten years (City of Charlottesville 2021), and in December 2023 it adopted a new zoning code that eliminated single-family-only zoning and parking minimums, legalized single-room occupancy everywhere, and required affordable units in buildings over ten units (Housing Solutions Lab 2025). No other city in Virginia has gone that far. Then a group of property owners sued, the city’s outside counsel missed a filing deadline, and a judge voided the entire code on June 30, 2025, leaving Charlottesville for a time with no zoning at all (Cvilletomorrow 2025a). The suit was settled in October 2025 in exchange for a traffic study (VPM 2025). Eighteen months of uncertainty is a long time in development finance, and as of late 2025 only a handful of major projects had been approved under the new rules (Tubbs 2025).

The money side looks better on paper than on the ground. The city has invested $65.8 million since 2021, about two thirds of the $100 million goal (C-Ville Weekly 2026a). That money helped CRHA complete 190 units, including the renovation of Crescent Halls and the first phase of South First Street, with 137 more under construction and 138 planned at Westhaven, and it helped Piedmont Housing Alliance finish 106 homes in the first phase of Kindlewood with 104 more underway (C-Ville Weekly 2026a). Those are real homes for real families, and the resident-led Kindlewood model is one other cities should study. But it adds up to roughly 400 completed homes in five years, in a city that needs thousands.

The county has a different problem. Albemarle’s 2021 housing policy calls for 11,750 new homes by 2040 (Albemarle County 2021). The county has approved far more than that pace requires: more than 13,300 homes were approved but not yet built as of April 2026 (C-Ville Weekly 2026b). Between 2010 and 2021 the county averaged about 646 new homes a year (Information Charlottesville 2022). The gap between what is permitted and what gets built is where Albemarle’s problem lives. Zoning is not what holds those homes back. Water and sewer lines, roads, school capacity, construction costs and interest rates are. The county’s zoning modernization won’t produce substantive regulatory changes until 2028 (Citizen Portal 2025), and its dedicated housing money, $7.5 million in FY27 including a new 15-cent personal property tax levy (Albemarle County 2026), is a real commitment by county standards and a small one against the need.

Then there is UVA. In March 2020, Jim Ryan announced that the university would support 1,000 to 1,500 affordable homes on land it or its foundation owns (C-Ville Weekly 2021). Six years later, none has been built. The two-acre site at 10th and Wertland and the twelve-acre Piedmont site off Fontaine now show earliest construction dates of 2028, and Piedmont Housing Alliance has asked for an indefinite deferral of its rezoning (Tubbs 2026a). UVA’s own update cites structural shifts in the affordable housing industry (UVA President’s Council 2026). The university has said it does not plan to put financial resources into the projects, only land (C-Ville Weekly 2024). Meanwhile, nearly 7,300 students live on Grounds, about 4,000 of them first-years, which leaves most undergraduates renting in town (Information Charlottesville 2024). UVA is building 780 beds in the Ivy Corridor for fall 2027, and private developers are bringing about 3,000 beds online in the Blume and the Verve next summer (Information Charlottesville 2026a). Under city policy, student housing within half a mile of Grounds that leases by the bedroom pays an in-lieu fee instead of providing affordable units (City of Charlottesville 2026). That is why the city expects $11 million from student housing developers this year (C-Ville Weekly 2026a), and it is why Fifeville, 10th and Page and Rose Hill are fighting seven- and eleven-story student buildings on their edges (Cvilletomorrow 2025b).

The fight we keep having, and why it misses

Every housing conversation in this town collapses into the same argument. One side says build up: height and density are the only way to add homes on expensive land, and the people who oppose them are protecting their property values. The other side says the new code is a gift to developers who will build student towers over historically Black neighborhoods, repeating in slow motion what the city did to Vinegar Hill, Cox’s Row and Garrett Street, where urban renewal displaced more than a thousand residents between 1949 and 1978 (Encyclopedia Virginia 2024). The city formally apologized for that in 2011. Today 50 percent of white households in Charlottesville own their homes and 24 percent of Black households do (Cavalier Daily 2022).

Both sides are right about something, which is why the argument never ends. We do need to build up. Charlottesville is ten square miles, and the county has decided, sensibly, to protect its rural land and concentrate growth in five percent of its area. There is nowhere to go but up. It is also true that a code allowing eleven stories by right on West Main and seven in Fifeville, with no public hearing, will change who lives there, and that market-rate housing on its own has never protected a neighborhood from displacement anywhere in America. Minneapolis is the test case everyone cites. It abolished single-family zoning in 2019, grew its housing stock 12 percent between 2017 and 2022, and one study found rents rose 1.8 percent a year against 5.6 percent in a comparison city (Star Tribune 2025). But the Minneapolis Fed reported last month that new construction there has stalled and that zoning reform has not been enough on its own to overcome high interest rates and construction costs (Minneapolis Fed 2026). You need the zoning. You also need patient capital and public infrastructure, and that is what’s missing, here and there.

I’m not a housing developer. I work on economic development and on how to finance things that markets won’t finance on their own, and that turns out to be our problem. What follows are ideas I’d put in front of the city, the county and the university. The dollar figures are rough. I don’t have access to the city’s or county’s books or to the pro formas on any of these projects, so treat them as orders of magnitude, and where I’m unsure about something I’ve said so.

1. Create a Charlottesville-Albemarle Housing Production Fund

Montgomery County, Maryland, created a $100 million revolving fund in 2021 that its housing commission uses to finance construction of mixed-income buildings the public owns. The first building opened in 2023. The fund is projected to produce more than 3,000 homes by 2030, with 30 percent permanently affordable, and the market-rate rents stay with the public rather than flowing to private investors (HOC 2025; NPR 2024). It won the Ivory Prize. Atlanta has copied it, and Maryland created a state fund to help smaller jurisdictions do the same.

Virginia just did something similar. The 2026 General Assembly created a Virginia Housing Revolving Fund for lower-interest loans to mixed-income housing and to the infrastructure needed to make sites ready, and the budget put $20 million into a mixed-income pilot and $60 million in total toward it and the Housing Trust Fund (VPAP 2026; Governor of Virginia 2026). The state has built the lever. Our region should be first in line to pull it.

The structure I would propose is a regional fund in the range of $100 million, revolving, capitalized by the city and county (each dedicating a share of what they already spend, so most of this is money that comes back rather than new money), by UVA (see point two), by the state pilot, and by local philanthropy. The Charlottesville Area Community Foundation already runs an impact investing program, and Dave Matthews Band’s Affordable Housing Opportunity Fund has raised about $28 million of a $30 million goal for public housing redevelopment (CACF 2025). I picked $100 million because that’s what Montgomery County needed to get a pipeline going; a smaller region could start smaller. The fund would lend at below-market rates for construction and take equity in mixed-income buildings on publicly or nonprofit-controlled land. CRHA is the natural owner of the city’s share; the county may need a new entity or a regional one. Loans repay as buildings lease up and refinance, and the money goes back out. Thirty percent of every building stays permanently affordable, well past the fifteen or thirty years a tax credit lasts.

The reason this matters more than another grant program is cost and scale. Deeply affordable redevelopment financed with tax credits is expensive everywhere. Locally, Kindlewood’s second phase of about 104 homes has been reported at between $68 million and $86 million (C-Ville Weekly 2025); I don’t know how those two figures reconcile or exactly what they include, and I want to be careful not to draw a conclusion from them. What I do know is that building for families at 30 and 50 percent of area median income on an occupied site while displacing no one is the hardest work in housing, that it’s the right thing to do, and that it depends on tax credits that are oversubscribed and on subsidy that doesn’t come back. For the much larger number of homes needed at 50 to 80 percent of area median income, a revolving fund that keeps the asset and the market-rate rent is the only model I’m aware of that gets to thousands of homes. It would complement what Piedmont Housing Alliance, Habitat and CRHA already do, and they’d be among its first borrowers.

2. Ask UVA to convert its pledge from land into capital, and to house its own growth

UVA is the region’s largest landowner and its largest employer, and it drives more housing demand than any other institution here while paying no property tax. Its 2020 pledge was a real act of leadership. It has produced nothing so far, in part because the model asked nonprofits to assemble the financing while the university contributed only land. UVA, this is a chance to step up.

The university should put capital into the production fund, somewhere in the range of $25 million, as a first-loss or low-return tranche. It has a vehicle for this. UVA’s Strategic Investment Fund holds about $2.0 billion inside a $16.4 billion long-term pool that returned 16 percent last year (UVIMCO 2026). The SIF was created in 2016 to fund transformational investments in the university’s academic, research and health care missions, and most of its grants have gone to research, faculty and student aid, so I’d understand an argument that community housing isn’t what it’s for. But UVA has already made the opposite call: the SIF has funded the housing initiative since 2023, with $1.1 million for consultants, advisory services and legal and land transfer fees (UVA Strategic Investment Fund 2025). The question isn’t whether the fund can be used for housing. It’s whether the commitment stays at the size that pays advisors or grows to the size that builds. For scale, the university put $150 million of its own money into the Manning Institute of Biotechnology (UVA Health 2025). Twenty-five million is a little over one percent of the SIF, but I’d be glad to be told the right number is different.

Second, UVA should adopt a simple rule: no net new demand. Every increase in enrollment should be matched by new beds on Grounds, full-stop. The second-year housing requirement by 2030 is the right idea and should be finished, and the university should study whether it can do the same for third-years. It is building 1,100 beds. Private developers are building 3,000 more in a single year, which tells you how much demand the university exports to the city.

Third, UVA and UVA Health should start an employer-assisted housing program for staff below a wage threshold, with down payment matching, master-leasing of units in fund-financed buildings, and a preference for hospital and service workers in the homes built on university land (assuming this doesn’t exist yet). The university’s own materials already mention nurses as intended residents at 10th and Wertland (C-Ville Weekly 2024). Turn that from a talking point into a program with a budget.

3. In the county, pay for the pipes and unlock the 13,300

Albemarle has approved more homes than it needs for a decade. It should treat the 13,300 approved and unbuilt homes as its most important housing asset and go project by project to learn what is stopping each one. I don’t know the answer for most of them, but I’m not sure the county does either, not in a real systematic way. For many the answer will be the cost of extending water and sewer and building the road connections the rezoning requires; the county is already spending $2.5 million to match Habitat’s $29 million federal grant at Southwood for exactly this (Albemarle County 2026). A county infrastructure fund, financed by bonds repaid from the new tax base the homes create, is the standard tool, and the state revolving fund now explicitly covers infrastructure for site readiness. The county should also accelerate its zoning modernization from 2028 and, at a minimum, align growth area zoning with what the comprehensive plan already allows, so that the Rio/29, Pantops and Fontaine activity centers can take the height and density that is supposed to go there without a two-year rezoning each time.

4. In the city, defend the code and fix its edges

The 2023 code should stand. It survived a lawsuit and it is the most pro-housing code in Virginia. Two amendments would end the war that is consuming it. First, step down heights where commercial corridors meet 10th and Page, Fifeville and Rose Hill, so that West Main and Preston keep their height and the residential blocks behind them don’t inherit it by right. The city has already designated these as Sensitive Communities and is starting a small area plan for 10th and Page and Rose Hill (Information Charlottesville 2025). That plan should produce binding form standards rather than yet another study. Second, reform the student housing in-lieu fee, which the city is studying now (City of Charlottesville 2026). The fee should rise sharply with height and distance from Grounds, and above a threshold the units should be required on site. A developer who wants eleven stories on West Main should house workers in it.

The missing middle piece needs a different fix. The city’s own working group found that utility connection costs are what stop homeowners from building the second and third units the code now allows (Tubbs 2026b). A pattern book of pre-approved duplex and triplex plans, a fee waiver for units that meet the code’s affordability definition, and a small construction loan product from the production fund would probably do more for gentle density than any further zoning change.

5. Build wealth in the neighborhoods urban renewal destroyed, along with housing

Preserving historically Black neighborhoods cannot mean freezing them. It has to mean that the people who live there now capture some of the value that development creates. This was very much part of the central thesis to the launch of the New Hill Development Corporation. Several tools already exist and are underused. The Piedmont Community Land Trust, the first in Virginia, holds land permanently and sells only the house; the city funded two homes on 11th Street NW through it last year (Information Charlottesville 2025b). It should be scaled by an order of magnitude, with the production fund acquiring lots in Sensitive Communities ahead of the market. Long-time homeowners should get real estate tax relief indexed to appreciation, so a family that has owned on Page Street since 1965 is not taxed out by the building next door. Heirs’ property, where title is split among descendants and homes cannot be sold or borrowed against, is a quiet driver of displacement in these neighborhoods and needs a funded legal aid program. And the Fifeville Neighborhood Association’s 501 Cherry Avenue project, a community-owned grocery co-op with housing above it, is the kind of resident-led development the city should fund fully and then look to repeat (Cvilletomorrow 2025c).

There is a new tool as well. The Faith in Housing Act, signed in April, allows churches and tax-exempt nonprofits that have owned land for five years to build housing by right if 60 percent is affordable, starting next year (McGuireWoods 2026). Charlottesville’s Black churches own land in the very neighborhoods under pressure. A partnership between those congregations, the land trust and the production fund could build permanently affordable homes on church land with the congregation as owner, which preserves the neighborhood’s institutions and gives them an income at the same time. I’ll say plainly that I don’t know how the congregations themselves feel about this, and they’d need to lead it.

6. Make the city and county one housing market, because they already are

The county pays the city $21.9 million this year under the 1982 revenue-sharing agreement, and some county voices want it renegotiated or ended (Cville Right Now 2026). I’d propose the opposite of ending it. Dedicate a fixed share, say a quarter, to the regional production fund, jointly governed, and an annual grievance becomes the seed capital for something both localities need. The two boards met jointly in October and talked about coordinating their strategic plans. Housing is the obvious place to start, with one regional needs figure when the TJPDC assessment lands in March 2027, one shared development dashboard, and one fund. The Regional Housing Partnership already exists for this. It needs money and authority.

7. Set a number and publish it every year

My rough math says the city and county together need something like a thousand new homes a year for the next decade to cover the existing deficit and projected growth, and that about 300 of those need to be permanently affordable to households below 60 percent of area median income. The TJPDC assessment due next spring will give a far better number than mine. Whatever it is, both localities should adopt it as a target, report against it every year (in plain language), and let voters hold them to it. The county averaged 646 a year through the 2010s and the city has added about 2,000 apartments since 2020, so a thousand a year is a stretch but not a fantasy. Every plan in this region has targets. What none of them has is a public record of whether the targets were met. We’d all benefit from greater accountability.

What this costs and who pays

The production fund is the expensive part, and it costs less than it sounds. A hundred million dollars, raised once and then recycled, is less than the city and county will spend on housing grants over the next six years at current rates, and it comes back. UVA’s share is about one percent of its Strategic Investment Fund. The state pilot is funded. The philanthropic money is already being raised. The infrastructure bonds are repaid by the taxes the new homes generate. Most of what I’m describing is money the region already spends, directed through one vehicle instead of three (hello efficiencies), with the public keeping the assets at the end.

McGuire’s rally line was that a thousand people chasing a hundred houses drives up the price. He had the arithmetic right and the people wrong. The answer to a hundred houses is a thousand houses. Everything above is about how to build them.

Sources

Albemarle County (2021). Housing Albemarle. Adopted by the Board of Supervisors, July 7, 2021. albemarle.org

Albemarle County (2026). FY27 Recommended Budget FAQs; Affordable Housing Snapshot, May 2026. albemarle.org

Cavalier Daily (2022). Charlottesville’s affordable housing crisis: a long time coming, January 2022. cavalierdaily.com

Charlottesville Area Community Foundation (2025). Impact Report. cacfimpact.org

Citizen Portal (2025). Albemarle Staff Outline Three-Phase Zoning Modernization to Implement AC44; Regulatory Changes Targeted for 2028. citizenportal.ai

City of Charlottesville (2021). Charlottesville Affordable Housing Plan, March 2021. charlottesville.gov

City of Charlottesville (2026). City Invites Community Feedback on Student Housing Policies, February 4, 2026. charlottesville.gov

Congressional Budget Office (2024). Director’s Statement on the Updated Budget and Economic Outlook: 2024 to 2034, June 18, 2024. cbo.gov

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C-Ville Weekly (2024). Housing more: BOV updated on efforts to build up to 1,500 affordable units on UVA-affiliated land. c-ville.com

C-Ville Weekly (2025). Kindlewood Phase II finalizes funding, March 2025. c-ville.com

C-Ville Weekly (2026a). Charlottesville on track to meet spending goal for subsidized housing, September 2026. c-ville.com

C-Ville Weekly (2026b). Albemarle supervisors will hear proposal to add 165 units at Fifth Street complex, August 2026. c-ville.com

Cville Right Now (2026). City Council, County Supervisors look to increase collaboration, October 7, 2026. cvillerightnow.com

Cvilletomorrow (2025a). O’Hare, Erin. Charlottesville falls back on 2024 development code, but zoning applications still on hold, July 15, 2025. cvilletomorrow.org

Cvilletomorrow (2025b). O’Hare, Erin. Charlottesville’s zoning lawsuit could be coming to an end, October 21, 2025. cvilletomorrow.org

Cvilletomorrow (2025c). Fifeville moves one big step closer to having a community-owned grocery store. cvilletomorrow.org

Encyclopedia Virginia (2024). Yager, Jordy. Urban Renewal in Charlottesville. encyclopediavirginia.org

Frost, Riordan (2026). Homebuilding and Remodeling Depend on Immigrant Labor in Major Metros. Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, January 5, 2026. jchs.harvard.edu

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Governor of Virginia (2026). Governor Spanberger Celebrates Record Education, Healthcare, and Housing Investments in Final Budget, June 29, 2026. governor.virginia.gov

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Housing Solutions Lab (2025). Charlottesville, VA’s path to equitable zoning reform. NYU Furman Center. localhousingsolutions.org

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Information Charlottesville (2024). Tubbs, Sean. UVA to build two new residence halls with 2,000 units on Emmet Street, Ivy Road, May 27, 2024. infocville.com

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Minneapolis Fed (2026). Minneapolis 2040 Plan indicators point to stable rents, stalled development, October 7, 2026. minneapolisfed.org

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An atelier in the 13th

The trip began on Wednesday at Espero Atelier, a fashion workshop that Maya Persaud started in Paris. Espero makes ready-to-wear and couture, and the people who make it came to France as refugees from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey, Chechnya and Ukraine. Most have worked at the atelier for years. The team has placed members in internships at Yves Saint Laurent, made couture for clients as far away as San Francisco and staged a show at the Musée d'Orsay. A documentary about them screens in Washington and New York next month.

One of the women on the team told me that finding work was hard at first. She spent three weeks as a cleaner at Disneyland Paris before she found her way to Espero. Another, back from the Saint Laurent internship, talked about how exacting the technical work at a couture house turned out to be, and how proud she was to have met the standard.

Maya put it better than I can. "They teach me so much: to have joy in work, to be patient, to have gratitude and resilience. Together we belong."

– Maya Persaud, Espero Atelier

I've spent ten years arguing that displaced people are workers, founders, customers and borrowers, and that places that treat them that way do better than places that don't. Espero is this, made real, in one room: a working business, skilled jobs, a product Paris can be proud of, and a group of people who belong to one another.

Two days at the Maison des Réfugiés

The Refugee Entrepreneurship Network was first convened in 2018 by the Centre for Entrepreneurs in the UK. This year's summit was put together, on a volunteer basis and on top of their day jobs, by Elody de Brito of SINGA Switzerland, Vasili Sofiadelis of Changemakers Lab in Lesvos and Laura di Santolo of Forward Inc in Amsterdam. They had help from Camila Rojo and her wonderful colleagues at the Maison des Réfugiés, who hosted us, from other members of the network, including Charlie Fraser of TERN and Valentina Primo of Startups Without Borders, who built sessions with me, and from Visa and Generali, whose sponsorship made the two days possible. Each of them deserves to be called out, because this field depends on people like them and they rarely get thanked in print. I had dinner with the organizing team the night before, a table of people from entrepreneur support organizations, research groups and advocacy organizations across Europe and the UK. Most of them have been at this since the Syrian crisis. Ten years in, what I noticed wasn't fatigue. It was precision, dedication, and compassion. They know which bank in which city will open an account for someone whose residence permit expires in eleven months, and which won't. They know how hard it is to build things that matter, yet they continue to do this work despite the turbulent political and funding landscape. And they put thus conference together professionally and as volunteers. Hats off to this team of teams.

The first morning opened with Nikiara Purmambietova. Nikiara is a Ukrainian-born displaced entrepreneur, Muslim, and mother of three, who previously led a career in finance, B2B/B2C sales, and SaaS tech, and here she was showcasing ModestBeauty.com, an ecommerce fashion marketplace she founded to connect designers and eco-conscious brands across over 14 countries to serve Muslim women and consumers seeking value-aligned, contemporary modest wear in non-Muslim countries. Then we had a presentation on the REN’s new mapping of the field report, which I’ll come back to shortly. Valentina and I had a fireside conversation about the book. Then Charlie moderated a panel on access to capital with Rebecca Wilkey of the International Rescue Committee, Michael Wang of Fertile Soil Ventures, Isobelle Ford of Skylight Ventures (the small business lending company TERN spun out), and Matiullah Rahmaty, who came to Europe as a refugee from Afghanistan and founded Tamveel Ventures to build financing for founders who won't take an interest-bearing loan. What struck me was how differently each of them is going at the same problem. Isobelle lends small amounts on character and cash flow. Michael writes equity checks. Matiullah is building sharia-compliant structures. Rebecca is working out how a humanitarian organization becomes a lender in Europe. The field needs all four, and more.

Charlie used the panel to announce TERN's Refugee Venture Fund, built with Atomico. It opens with £300,000, aims for £500,000 in its first round and £10 million in time, and will write checks of £50,000 to £100,000 into UK start-ups led by people with refugee status (tech.eu 2026). As Charlie put it, the fund is about closing a market gap, not lowering the investment bar.

In the afternoon Charlie and I ran a working session on funding and financing for support organizations and the founders they serve. We spent most of it widening the aperture. Ask most people how a business raises money and they'll name venture capital, angels and bank loans. By the end of the session the group had listed dozens more, from honor loans and savings circles to supplier credit, guarantee funds, recoverable grants and pre-sales. I’ll be writing these up as a short primer, on entrepreneurial financing next week and will publish it when it’s ready.

The evening belonged to the Visa Everywhere Pioneers, a program that honors refugee women who have built businesses in Europe, and to the creatives among them. Jessie MacNeil-Brown of Ben & Jerry's sat on the jury. Ben & Jerry's has backed refugee entrepreneurs in Europe for years, long before it was cool, and it was a pleasure to put a copy of the book in her hands. Belonging, it turns out, can also taste delicious. Dinner came from Les Cuistots Migrateurs, a Paris caterer whose chefs all arrived as refugees. Their flyer makes a point I liked: no auto-entrepreneurs, every chef is a salaried employee, and the company runs a free cooking school that qualifies graduates as commis de cuisine. Afterwards a group of us went for drinks in the 20th and I got to know some of the Ukrainian entrepreneurs in the network properly. Many of them are entrepreneurs and single moms and have had to leave family behind in Kiev. Some have been displaced multiple times. And yet they carry on and continue to build. For these entrepreneurs, there isn’t really any other option.

Before I left for the airport this morning I sat down with the speakers from two of Europe's development finance institutions. Both were candid with me. Most DFIs, one said, still have no real mandate for investing in refugees or ‘durable solutions’ as we sometimes call it, and there's lingering suspicion inside those institutions that it isn't yet a viable market. I know there are doubts, but I think the suspicion is wrong on the facts, which is largely why we wrote our book.

What the founders said

I’ll remember more of what the founders said than the data on any of the slides.

Bonny Magambo, one of the 2025 Pioneers, said it in five words: "When you start over, doors open."

Maryna Zaporozhets, one of the creative economy entrepreneurs, described leaving Ukraine. "When the war began, all of us lost our safe spaces." One of hers had been a library. She has since built a free audiobook library for Ukrainians in their own language, and she plans to extend it to other languages so that other displaced people can find their way back to one of theirs.

Another entrepreneur spoke to their grit: "Whatever happened in my life, I will show my family we can survive. We have to keep reinventing ourselves. We put this into our business - I know we will make it profitable no matter what challenges we face."

I've heard resilience used as a slogan in this field for years. What she was describing was a business plan, and she was presenting it to a room full of people who could fund it.

How big is this, really?

The network's first report on the refugee entrepreneurship field, published last year, found that more than 90 organizations had supported 203,255 refugee entrepreneurs, 57 percent of them women, who had launched 13,332 businesses and created 16,456 jobs. Those businesses had raised a combined €136 million. Sixty percent were still trading after three years, which matches mainstream small business benchmarks, and 35 percent employed someone other than the founder from the start (REN 2025).

The 2026 mapping presented in Paris shows a field that's growing fast. REN has now identified 125 support organizations: 46 in Europe, 40 in the Americas, 22 in Africa and 15 in Asia. Almost all of them were founded after 2015. Survey respondents reported 19,561 businesses started, up from 13,332 the year before. Adding desk research on organizations that didn't respond brings that to 39,023, and REN's estimate for the whole field is 82,787 businesses, of which about 55,741 pay a living wage (REN 2026). Those last two figures are extrapolations from a small sample, and the investor side of the survey had only four respondents, so read them as a first sketch. The Refugee Investment Network is running a parallel survey of investors this autumn, and the two sets of data should be read together once they're complete. I’ll be keen to see how those shake out.

Even so, the sketch is useful. Take the 2025 ratio of 1.2 jobs created per business beyond the founder. Applied to 82,787 businesses, the organizations in this network have helped create something like 100,000 jobs, and with the founders' own livelihoods added, close to 185,000 people are working in businesses this field helped start. That's the work of 125 organizations, most of them a decade old or less and most of them small and under-resourced.

It's also a fraction of the real market, and this is the point I want the development finance institutions (and investors of all kinds) to hear. Supported businesses are the ones we can see. The best-documented case is the United States, where in 2019 13 percent of refugees were entrepreneurs, against 11.7 percent of other immigrants and 9 percent of people born in the country, which amounted to nearly 188,000 refugee-owned businesses (IRC 2025). An earlier analysis of 2015 data found more than 181,000 refugee entrepreneurs generating $4.6 billion in business income (New American Economy 2017). The Netherlands expected to pass 70,000 refugee-owned businesses in 2025, with about 9,500 started in 2024 alone, growing 20 percent a year and accounting for roughly one in twenty new businesses in the country (Starting New 2026). Two countries, a quarter of a million businesses.

Nobody has published a global figure, so here's a rough one, with every assumption in the open so that anyone can swap in their own. At the end of 2025, 117.8 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide: 41.6 million refugees, 68.7 million people displaced inside their own countries, and about 7.5 million asylum seekers and others in need of international protection (UNHCR 2026). Displaced populations are young, around 40 percent children, so a working-age share of 55 to 60 percent gives 65 to 70 million adults, of whom roughly 24 million are refugees. Not all of them can legally work. UNHCR finds that only 45 percent of refugees live in countries where formal employment, including self-employment, is accessible in practice (UNHCR 2024), and most internally displaced people are in places where informal trade is the only option.

The United States is a generous host by global standards, so for a world figure I use a blended business-ownership rate of 8 to 15 percent for refugees and 10 to 15 percent for internally displaced people, who face fewer legal barriers but far worse markets. That yields roughly 6 to 10 million enterprises run by displaced people, each of them at least one job, the owner's. How many do they hire? Most are one-person operations. The OECD estimates that a foreign-born entrepreneur in a small firm creates 1.4 to 2.1 additional jobs (OECD 2010), and the REN data gives 1.2 for supported businesses. Supported businesses are a selected group, so I use 0.5 to 1 additional job per refugee enterprise and 0.3 to 0.6 per internally displaced enterprise. That produces 2.5 to 6 million jobs for people other than the owner. With the owners added back, businesses run by displaced people account for roughly 9 to 16 million jobs, of which 3 to 6 million sit in refugee-run businesses specifically.

That's only the first layer. Most displaced adults who work do so for someone else; a blended employment rate of 40 to 50 percent puts 18 to 25 million of them in wage jobs, and some share of those positions exist only because the labor is there. Employers in Fargo, North Dakota, including a glass manufacturer and a regional health system, have said they couldn't have kept or expanded operations without refugee workers (IRC 2025). And displaced people spend. In Rwanda, each refugee receiving cash assistance raised annual income in the surrounding host economy by $205 to $253 (Taylor et al. 2016); Kakuma camp in Kenya supports a local market worth an estimated $56 million a year (IFC 2018); in Turkey, the arrival of Syrians increased both the number of businesses and the employment of native workers in the affected provinces (Cengiz and Tekgüç 2022). Adding up hires by displaced-run businesses, labor-dependent wage jobs and the host jobs that spending supports, jobs created in the strict sense come to somewhere between 15 and 30 million. Jobs held or sustained by displaced people come to 35 to 55 million. The one-line answer is tens of millions, and the enterprise figure is the only part a skeptic can't wave away, because it can be shown line by line.

Against that, the 83,000 businesses the support field has reached are about one percent of the enterprises displaced people run. I don't say this to diminish the field. I say it because an institution that looks at 125 small organizations and concludes there's no market has the telescope the wrong way round. The market is there. What's thin is the capital and the support. What the exercise mostly shows is how little effort has gone into measuring this: we have excellent data on how many people are displaced and almost none on what they build once they arrive. That gap isn't an accident. It's much easier to make the case for restriction when the people being restricted appear only as a cost.

The credit problem, and a fix Europe could make

When REN asked support organizations what keeps their founders from capital, the top answer was no credit history, named by 42 percent, ahead of documentation requirements, businesses not yet ready for investment and residence permits too short for a loan term (REN 2026). I heard the same thing from Rebecca at the IRC, which is working out how to lend to refugee founders in Europe and has so far found personal loans the easier road.

The missing credit file is real, but I don't think it's the binding constraint. American community lenders, including the IRC's own Center for Economic Opportunity, don't rely on credit scores for their core microloans either. They underwrite on cash flow, character and coaching. The harder European problems are structural. Lending is licensed country by country and it’s not automatic in the way it is in the States. Credit data doesn't cross borders. Outside Germany, Italy and the Nordics, most credit bureaus hold only negative information, so even native-born founders have thin files.

My advice to Rebecca, for what it's worth, was not to build a lender. Plug into the ones that already do this. ADIE in France, Qredits in the Netherlands, PerMicro in Italy and Microlux in Luxembourg already lend to people with no credit history, many of them migrants, and they hold the licenses. What a humanitarian organization brings is pipeline, trust, pre-loan coaching and wraparound support, so structure it as a referral and guarantee partnership with first-loss capital. Use the European Investment Fund's InvestEU microfinance guarantee to cover a slice of the losses; that's what it exists for. Replace credit history with cash-flow underwriting through open banking, which is how fintech lenders already lend to new businesses; a founder with six months of bank transactions is underwritable. And make the personal loans a ladder rather than a ceiling, by reporting repayment to national bureaus wherever the rules allow and graduating borrowers to business credit at pre-agreed thresholds.

The policy ask is simpler, and I put it to my Fatimeh Jailani, the Executive Director of Starting New (the Newcomer Entrepreneurship Policy Coalition) who works on these questions in Brussels. The European Union already requires that an EU citizen's data be portable across member states. It should treat a third-country national's credit record the same way: a consented, portable file attached to the person rather than to the country where they happened to open their first account. A Syrian engineer who repaid a loan in Germany shouldn't become a stranger to every bank in France. Fatimeh has invited us to the European Migration Forum next year, and I hope Christine and I can make that case there.

What the people doing this work need

I'll keep this short, because Charlie and I intend to write about it properly in the coming weeks. Every organization in the room, without exception, is struggling for money. Of the forty that answered REN's funding questions, 27 said finding new funders is a struggle and 22 said the same of securing unrestricted or multi-year funding. Asked what gets in the way of working together, 58 percent gave the same answer: we compete for the same funding (REN 2026). The pool of funders who see durable solutions to displacement as their business is small, and everyone is drinking from it. The Refugee Investment Network knows this as well as anyone.

The answer isn't to divide the pool more cleverly. It's to make it bigger. Refugee economic inclusion falls between humanitarian funders and immigration funders, and plenty of funders who care about small business, jobs, women's enterprise, climate, food or innovation would support this work if they saw how it serves their goals. The second answer is time. An organization on twelve-month grants can't build a lending partnership that takes three years to prove. Multi-year, flexible money isn't a luxury in this field. It's the difference between a program and an institution and real, lasting change.

The flight home

I owe a copy of our book to the woman from the development finance institution, because I'd given out my last one by Thursday night. I'll mail it. I hope she reads proudly the chapter on Kiva, and I hope that in a year or two the suspicion she described from her colleagues sounds as dated as the idea, common when we started, that refugees wouldn't repay a loan.

What I'll carry home isn't the slides. It's a woman who cleaned a theme park for three weeks and now designs for a fashion house that shows at the Orsay. It's a creative entrepreneur rebuilding a library one audiobook at a time. It’s an entrepreneur building a circular economy food start up in Brussels. It's a table of people in the 20th arrondissement who have spent ten years making doors open for others and are still, somehow, good company. Maya was right. Together we belong.

Sources

Cengiz, Doruk, and Hasan Tekgüç. 2022. "Is It Merely a Labor Supply Shock? Impacts of Syrian Migrants on Local Economies in Turkey." ILR Review 75 (3): 741–768.

International Finance Corporation (IFC). 2018. Kakuma as a Marketplace: A Consumer and Market Study of a Refugee Camp and Town in Northwest Kenya. Washington, DC: IFC.

International Rescue Committee (IRC). 2025. Refugees Strengthen Economies. Summarized in "Refugees strengthen economies, new study finds," AMES News, 25 March 2025.

Kluge, John, and Christine Mahoney. 2026. Many Doors to Capital: A Primer on Funding and Financing for Refugee Entrepreneurs and the Organizations That Support Them. October.

New American Economy. 2017. From Struggle to Resilience: The Economic Impact of Refugees in America. New York: New American Economy.

OECD. 2010. Open for Business: Migrant Entrepreneurship in OECD Countries. Paris: OECD Publishing.

Refugee Entrepreneurship Network. 2025. 2025 REN Survey. Findings presented at the REN Summit, Loughborough University London.

Refugee Entrepreneurship Network. 2026. "REN: Mapping the Field." Survey results presented at the REN Summit, Paris, October 15.

Starting New. 2026. "Around Europe, Episode 1: Cycling Through the Netherlands." Newsletter.

Taylor, J. Edward, Mateusz J. Filipski, Mohamad Alloush, Anubhab Gupta, Ruben Irvin Rojas Valdes and Ernesto Gonzalez-Estrada. 2016. "Economic Impact of Refugees." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113 (27): 7449–7453.

tech.eu. 2026. "UK Launches Refugee-Focused Venture Fund with Initial £300,000 Investment." October 13.

UNHCR. 2024. Global Appeal 2024: Self-Reliance, Economic Inclusion and Livelihoods. Geneva: UNHCR.

UNHCR. 2026. Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2025. Geneva.

The week of the General Assembly generates more announcements than any person can absorb. Pledges, coalitions, task forces, frameworks, institutes. Some of them will matter. Most will not. Nobody in the room can reliably tell you which is which, including the people making the announcements, and I have stopped pretending I can either.

Climate Week opened this year on a Sunday night at THE NAT, a gala built around closing the nature finance gap, themed Water is Life, in a room of world leaders and philanthropists and investors. Climate investor and former refugee Tenzin Seldon took the stage, introduced by Emma Watson, and laid out an idea called Gross Domestic Regeneration: the number an economy should run on in place of GDP, one that counts what we protect and restore (Pulse Fund 2026).

By Wednesday evening I was sitting with the advisory council of Columbia University’s Sustainable Investing Research Initiative (SIRI), which I recently joined and about which I should disclose I am not remotely neutral. SIRI is attempting something immodest, which is to rebuild the intellectual foundations underneath how money moves. That evening gave me more hope than I expected to feel. The premise is that we might yet leave our children and grandchildren an economy organized around what we restore and repair rather than what we strip out and sell.

That is not the economy we inherited. The one we have was taught to us. The Chicago School of Economics supplied the architecture, and Milton Friedman in particular supplied the permission slip, arguing in 1970 that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits and that anything else amounted to a manager spending someone else’s money (Friedman 1970). It was an elegant argument that has been enormously influential, and it has been, I think, catastrophic. It established a frame in which the damage a company does to the systems it depends on is genuinely somebody else’s problem, and it did so at precisely the moment when the scale of that damage began to compound. Extraction is not a feature of human nature. It is a habit we built an intellectual case for over the last several decades that has origins in the fracture of ethics from economics.

So I spent the rest of this week turning Seldon’s idea over. Not because I think it is wrong, as I think her instincts behind it are spot on, but because the question of what would actually have to happen for an idea like this to take root turns out to be far more interesting than the question of whether it is a good idea.

The proposal

Seldon runs Pulse Fund, which invests in climate companies across energy, food and agriculture, infrastructure and mobility. The idea comes out of something she saw as a child in the Himalayas, where glacial meltwater took the field she played in. Her argument then starts where almost every argument in this space starts, with Simon Kuznets.

Kuznets built the first national income accounts and presented them to Congress in 1934 as an emergency measurement tool for the Depression. He told lawmakers explicitly that the welfare of a nation could scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income. We adopted the measure anyway, made it the global standard, and have spent ninety years treating a Depression-era output gauge as a scorecard for human prosperity. Big oops.

Her illustration is Brazil, where, by her account, GDP climbed roughly twenty percent over five years while deforestation climbed at about double that rate (Seldon 2026a). On that scoreboard, burning a forest counts as growth. She makes the same point about disaster reconstruction, about pollution driving healthcare spending, about extraction generally. GDP registers the transaction and says nothing about whether the transaction strengthened or consumed the thing that produced it. Thus have we arrived at all of the fallout from modern economics: widening wealth inequalities, a burning planet, rising forced displacement, and unmitigated synthetic intelligence that is quite possibly less than 18 months away from escaping our control.

Her alternative asks what was restored rather than what was produced. Did the soil improve. Did the water systems replenish. Did communities get stronger. Did this year’s prosperity increase or reduce the capacity of next year’s.

She tells it through two farmers, which is a good parable. One strips the soil and takes everything the land will give, posting strong yields until the organic matter is gone and the water stops holding and the land fails. The other builds the soil season by season, and a hundred years on the farm is worth more than it is today. The difference between them is not simply ethics. It is accounting. One is measuring output and the other is measuring capacity.

I find this compelling. I spend a fair amount of my time on questions about how land and nature get valued, and the observation that our accounting cannot distinguish between building something and consuming it is not abstract to me. It shows up every time someone tries to finance ecological improvement and discovers that no lender recognizes it, no appraiser prices it, and no insurer discounts for it.

So the instinct is right. What happens next is the hard part.

The case has already been made

Here is the thing that surprised me when I started reading, and that I suspect will surprise most people who follow this conversation casually, if at all.

The case against GDP as a measure of progress has been made, repeatedly, by the most credentialed people available, and it has been formally accepted at the highest level of international governance. What has not followed is any change in how the world actually keeps score.

In 2009, at the request of Nicolas Sarkozy, Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi produced a commission report on the measurement of economic performance and social progress that remains the most authoritative critique of GDP anyone has written (Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi 2009). Two Nobel laureates and a distinguished economist, commissioned by a head of state, concluding that the measure was inadequate. That was seventeen years ago! GDP is still the scoreboard.

In March 2021 the UN Statistical Commission adopted the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting Ecosystem Accounting as an international statistical standard, after years of testing, consultation and revision (UN SEEA 2021). This is the part almost nobody talks about. SEEA is a rigorous, internationally agreed framework for measuring the extent and condition of ecosystems, quantifying the services they provide, and linking that to economic activity. Ecosystem accounts have since informed policy in more than thirty-four countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, the Philippines, South Africa, Uganda, the United Kingdom and yes, even the United States (Obst and Alfieri 2021).

A standard for accounting for nature exists. Countries are using it. And yet, GDP still runs everything.

The same year, Partha Dasgupta delivered his review of the economics of biodiversity, commissioned not by an environment ministry but by HM Treasury (Dasgupta 2021). The Secretary-General named overreliance on GDP as a problem requiring correction in Our Common Agenda. In 2024, in the Pact for the Future, member states committed to developing measures that complement GDP, which gave the agenda a universal political mandate rather than just technical support.

And then, on 7 May of this year, the Secretary-General’s independent High-Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP released what the UN described as the first global blueprint for how countries can assess progress alongside GDP, built around a ready-to-use dashboard of globally applicable indicators (United Nations 2026). An intergovernmental process is now getting underway off the back of it (UNU-CPR 2026).

That was four months before Climate Week, and I would guess most people reading this had not heard about it (I had not).

I am not raising this to diminish anyone. I am raising it because it changes the question. If the problem were that nobody had noticed GDP was inadequate, or that nobody had built an alternative, then the useful contribution would be noticing and building. But people noticed decades ago and have built many alternatives. Bhutan has run Gross National Happiness for years. The Genuine Progress Indicator exists and gets used in a handful of American states. The Inclusive Wealth Index, out of UNEP and the Arrow and Dasgupta tradition, measures produced, natural and human capital as stocks rather than flows, which is very close to what a regeneration measure would have to do.

None of them displaced GDP. So the real question isn’t really what a better measure would look like. It is why better measures keep failing to take hold, and what would have to be different this time.

Four things that seem to matter

I am not an economist so I want to be mindful about the limits of what I can claim. But reading through the history of these attempts, four patterns show up often enough to call them out.

The first is that somebody has to be required to produce the number. SEEA moved partly because SDG indicator 15.9.1 asks countries to report on integrating biodiversity values into national accounting. That obligation created demand for a methodology, and the methodology got built and adopted because statistical offices needed something to report against. A measure that answers no mandatory question depends entirely on voluntary enthusiasm, and enthusiasm does not distribute anything, particularly when competing against short-term self-interest which is an entrenched quality of modern extractive capitalism. It is worth asking of any new metric what obligation would ever require someone to compute it.

The second is that it has to end up in law rather than in a brand. New Zealand illustrates this better than I can argue it, so I’ll dig into this in a moment.

The third is being clear about what kind of thing is actually being counted. GDP counts activity: what got bought, built and sold over the course of a year. Regeneration is about condition: how deep the topsoil is, how full the aquifer, how much forest is still standing. Economists call the first a flow and the second a stock. In plainer terms, one is an income statement and the other is a balance sheet, and you cannot add them together into a single figure. Seldon’s two farmers make the point. For years their income statements look much the same. Their balance sheets do not. So any new measure has to say which of the two it is producing. The Inclusive Wealth Index chose the balance sheet and became rigorous and much harder to explain, which is the trade you make, and most proposals avoid making the choice at all.

The fourth is that it has to pick between a single number and a dashboard but swallow the cost either way. One number communicates and cannot be fully defended, because weighing soil carbon against human wellbeing requires weights, and weights are political choices wearing the clothes of arithmetic. A dashboard is defensible but gets ignored, because practically speaking, who can hold twenty indicators in their head? Notably, the UN Expert Group went with a dashboard, and the expert workshops that followed still treated the development of headline indices as critically important (UNU-CPR 2026). To me, this suggests the people closest to this know a dashboard alone is not sufficient and have not solved the problem either.

Geoffrey Holland, in a thoughtful piece on Seldon published a few days after the gala, gets to the edge of that last one when he asks how soil restoration should be compared with improved public health (Holland 2026). It is exactly the right question. It is also the question that has broken most of this field for fifty years, and I do not think anyone has answered it.

New Zealand

If you want to understand what survives and what does not, New Zealand is the clearest case I have found.

The Treasury began developing its Living Standards Framework in 2011 as an analytical tool, released a dashboard of wellbeing indicators in December 2018, and delivered a Wellbeing Budget in 2019 that used the framework to set spending priorities (OECD 2023). In 2020 an amendment to the Public Finance Act required the government to report annually on its wellbeing objectives alongside its fiscal objectives, and required the Treasury to report on the state of wellbeing in New Zealand every four years. The first of those reports came in 2022.

Then the government changed. By March 2024 the press was writing the Wellbeing Budget’s obituary (Walters 2024).

Except that the statutory reporting requirement is still in force. The Living Standards Framework is still there. The dashboard was still being updated in December 2025, carrying data through that October (New Zealand Treasury 2025).

The brand died but the plumbing lived. The plumbing lived because it had been written into the Public Finance Act, and the brand died because it had been written into a press release. Big difference!

I keep returning to this. It suggests that the durable version of this work is unglamorous, legislative and largely invisible, and that the visible version is the part most likely to evaporate when the political weather changes. It also suggests something about where effort is best spent, which is not in the launch.

The questions I would want answered

Gross Domestic Regeneration is at the stage where it is a compelling frame rather than a defined method. Holland says as much in his piece, and to his credit he does not pretend otherwise. There is no published methodology I can find, no data pipeline, no aggregation rule, no unit of account. That is where most ideas are when they launch and it is not a criticism.

But it does mean the interesting conversation is about what comes next, and there are a handful of questions I would like to hear answered. I am posing them as questions because I really do not know the answers, and because the answers would tell you a great deal about whether this becomes infrastructure or becomes just another good idea.

Is it a national measure or a company measure? At THE NAT it was described as the number an economy should run on in place of GDP, which is unambiguously a claim about national accounting. In her Forbes piece from June, Tenzin describes GDR as a frame she uses when evaluating companies (Seldon 2026b). Those are different instruments with different data requirements, different users and different paths to adoption. A firm-level frame competes with integrated reporting and impact measurement, but it’s something any investor could theoretically adopt on their own at their own speed. A national measure competes with the System of National Accounts. Knowing which it means to be would clarify almost everything else.

And is the ambition to replace GDP or to sit alongside it? This sounds like a technicality but it’s not. The entire UN effort, from the Pact for the Future through the May blueprint, is framed around measures that complement GDP. Replacement is a larger claim with much longer odds, because it means persuading every finance ministry and central bank and ratings agency to run on something new. Speaking frankly, I’m in favor of the bigger vision, despite the higher hurdle. Complementing is how SEEA got adopted. Both are legitimate ambitions but they imply completely different strategies, and the language at the gala pointed one way while most of the institutional machinery points the other.

Where does it sit relative to SEEA? If a country is already compiling ecosystem accounts under an internationally adopted standard, what does this ask them to do differently, and why would a statistical office take that on?

How does it relate to the intergovernmental process already underway? A private institute developing a parallel framework could be enormously useful as a source of methodology and pressure, or it could be duplicative. The difference probably comes down to whether it is designed to plug in or to compete.

Stocks or flows, and index or dashboard? Both forks should be resolved but neither has an answer without some cost.

And what would ever compel anyone to calculate it? This is really the one I would ask first. Not because the answer has to exist yet, but because working backward from it tends to reshape everything else about how you build.

What I am watching for

There is one more reason this matters that has nothing to do with accounting theory, and it is the argument I wish more people made.

GDP-centric rules govern who gets access to concessional finance. Countries are classified, graduated and priced on the basis of income measures that say nothing about the condition of what they are sitting on or what they are drawing down. The Sevilla Commitment made that explicit (IISD 2026). This is not a debate about statistics. It is a debate about which countries can afford to borrow, and on what terms, and therefore about who gets to build anything at all. If a better measure changed nothing else, changing that would be meaningful.

So I am sympathetic. I want this to work, or something like it to work, and I am glad someone with capital markets credibility is pushing on it rather than standing outside throwing rocks.

What I will be watching for over the next year is not whether the idea attracts attention. It already has, and there will be more profiles, and the profiles will be admiring. A gala that opens Climate Week is a room worth having, and nature finance needs the money and the visibility that rooms like that generate. But attention was never what this particular problem was short of. Stiglitz and Sen had attention.

I will be watching for a published methodology with its choices made explicit. For a relationship to the UN process, whether that turns out to be collaboration or an argument. For some account of what obligation would make a statistical office or a finance ministry actually produce the number. For a decision about whether this measures companies or countries, and whether it replaces GDP or complements it. And for the work to be given away rather than held, because the standards that spread are the ones anybody can pick up without asking permission, which is how SEEA travelled, and GAAP, and IFRS, and the TCFD recommendations.

None of that is glamorous. All of it is the part that determines whether anything happens.

I have no relationship with Tenzin Seldon and no stake here beyond wanting the problem solved by someone. I would rather ask these questions in public, where she and other smarter people than me can work on answers together. The idea deserves that much. Taking something seriously enough to test it is a better form of respect than admiring it, and the history here suggests the frameworks that survive are the ones that get argued with early.

Friedman’s frame took about a decade to move from a newspaper essay to the operating assumption of American business. It is worth remembering that it did not win because it was true. It won because it was clear, because it was taught, and because it was eventually written into the machinery of how companies are governed and how performance is judged. Whatever replaces it will have to be built the same way, by people willing to do the boring parts, and probably over a longer horizon than any of us would like. So we might as well get cracking.

Sources

Dasgupta, Partha. 2021. The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. London: HM Treasury.

Friedman, Milton. 1970. “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” The New York Times Magazine, 13 September.

Holland, Geoffrey. 2026. “Tenzin Seldon: Measuring What We Restore.” Geoffrey Holland Partnership, September.

Geoffrey Holland - Partnership

This publication explores the transition from domination systems toward partnership civilization — through culture, storytelling, ecology, governance, technology, and human development.

IISD. 2026. “Beyond GDP: Where We Stand, What We’ve Learned, and What Comes Next.” SDG Knowledge Hub, 28 April. https://sdg.iisd.org/commentary/policy-briefs/beyond-gdp-where-we-stand-what-weve-learned-and-what-comes-next/

New Zealand Treasury. 2025. “Measuring Wellbeing: the LSF Dashboard.” December. https://www.treasury.govt.nz/information-and-services/nz-economy/higher-living-standards/measuring-wellbeing-lsf-dashboard

Obst, Carl, and Alessandra Alfieri. 2021. “Beyond GDP: United Nations Adopts New SEEA Ecosystem Accounting Standard.” Capitals Coalition. https://capitalscoalition.org/beyond-gdp-united-nations-adopts-new-seea-ecosystem-accounting-standard-by-carl-obst-alessandra-alfieri/

OECD. 2023. “New Zealand’s Living Standards Framework and He Ara Waiora Framework.” Well-being Knowledge Exchange Platform. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/well-being-knowledge-exchange-platform-kep_93d45d63-en.html

Pulse Fund. 2026. “Tenzin Seldon at THE NAT.” LinkedIn, 22 September.

Seldon, Tenzin. 2026a. “Seldon: New Systems Needed to Fight Climate Change.” Aspen Daily News, 22 April. https://www.aspendailynews.com/opinion/article_f8cda197-ea0f-4d4e-9664-8cd60d2efb51-23e93737

Seldon, Tenzin. 2026b. “The Metric Problem: Why Smart Capital Is Looking Beyond GDP.” Forbes Finance Council, 25 June. https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesfinancecouncil/2026/06/25/the-metric-problem-why-smart-capital-is-looking-beyond-gdp/

Stiglitz, Joseph, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi. 2009. Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. Paris.

THE NAT. 2026. “A Global Movement for Nature.”

https://www.thenat.com/

United Nations. 2026. “United Nations Proposes New Global Dashboard to Measure Progress Beyond GDP.” UN DESA, 7 May. https://www.un.org/en/desa/united-nations-proposes-new-global-dashboard-to-measure-progress-beyond-gdp

UN SEEA. 2021. “Ecosystem Accounting.” United Nations System of Environmental-Economic Accounting. https://seea.un.org/en/methodology/ecosystem-accounting

UNU-CPR. 2026. “Towards a New Compass of Progress: The Start of the UN Intergovernmental Process to Move Beyond GDP.” United Nations University Centre for Policy Research, 14 May. https://unu.edu/cpr/blog-post/towards-new-compass-progress-start-un-intergovernmental-process-move-beyond-gdp

Walters, Laura. 2024. “The Wellbeing Budget Is Dead.” Newsroom, 22 March. https://newsroom.co.nz/2024/03/22/the-wellbeing-budget-is-dead/

I am writing this for two people, and neither of them is here yet.

One is me, some years from now. I don’t know how many. Twenty, thirty, if things go well. I want that man to have a record of what this week felt like from the inside, before memory sands the edges off it, because I have a suspicion he is going to need it.

The other is you. You started third grade last week. You picked out your own backpack and you have been practicing the steps for your dance performance in the kitchen after school, counting under your breath, getting it wrong, getting it right, starting over from the top. You don’t know any of what I’m about to write down, and you shouldn’t, not yet. But someday you’ll be old enough to go looking for what your father was thinking the week the world admitted it failed, and I would rather you find this than nothing.

So this is a letter of sorts, and I’m going to leave it where other people can read it too, because I think the question at the center of it is one we should all be asking, and I don’t know a better way to ask it than out loud.

The question is this. When she asks me what we did, what do I want to be able to say?

Here is what happened.

On Wednesday the United Nations Environment Programme released a report. I read it Thursday morning at the kitchen table with the coffee getting cold, and I have not really put it down since (UNEP 2026).

You’ll learn about this in school, probably as a date, the way I learned about other dates. So let me tell you what it was, in words you could have understood at eight.

A long time before you were born, in 2015, almost every country on earth sat down in Paris and agreed to try to keep the planet from warming more than one and a half degrees Celsius above where it was before people started burning lots and lots of coal. That doesn’t sound like much. It’s less than the difference between one afternoon and the next. But it isn’t a weather number. It’s the average temperature of the whole surface of the earth, land and sea together, and moving it a degree and a half is like moving a fever a degree and a half: small on the thermometer and enormous in the body. The one and a half figure was in the agreement largely because the small island nations insisted on it. For them the difference between that and two degrees is the difference between having a country and having a memory of one.

It was the first time in the history of our species that we drew a line for ourselves on the whole planet, in public, and agreed to be measured against it.

The report on Wednesday said we are going to cross it. Probably within a few years. The only questions left are how far past it we go and how long we stay there before we come back down or cook ourselves out of a home planet. The best case in the report has the world peaking at about 1.8 degrees. Most of the cases are worse.

I’ve read enough climate reports to know what I usually feel when I read reports with numbers in them but this was different. It wasn’t about the number. Scientists had been saying privately for a couple of years that we’d miss it; one year already came in above that temperature line (WMO 2026). What changed on Wednesday was the tense. For thirty years, most of my adult life, one and a half degrees lived in the future. It was a goal, and a goal usually organizes people. This week the institution whose job was to hold out hope for that number wrote down, instead, what to do after it breaks.

I read that and I thought: so this is the week. This is one of the ones you remember where you were standing. Or at least, it should be.

I was standing in the kitchen, as it happens. You were at school. Your mom was at work. The dog wanted pets.

I want to tell you what I am feeling, because you’ll feel it too, at some point, about something, and I’d like you to have a word for it.

The word is grief, and the strange thing about it is that it comes before the loss is finished. The people who study it call this anticipatory grief. It’s what you feel sitting with a love one who has a terminal illness and knows it, or what I suspect some parents might feel in the year before the last of their kiddos heads off to college. There is another phrase, disenfranchised grief, for the kind that the people around you don’t recognize as legitimate, the kind you can’t bring up at a dinner party without becoming the person who ruined the dinner. This is both. It’s mourning for something that hasn’t finished dying, and it’s mourning that most people have quietly agreed not to talk about.

What am I mourning?

I am mourning the thing every parent before me got to take for granted, which is that they were handing their children a world in roughly working order. The same seasons. The same coastline. The same rough bargain between when you plant and when you harvest. That assumption has been the floor under human life for ten thousand years, and you won’t have it. I was mourning the animals in the picture books your mom and I read with you, which you will read to your own children as history. I was mourning the rivers I grew up fishing in are drying up, and the fact that the one you’re growing up beside may too.

I want you to know that I let myself feel this loss. I didn’t skip to a plan, which tends to be my habit. My mom used to tell me I am “too sentimental.” But anyone who tells you to skip those feelings and get to the solutions is telling you to build on ground you haven’t tested.

Let me tell you about the summer, since you’ll only half remember it.

It was the driest Virginia had been in more than twenty years. By July, twelve of the state’s thirteen drought regions were under warning, one step short of emergency, and the ground water wells the state keeps an eye on were at the lowest levels ever recorded (Virginia DEQ, in WVIR 2026). Five counties were told they had to stop watering.

You remember the pond being low. You asked about it. What you don’t know is that one night in July I walked down to check the water level with a flashlight and stood there longer than I needed to, because the thing about a number in a report is that you can argue with it, and the thing about a dry pond is that you can’t. The soil held less water than it used to. Our streams ran thin in a places they never had. The flowers came up early and grew to half their normal height and the bees that depend on them produced 30% of the honey they usually do. Most of our friends didn’t see this, but we did.

It was the hottest July ever measured on earth, tied with two summers ago. The four hottest Julys on record are now the last four (WMO 2026). In Europe something like twenty-five thousand people died of heat this summer, by one estimate, and almost none of them made the news, because heat doesn’t produce wreckage. There is nothing to film and that seems to be what our media outlets tend to focus on these days.

I want to tell you about the people who were hurt this summer because we didn’t do enough, because she was a real person and I don’t want her to be a statistic in something I wrote for you.

Her name was Martha Irene Van Egmond. She was eighty-three years old and she lived in Bolton, Mississippi. In July she went out to work in her garden, the way she probably had ten thousand times, and she stumbled, and she couldn’t get back up. She lay on the ground for hours in the heat. The coroner said that’s what killed her (Washington Post 2026). That is how this mostly kills people. Not in floods, though it does that too as it did in Nepal last week. But most people we’ve lost have gone one at a time, old, alone, in a garden or a bedroom, in a way that doesn’t land in the headlines.

I keep thinking about Martha because she was somebody’s grandmother, and she was doing the thing I hope you’ll still be doing at eighty-three, which is kneeling in dirt tending a garden. But for Martha, the world she’d lived in her whole life turned on her in an afternoon.

Now the part I’m mad about, and importantly, my reasons.

Not all of this belongs to the people in charge this year (though, as you know, I have my thoughts on them too). We had forty years of warning and about forty years of everyone, all of us, finding reasons not to act. I’ve watched enough grand pledges quietly expire to know that on this subject the hypocrisy has been fully bipartisan and fully global, though not equally distributed.

Some of it really does belong to the folks running things today and I want you to have the dates, so you never have to wonder.

In May of 2025 the government agency that had tracked the cost of American weather disasters since 1980 simply stopped. The database was shut down. The people who ran it had been laid off in the spring along with hundreds of weather forecasters (Schiff 2025). It exists today only because a nonprofit picked it up, hired the scientist who’d run it for fifteen years, and rebuilt the whole record at private expense (Climate Central 2026). On January 27, 2026, the United States formally left the Paris Agreement, and a few weeks before that announced it was leaving the underlying treaty from 1992 too (EELP 2026). On February 12 the Environmental “Protection” Agency, revoked the finding, upheld by every court that had looked at it, that greenhouse gases threaten public health, which was the legal footing for every federal limit on carbon pollution in the country. Our current President called it “the single largest deregulatory action in American history.” He has also called the whole thing a con job. Isn’t that ironic.

Here’s what I want you to understand about why that made me angry, because it isn’t the obvious reason.

I’m not angry that people disagree with me about energy. People can disagree about energy. That’s what a country is for.

I’m angry that they turned off the instruments. You cannot have an honest argument about what to do if one side has arranged for the argument to have no numbers in it. Firing the forecasters, shutting off the database, defunding the monitoring: none of that is a position. It’s a way of making the disagreement impossible to have. And it will get people killed, specifically and traceably, because the forecaster who is gone is the one who would have sent the warning before the floods came.

And I’m angry about the math. You will be living with the consequences of decisions made this year when you are in your sixties. The people who made them will be gone (a small blessing). But that’s not a policy difference. That’s a bill, passed from people who could vote to a girl who couldn’t, yet.

I said I’d give you the anger and the reasons, but I want to give you one more thing, because I think it’s probably the most important thing in this whole note.

Anger isn’t the opposite of love. Anger is what love does when the thing it loves is threatened. Nobody has ever been furious about something they didn’t care about. If you can follow your anger back to the attachment underneath it, you can turn something that would have eaten you into something that will still be burning in twenty years, and twenty years is what this needs.

So I tried to follow it back. I’m not angry on behalf of the planet. The planet is too big to love. I’m angry on behalf of our pond. The trees we have picnics under. The bees that didn’t get the nectar they should have this year. Our neighbors whose wells went low. A country I still believe is capable of better than this, whose founding documents were written a short drive from our kitchen table by men who fought hard, thought harder, and wrote down what they owed to a future they’d never meet.

And you. Mostly, almost entirely, you. The whole long shape of your ordinary life, which I would like to be very ordinary and very long.

Anger that comes from love is patient. That’s how you tell it from the other kind. Anger that comes from ego burns out in a week because it was only ever about being right. Anger that comes from love shows up to the town hall in the eleventh year, when nobody’s watching. It shows up in the voting booth and in the weeks and months before an election. It shows up as much in how we show up every day as it does in organizing large movements.

Which brings me to what I actually want to say to you, and to the man I’ll be, about what it means to be a person alive on this planet at this particular moment.

Every generation before ours got to inherit the world without knowing what it cost. We are the first to know. We are the first who can see, in something close to real time, exactly what our choices take from the world our children will live in. That knowledge is a burden nobody asked for, and it’s also the entire basis of our duty. You can’t owe something to people you’ve never imagined. We’ve imagined you though. We even have the charts and the forecasts. Every one of them runs to the year 2100, and if you live an ordinary long life, you’ll be eighty-three that year. The far edge of every climate graph and report I’ve read represents the second half of your life.

I’ve decided the duty isn’t to save everything, as much as I want to. Nobody can, and pretending otherwise is a kind of lie that produces despair. The duty, as best I can work it out, has four parts, and they’re small enough to do.

Don’t look away. Leave the instruments on. Keep counting even when the counting is unbearable, because a loss that isn’t measured can’t be mourned, nevermind fought.

Do the work in front of you. There is a category of climate work that a person with a piece of land, or a county, or a church, or a little bit of money can do this year without asking anyone’s permission: more shade, clean water, healthy soil, buffers along the streams, native plants, corridors for the creatures who need to move. It’s cheap and it’s local and it’s unglamorous and it cools the ground you stand on while it holds carbon. Most of what actually gets done in the end will be done this way, by people nobody ever hears of. I call these folks the grounded giants, and despite what you might read in the news, they’re everywhere.

Tell the children the truth, at the pace they can hold it. Children can carry hard facts. What they can’t carry is finding out later that the adults knew and performed calm. If you ever learn that I understood all this and said nothing, you’ll lose two things at once, and the second is worse, because it takes with it your ability to believe anything else I told you.

And give them a place. Not the planet, a place. A creek, a field, a stand of trees, a park. Take them there until it’s theirs. A child who loves a creek defends it at forty, and every serious study of what actually keeps people working on this over decades comes back to the same thing, which is not information but loyalty.

There’s a poem I want to leave you, because it’s old, and because the man who wrote it was watching his own world get wrecked and refused to conclude that it was finished. Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877. He looks at the England of the coal mills and says everything “is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil,” and then the poem turns:

And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs (Hopkins 1877)

He believed it was the Holy Ghost brooding over “the bent world” that made the morning come. You can decide for yourself about that. But I’ve stood at the brown brink eastward watching the sun come up after a hard year and felt exactly what he means, and I think it’s real. I think it’s what grief is for. Grief that’s fully felt arrives somewhere. Grief that’s refused just stays.

And the other one, because you’ll need it at some point, and because it’s nearly a summary of this weeks’ climate report itself. Tennyson (speaking this in the voice of an old man who has already lost most of what he had — you know I like reading in voices):

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. (Tennyson 1842)

Much is taken. Much abides. The space between the best future in that climate report and the worst is enormous, and the thing that fills it is children. The research says that at one and a half degrees, sixty-two million of the kids born in 2020 will live through heat no generation has ever known. At three and a half, almost all of them will. The gap between those two worlds is six hundred and thirteen million childhoods (Grant et al. 2025). They’re not lost. They’re unassigned. They’ll be assigned by what enough people decide to do in the next ten years.

I’d like to be one of those people. I’d like you to be able to say I was.

So here is my answer, for now, to the question I started with. When you ask me what we did, I want to say:

We didn’t lie to you. We grieved it properly and we let ourselves be angry about the parts that were done on purpose. We found the specific things we loved and we worked on those, without much drama, for a long time. We kept the instruments on. We took you to the pond.

That’s the plan. This weekend I’m going to take you and your mom down there after I get back from the market, since it rained this week, and I want to see if the water came back up. It’s a small thing. Most of them will be.

You’re in the kitchen right now as I write this, going through the jig steps again. Five, six, seven, eight. You’re not carrying any of this yet, and I intend to keep it that way for a few more years while I do enough that when the day comes and you turn around and ask, I have something to tell you that isn’t an apology.

You’re already practicing. I’d better start.

Sources

Climate Central. 2026. “Mid-2026 Update: U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters.” July 29.

Environmental and Energy Law Program, Harvard Law School (EELP). 2026. “Paris Climate Agreement.” Regulatory tracker, January.

Grant, Luke, Wim Thiery, et al. 2025. “Global emergence of unprecedented lifetime exposure to climate extremes.” Nature, May 7.

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. 1877. “God’s Grandeur.” In Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by Robert Bridges. London: Humphrey Milford, 1918.

Schiff, Adam. 2025. Letter to Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick regarding the NOAA Extreme Weather Database Program. May 13.

Tennyson, Alfred. 1842. “Ulysses.” In Poems. London: Edward Moxon.

UN Environment Programme. 2026. Limiting Overshoot: Navigating Exceedance. Nairobi, September 2.

Washington Post. 2026. “The Post counted 70 deaths from July heat domes. The true toll may not be known.” July 26.

WVIR. 2026. “Virginia nears emergency drought conditions.” July 2.

World Meteorological Organization. 2026. “Record-breaking heat and extreme weather continue.” August.

Parton asked them to withdraw it. She said she was honored, and then said that given everything going on in the world, she did not think putting her “on a pedestal” was appropriate right then (CBS News 2021). She left the door open for later, maybe after she was gone, if people still felt that way.

She died this morning in Nashville, at eighty (NBC News 2026). So the door is open now. But I keep thinking about the refusal rather than the statue, because the refusal is the part that teaches something.

What she was actually doing

The obituaries lead with the music, as they should. Twenty-five number one country singles. A songbook that other people’s careers were built on. But the work she said she wanted to be remembered for was a book program in Sevier County, Tennessee.

Her father could not read or write. In 1995 she started mailing free books, one a month, to children from birth until they started school, beginning in the county where she grew up. By 2022 the Imagination Library had mailed 186 million books and had spread across several countries (Axios 2022). She once said that when they lay her down, she would be thinking of the Imagination Library (Axios 2022).

Look at what that program actually is. It is a mailing list. Address verification, county sponsors, publisher negotiations, postage, and thirty years of not stopping. There is no pilot phase and no theory of change. A book shows up in a mailbox with a child’s name on it. Then another one the next month, for five years.

That is deeply unfashionable work. It does not make for a compelling annual report. It is also, by any measure I know how to apply, one of the most successful pieces of private philanthropy in modern American life.

What paid for the generosity

Here is the part that funders should sit with. Early in her career, Elvis Presley wanted to record “I Will Always Love You.” Colonel Tom Parker’s condition was that Parton hand over half the publishing. She refused, and by her own account cried over it. Two decades later Whitney Houston recorded the song, it became one of the best selling singles in history, and Parton owned it.

She told that story as a business lesson, and it is one. It is also the reason the rest of this essay exists. The Imagination Library, the theme park that employs thousands of her neighbors, the million dollars she quietly put into Vanderbilt in April 2020 that turned up in Moderna’s donor list that November (CBS News 2021), all of it was paid for by a woman who kept her own publishing rights when the most powerful manager in music told her to give them up.

Giving at that scale requires owning something first. The people who give the most are often the ones who were most stubborn about what they refused to hand over. That is not a comfortable thing to say in a field that prefers to talk about generosity as pure self-emptying. But it is true, and she is the clearest example of it I can think of.

Truth to power, in her own key

She turned down the Presidential Medal of Freedom twice (Forbes 2021). She asked her home state to shelve her statue. She quietly took “Dixie” out of the name of her dinner show. When asked about the protests of 2020 she said, plainly, that Black lives matter, in a genre and to an audience where that was not a free sentence to say.

None of it came out as confrontation. This is where people who admired her and people who wanted more from her have always disagreed, and the disagreement should not be smoothed over on the day she dies. Serious people wanted her to be more explicit, to endorse, to name names, and felt her refusal was avoidance dressed up as grace. That criticism is not unfair. She chose to keep the whole country listening rather than win any particular argument, and that choice cost something.

What I would say for her is that she never used the ambiguity as a reason to sit still. The positions turned up in what she did with her money long before they turned up in anything she said. She paid full tuition for her employees. She sent cash with no conditions attached to families who lost their homes in the Gatlinburg fires. She built her literacy program in counties with some of the deepest poverty in the country and sent the books to every child, so that no family had to prove hardship to qualify. You can argue with her rhetoric. It is harder to argue with where the money went.

Five things worth taking

Give where you are from, and stay there. She started in one county and never left it behind, even as the program went global. Knowing a place well is usually what makes the giving work.

Trust people with cash. Direct payments, no conditions, no reporting requirements, no case management. The evidence caught up with her about twenty years later.

Keep your rights. The refusal that looked like stubbornness in 1974 paid for everything that came after.

Decline the pedestal. Not out of false modesty, but because accepting honors is how institutions turn your independence into their endorsement. A person who has not taken the medal is harder to co-opt.

Build for thirty years (or more), not for the grant cycle. The book arrives every month. That is her whole model. It’s boring, repetitive, verifiable, and the reason a generation of children in Appalachia associates their own name with something arriving in the mail for them that feeds their curiosity, fosters understanding, and builds a foundation of knowledge and learning.

On days like this the temptation is to reach for the word icon and leave it there. Better to be precise. She was a talented woman who mailed books to children whose families were stuck in poverty, every month for thirty years. She kept her own copyrights. She turned down a statue and two medals. And she managed to be loved by an entire country without ever pretending to be neutral about whether people deserved to be treated well.

Somewhere down the road, Tennessee will get around to the statue. She said she thought that would be fine, once she was gone. Statue or no, her work and her legacy will always be a light (of a clear blue morning).

Sources

Axios Columbus. 2022. “Dolly Parton celebrates her Imagination Library program.” August 10, 2022.

CBS News. 2021. “Dolly Parton rejects proposed statue of her at Tennessee Capitol.” February 19, 2021.

Forbes. 2021. “Dolly Parton Declines Proposal To Build A Statue Of Her On The Tennessee Capitol Grounds.” February 18, 2021.

NBC News. 2026. “Dolly Parton, country music icon, dies at 80.” August 25, 2026.

The Music Universe. 2026. “Dolly Parton dies at 80.” August 25, 2026.

Here it is: $16.5 million. That is the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's own estimate for the total cost of recovering the rusty patched bumble bee across its entire range, the full set of actions needed to take a federally endangered species off the list (USFWS 2021). Believe it or not, that is the cost of a single house in Aspen, and it would recover the first bumble bee ever listed under the Endangered Species Act (82 FR 3186, 2017).

Almost nobody is funding it. I'd like to change that, and I think Virginia is the place to do it.

Why this bee, and why Virginia

The rusty patched bumble bee was once one of the most common bumble bees in the eastern United States, familiar enough that nobody bothered to count them. Then, starting in the late 1990s, it collapsed. It has disappeared from nearly ninety percent of its historic range (NRDC 2026). The best available science points to a brutal interaction between an introduced pathogen and pesticide exposure, with habitat loss and climate change grinding away underneath (USFWS 2021). It was listed as endangered in 2017.

Most of what's left survives in the upper Midwest. But there is one other place: the Allegheny Highlands, where Virginia meets West Virginia. In Virginia, the bee has been found in recent years in just four counties, Bath, Highland, Augusta and Rockingham. In 2020, state biologists documented ten of them on the Highland Wildlife Management Area, which made it the strongest known site in the Commonwealth (Virginia DWR 2025). Ten bees was a headline!

Here is why those ten bees matter far beyond Virginia. Rangewide genetic analysis shows that the Virginia and West Virginia population is a distinct cluster, substantially differentiated from everything remaining in the Midwest (91 FR 32516, 2026). The federal recovery plan divides the species' range into five conservation units and requires healthy populations in every one of them before the bee can come off the list. Virginia anchors the southeastern unit. If our cluster blinks out, recovery becomes mathematically impossible. No amount of good work in Minnesota can substitute for it.

Right now, the number of populations meeting the federal definition of healthy, in our unit and in every other unit, is zero (USFWS Species Status Review 2024). The Service's timeline says delisting could happen as soon as 2061 if the work is funded and done (USFWS 2021). That is a long arc. It is also roughly the time horizon a family office already uses when it thinks about the next generation.

The moment

Three things happened in 2026 that make this the year to move.

On June 1, the Fish and Wildlife Service finalized critical habitat for the species, about 1.5 million acres across six states, and Virginia is one of them. On May 1, the Service signed a Conservation Benefit Agreement for the bumble bee, a voluntary program that lets private landowners enroll their land in recovery with regulatory assurances in return. And as of the final rule's publication, not a single acre anywhere in the country had yet enrolled (91 FR 32516, 2026).

The enrollment book is open. Virginia landowners could be the first names in it.

But how?

What follows is a five year, roughly $5 million private philanthropic program. All figures below are my estimates, built from the federal recovery budget and comparable state programs, and offered as a starting frame rather than a quote. It amounts to about a third of the entire national recovery cost estimate, aimed at the one piece of the range no one else is covering.

First, find the bee: an estimated $1.5 to 2 million over five years. You cannot recover what you cannot count, and counting is the single largest line in the federal recovery budget, roughly $8 million of the $16.5 million total (USFWS 2021). Minnesota has a Bumble Bee Atlas. So do Missouri, the Great Plains states, and the Pacific Northwest (Xerces Society 2024). Virginia does not. A Virginia and West Virginia Bumble Bee Atlas, built on the Xerces Society's proven model, would likely run $250,000 to $400,000 a year for a full time coordinator, volunteer training, verification and equipment. Hundreds of trained community scientists adopting survey grids across the Highlands. Every other dollar in this plan gets smarter because of this one.

Second, restore the core at an estimated $2 million over five years. The Nature Conservancy already runs an Allegheny Highlands program anchored by the 9,000 acre Warm Springs Mountain Preserve in Bath County, with a long record of conservation easements and some of the largest collaborative prescribed burns in the country (TNC Virginia 2026). The missing piece isn't forest, it's flowers. This bee needs continuous bloom from April to October, undisturbed nesting cavities, and wooded ground where queens overwinter, all within flight distance of each other (USFWS 2021). This money buys prescribed fire, open canopy restoration, late mowing agreements on pastures and utility corridors, native seed, and stewardship endowments so the work outlives the grant.

Third, open the landowner door, which would cost an estimated $750,000. Fund the technical assistance, enrollment costs, and planting support for private farms and estates joining the new Conservation Benefit Agreement. This is where a donor with Virginia land can stop writing checks and starts participating, which in my experience is the relationship that lasts.

Fourth, address what's killing them, plain and simple. This could be an estimated $500,000 for pesticide use mapping around occupied areas, integrated pest management partnerships with neighboring farms, and pathogen screening. I'll add a piece here that costs almost nothing and that we intend to work on ourselves: pathogen spillover from managed bees. Commercial bumble bee colonies and dense honeybee operations near wild populations are documented stressors, and the recovery plan calls specifically for clean stock practices and beekeeper outreach (USFWS 2021). That something that can be done beekeeper to beekeeper and through Virginia’s beekeeping associations.

Finally, a convening budget: an estimated $250,000. Virginia's quiet institutional problem is that no single agency owns this bee. The Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services is the legal lead for listed insects, the Department of Conservation and Recreation's Natural Heritage Program does the survey work, and the Department of Wildlife Resources manages the habitat and owns the best known site (Virginia DWR 2025). Three agencies, each holding a piece, none with a budget to convene the others. Philanthropy can supply what they cannot which is a table and money already sitting on it. I'd argue this line buys more than any other and it could be funded through the collective of partners representing the Virginia Funders Network if they’d be willing to make a commitment on behalf of the common good of the Commonwealth and not just their own home counties.

The partners

None of this requires inventing an organization. The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation runs the Atlas model and petitioned for the bee's listing in the first place (Xerces Society 2026). The Nature Conservancy's Virginia chapter has the land, the fire crews and the landowner relationships in exactly the right counties. Virginia Working Landscapes, a Smithsonian program, has been surveying native bees on private lands in the region for years. The three state agencies bring legal authority, data and public land. The Fish and Wildlife Service brings the recovery plan and the new enrollment tools. Add the regional land trusts, the university entomology programs at Virginia Tech and UVA, and the farmers and estate owners of the Highlands themselves.

What success looks like

If this works, by the early 2030s Virginia has the first complete picture of its bumble bee populations in history, the first Conservation Benefit Agreement acres enrolled in the nation, measurable growth in occupied territory in the Highlands, and a working model that the recovery plan's other four conservation units can copy. The rusty patched bumble bee doesn't come off the endangered list by 2031. But the southeastern leg of its recovery, the one that was closest to failing, becomes the one that's furthest ahead.

And the bee is only the sharpest point of a bigger story. The same meadows, burns, bloom calendars and pesticide practices that recover this species carry dozens of other declining native bees, the monarchs, the grassland birds. Virginia's Natural Heritage Program recently produced the state's first comprehensive list of native bees, and it runs to hundreds of species (Virginia DCR 2021). A commonwealth that produced the ecological thinking of Monticello's gardens and is home to the country’s first public conservationist (James Madison) ought to be the state that shows what pollinator recovery looks like when someone actually pays for it.

Sixteen and a half million dollars for a species. Five million for the piece that decides whether recovery is possible at all. I've seen single rubber chicken fundraising and awards galas cost more - never mind the hundreds of millions spent on political campaigns.

If you're a funder, a landowner in the Highlands, or someone who runs one of the institutions named above and wants to build this, my inbox is open. I'll bring the mead.

Sources

82 FR 3186. 2017. Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants; Endangered Species Status for Rusty Patched Bumble Bee. Final rule, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, January 11, 2017.

91 FR 32516. 2026. Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants; Designation of Critical Habitat for the Rusty Patched Bumble Bee. Final rule, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, June 1, 2026.

NRDC. 2026. "U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Finalizes Critical Habitat Protections for Endangered Rusty Patched Bumblebee." Press release, May 29, 2026.

The Nature Conservancy in Virginia. 2026. "Allegheny Highlands Program" and "Warm Springs Mountain Preserve." nature.org.

USFWS. 2021. Recovery Plan for the Rusty Patched Bumble Bee (Bombus affinis). U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Midwest Regional Office, Bloomington, MN.

USFWS. 2024. Rusty Patched Bumble Bee (Bombus affinis) Species Status Review. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Virginia DCR. 2021. "Protecting the Pollinator Population." Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation, Natural Heritage Program.

Virginia DWR. 2025. "Rusty Patched Bumble Bee." Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources, dwr.virginia.gov.

Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. 2026. Bumble Bee Atlas program materials and critical habitat statements. xerces.org and bumblebeeatlas.org.

Paul Polman, the former chief executive of Unilever, marked the day with a piece worth your time. His central move is an accounting one. A stable date, he points out, does not mean a stable system: a household that overspends by 73 percent every year is still heading for bankruptcy even if the overspend never grows. Since overshoot began in the early 1970s, those annual shortfalls have compounded into an ecological deficit he puts at more than twenty years of the planet’s total biological productivity.

Then he makes the observation I keep coming back to: financial debts can be refinanced or written off. Extinct species, drained aquifers, and collapsed ecosystems cannot.

The debt framing is right but there is more to this.

If nature is a creditor, it is a creditor of a peculiar kind. It has extended enormous credit. It bears the risk of the enterprise. And it has no ability whatsoever to collect.

It cannot send an invoice, call a loan, attach an asset, vote its shares, or sue for breach. It cannot appear at the meeting where the decision gets made. The debt is real, the loss is permanent, and the party owed it has no standing anywhere in the system that produced it.

That is not a shortfall of information. We have measured this deficit to the day, every year, for half a century, with steadily improving precision. It is a shortfall of standing.

Polman sets two numbers beside each other that make this concrete. Private investment in artificial intelligence, he notes, reached almost $345 billion last year. Private investment in nature-based solutions came to about $23 billion. Alphabet alone expects to spend between $175 and $185 billion in capital expenditure this year, roughly eight times what all private capital worldwide puts into nature.

He reads this as a failure to understand where prosperity comes from. I would add a step to that.

Capital flows toward artificial intelligence because artificial intelligence has owners. It has boards that must approve budgets. It has shareholders who can remove directors who underinvest. It has contracts that bind, competitors whose gains land on somebody’s quarterly numbers, and analysts who ask why you are behind. Every one of those is a mechanism that compels attention whether or not a single person in the room feels moved.

Nature has none of them. It has reports about it, targets referencing it, and speeches praising it, but no seat, no vote, no lien, no cause of action.

Money does not move because something is important. Money moves because something in the structure makes it move. We built extraordinary machinery for compelling attention to shareholder capital and almost none for compelling attention to natural capital. Then we express surprise each July when the ratio comes out eight to one.

This is worth sitting with, because it reframes what looks like indifference. The people allocating that capital are not, for the most part, unaware of ecological limits. Many of them have read the same reports we have. They are operating inside a structure where one set of obligations carries teeth and the other carries none, and structures of that kind produce their outcome regardless of what anyone privately believes.

Polman closes on courage. The solutions, he writes, are no longer obscure or unaffordable, and what remains absent is the will to make them central.

This is where I have come to a slightly different view, and it is the reason I spent the past year coding companies rather than writing about them. I wrote that research up here two weeks ago, so I will not repeat it, except for the one finding that bears directly on Polman’s conclusion.

I looked at companies that had already acted. Every one of them gives away at least one percent of sales to environmental causes, voluntarily, year after year, whether or not anyone is watching. Whatever else is true, these are not people short of will.

They stop anyway. Almost all of them stop at operations: cleaner sourcing, a certification, a footprint reduced. Across ten industries, none had given nature a formal voice in governance, a binding hold on ownership, or any claim that could be enforced against the company itself.

That is a strange result if the constraint is courage. These are the willing, and the willing stopped.

My reading is that they ran out of vocabulary. There is a well-developed language for measuring a footprint and shrinking it, and almost none for what follows. Who speaks for nature when this company decides something. What stops the next owner from reversing all of it. To whom is this company actually answerable. Most firms have never been offered a way to ask those questions, let alone answer them.

Polman’s own list rewards a close reading here. He calls for nature to enter budgets, procurement, industrial strategy, and capital allocation. Every one of those is a management decision, and every one is necessary. But a management decision can be unmade by the next manager. Nature does not need to be considered more carefully by the people in the room. It needs to be one of the parties.

I run a small meadery and apiary in Virginia. We are certified pollinator friendly, we keep close to a hundred hives, and we give away our one percent like everyone else in that sample.

We have done some of the structural work. Our mission as a nature-based company is written into our articles and bylaws, not left to the good intentions of whoever happens to be running the place. That was deliberate, and it means a future owner inherits the commitment rather than a preference.

What we do not yet have is a voice. Nobody sits at our board with the defined job of speaking for nature, holding a vote, and being answerable for that and nothing else. Everyone weighs nature in decisions, and that is genuinely how we operate, on the good days and the expensive ones. But everyone’s duty is nobody’s mandate. When a hard trade-off arrives, and it does, there is no one in the room whose only question is what this costs the living world. We are working toward that seat. We have not filled it.

I find that gap instructive, because it is the reverse of what you might expect. We locked the commitment into the constitution before we gave nature anyone to speak for it. Which suggests these are not rungs to climb in order. They are separate pieces of work, and a company can be further along on one than another without noticing the hole.

Overshoot Day has now sat within roughly the same few weeks of the calendar for more than fifteen years. It did not settle there because the problem stabilised. It settled there because nothing in the structure that produces the overshoot has changed, and stable structures produce stable results.

Next July the date will land in about the same week. It will keep landing there until the party carrying the loss has some way to act on its own behalf, rather than depending on the goodwill of the people spending it.

The bill is real. The creditor still cannot file. That is the work.

John Kluge Jr. is the founder of Thistlerock Mead Co. in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is writing a book on nature-centred business. He is co-author of Banking on Belonging (Columbia University Press, 2026)

Every business depends on nature. Almost none of them answer to it. A company draws down soil, water, pollinators, timber, fish, and a stable climate, treats each as free, and passes the bill to the future. This paper sets out a framework, called The Tree, for businesses and investors that want to change that: to move nature from the edge of the balance sheet to the centre of how a company is run, governed, and owned.

The framework has five parts, each matching a part of a tree. Leaves: measure it. Branches: improve it. Trunk: represent it. Roots: lock it in. Seeds: answer to it. A mature tree carries all five at once. So does a mature nature-centred business. The parts are not steps to climb one at a time but parts to grow together.

The paper also reports early research. When I coded 122 companies in one category of a network of businesses that have each pledged money to the environment, 84 percent showed no public sign of any nature practice beyond the pledge itself. The ones that did the most still stopped at cleaner operations and a certification. None gave nature a seat in its governance. None wrote nature into its ownership. None answered to nature in any way a court could enforce. The gap between caring about nature and building around it is wide, and almost no one has crossed it. That gap is the subject of this work. 

1. The problem: a stakeholder with no seat

The title of this paper is a translation. Dòigh Nàdair is Scottish Gaelic for the way of nature, and the phrase carries two meanings at once. It names the way nature itself works: patient, reciprocal, varied, and built to last across generations rather than quarters. And it names a way of doing business that takes its lead from that: a firm run in nature's manner rather than against it. The Tree, the framework set out below, is the method. The way of nature is the point of it. What follows is an attempt to say, in plain and practical terms, what it means to run a company the way of nature, and why the firms that learn to do it will outlast the ones that do not.

Business runs on nature. The food industry rests on soil and pollinators, the drinks industry on clean water, textiles on cotton and wool, medicine on wild compounds, and every industry on a climate that stays inside the range farming and cities were built for. The World Economic Forum has put more than half of world output as moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services (World Economic Forum 2020).

Yet nature sits at no table where its fate is decided. It cannot own shares, cast a vote, sign a contract, or sue. So a firm treats nature as both a free store and a free drain, and the true cost lands later and elsewhere: in dead soil, empty seas, lost insects and vanished species, and supply chains that snap. The loss of the living world's variety, its biodiversity, is the clearest name for what a firm draws down when it treats nature as free, and the hardest to win back once gone. The scale of the mismatch is stark. The United Nations Environment Programme finds that money flowing into nature-based solutions runs at roughly 220 billion dollars a year, against roughly 7 trillion dollars a year flowing into activities that harm nature, with the flow into nature needing to reach about 571 billion dollars a year by 2030 to meet agreed targets (United Nations Environment Programme 2023).

Behind the numbers sits a stance. A firm that treats nature as a free store and a free drain is taking without giving back, and the name for the opposite of that is reciprocity: the plain idea that what a firm draws from the living world it also owes to it. This is not a soft notion. It is the same logic that governs any lasting relationship with a supplier, a workforce, or a town. You do not exhaust the thing you depend on and expect it to be there next year. Reciprocity with nature was once a widely held human inheritance, not the property of any single culture. It survives most clearly today in Indigenous traditions, and this framework learns from them; its aim is to turn that reciprocity from a sentiment into a structure a firm can be held to.

Many cast this as a problem for governments and treaties. It is also a problem of how firms are built. A company is a set of choices about what it measures, what it improves, who speaks in its decisions, what its owners may and may not do, and whom it must answer to. At present those choices leave nature out. The argument of this paper is that they can be made to include it, and that the firms which do so will prove more durable as the century wears on.

2. Why existing approaches fall short

Two large bodies of thought already speak to this, and each stops short.

The first is nature writing, in the broad sense: the books and ideas that rebuild a felt bond between people and the living world. This work matters, and the science now backs its intuition. Nature connectedness is a measurable trait, tracked with tested scales, and it predicts both wellbeing and care for the environment (Richardson 2025). But this writing rarely reaches the firm. It can move a reader; it does not tell a founder what to change on Monday.

The second is sustainable business. Over thirty years it has grown sharp on measurement, risk, and reporting. It tells firms to count their footprint and shrink it. This too matters, and much of it works. But it treats nature as a risk to manage or a cost to cut, and it stops at the edge of the two questions that decide the matter: who holds power in the firm, and who owns it. A carbon report does not give nature a voice. A recycling target does not stop a new owner from reversing course.

So one tradition holds the feeling and the other holds the tools, and neither joins the felt bond to the hard questions of power and ownership. The Way of Nature is an attempt to join them.

3. The framework: The Tree

A tree is a fitting image because a healthy one holds all its parts at once and each part does distinct work. The framework maps five kinds of nature commitment onto five parts of a tree. They deepen as they go, from watching nature to answering to it, and a firm can and should grow several at the same time.

Leaves — Measure it. Leaves are where a tree meets the air: the most visible part, the part that responds first. For a firm, it means knowing and disclosing its bond with nature: both what it draws from nature and what it does to nature. The key move is to count nature itself, not only carbon. Carbon accounting is not wrong; it is partial. A firm can go carbon-neutral and still do nothing for the living systems around it, because carbon and biodiversity are not the same thing. Biodiversity, the variety of living things and the health of the systems they form, is the large part that carbon math leaves out, and until lately it was thought too complex to measure. That has changed. Firms can now read biodiversity from traces of genetic material left in soil and water, which turns "we help nature" from a claim into a number (see NatureMetrics, in the evidence base). A shared method now defines a single unit of biodiversity gain as a one percent improvement per unit of land (Wallacea Trust 2022). And new disclosure and policy frameworks, the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures and the global agreement struck at Kunming-Montreal in 2022, are pushing firms to report what they draw from nature and what they do to it (TNFD 2023; Convention on Biological Diversity 2022). Measurement is the start because a firm cannot improve, govern, or lock in what it has not learned to see.

Branches — Improve it. Branches are where a tree does its work and grows its reach. For a firm, it means changing what it makes and how it sources and operates so that its activity restores nature rather than merely harming it less. Regenerative and organic farming, verified by an outside body, sits here, as does designing a product to give something back to the living world. But improvement runs wider than a firm's own operations. A firm can protect habitat directly, funding or holding land for conservation so that living systems are kept intact. It can go further and pay to rewild degraded land, letting nature return and often building a business on the result: one rewilded English estate, once ploughed for crops, now runs safaris, wild-range meat, and events, and measured roughly a seventy percent gain in biodiversity against a conventional neighbour (see the evidence base). And where a firm cannot restore nature on its own ground, it can pay others to, through the young market in biodiversity credits, which lets a firm fund a measured gain in living systems somewhere its money can do more. The test throughout is whether the gain is real and checked, not merely asserted. On the credit market that test is not yet settled: the market is early, and whether a credit represents a gain that is real, lasting, and additional is still contested and needs scrutiny before a firm leans on it.

Trunk — Represent it. The trunk is where a tree stands. It is also, in law, where the deepest idea in this framework lives: standing, the right to be heard. Half a century ago the legal scholar Christopher Stone asked whether trees should have standing to sue, and argued that natural things could hold rights defended by guardians in court (Stone 1972). To represent nature is to give it a real voice inside the firm's decisions: a seat on the board, a guardian with a defined remit, a duty every director carries. One British company, Faith in Nature, has appointed a director to speak for nature at the board, with a vote (see the evidence base). Recent legal work has begun to turn this from a single case into a repeatable method. The Earth Law Center's Onboarding Nature Toolkit, which won the 2026 Grunin Prize at New York University's law school, sets out four ways to bring nature inside a firm: as inspiration, written into a firm's stated purpose; as advisor, through a dedicated seat; as director, with a voice and a vote in governance; and as shareholder, through ownership and voting arrangements (Earth Law Center 2025; Ioselevich 2026). The first three of these sit at the trunk. The fourth reaches down to the roots, which the next level takes up. As one of the toolkit's authors put it, the aim is not to change the law but to repurpose it (Ioselevich 2026). This is rare work, and it is the hinge of the whole framework, because it is where nature stops being a topic and starts being a party.

Roots — Lock it in. Roots are unseen, permanent, and load-bearing; they hold the tree when the wind comes. For a firm, this is writing the commitment into ownership and constitution so it survives a change of leader, a cash crunch, or a sale. The tools are real and growing: steward-ownership, perpetual purpose trusts, golden shares held by a mission body, charity ownership. When Patagonia's founder gave the company away in 2022, he placed its shares in a trust and a non-profit built to keep its purpose beyond his life (see the evidence base). The same legal toolkit that puts nature on the board also treats nature as a kind of shareholder, embedding its interests in ownership through steward-ownership, golden shares, or weighted votes (Earth Law Center 2025). Without roots, every gain at the other levels can be undone by the next owner.

Seeds — Answer to it. Seeds are what a tree gives back, and how life carries past the single tree. For a firm, this is the deepest level: to operate under, fund, and defer to arrangements where nature holds rights that can be enforced against the firm itself. The rights-of-nature movement has moved from theory into law, and its roots are older than the law that carries it. Ecuador wrote the rights of nature into its constitution in 2008, drawing directly on the Andean Indigenous principle of sumak kawsay, or buen vivir, good living, in which humans belong to nature rather than owning it and owe it reciprocal care (Erazo Acosta 2022). From that soil the movement has spread: New Zealand has granted legal personhood to a river; Spain has given its first ecosystem, the Mar Menor lagoon, rights defended by guardians (Cano Pecharromán 2022); and in Peru, native stingless bees have been recognised as holders of rights, a reciprocal duty owed to the pollinators a community depends on (see the evidence base). To answer to nature is to accept that the firm's own conduct can be checked by nature's defenders, not only by its owners. It is reciprocity made enforceable.

Two points hold the framework together. First, it runs from managing nature to answering to it. Each level hands more real power to nature, and gives up more of the firm's freedom to treat nature as it likes. Second, the goal is the whole tree, not the top of a ladder. A firm can measure and improve while it begins the slower work of governance and ownership. What it should not do is mistake one part for the whole. A firm with clean operations and no voice for nature in its rooms is a firm with one good branch, not a tree.

4. Early evidence: the gap is wide

To test whether the framework describes something real, I began coding companies against it. The first study took 122 companies in one category, adult drinks, of a network whose members each give at least one percent of sales to environmental causes. Each company was checked against public sources for certifications, practices, governance, and ownership.

Two findings stand out. First, among the companies with a real public record, commitment ran out fast. Every one of them reached the improve level. About a third held an outside certification for organic, biodynamic, or pollinator-friendly practice. Most held a soft governance mark, usually B Corp status. Then it stopped. Not one gave nature a formal voice in its governance. Not one held a binding lock on its ownership. Not one measured living nature rather than carbon, or answered to nature in any enforceable way.

Second, and more telling, most of the category showed almost nothing at all. Of the 122, 102, which is 84 percent, carried no public sign of any nature practice beyond the giving pledge. A later scan across ten categories and 293 companies found the same shape, sharper: 93 percent carried no public record beyond the pledge, and again the upper levels of the framework sat empty across every category.

Two cautions matter. This is a chosen sample, not a random draw, so the figures describe what the field makes public, not the whole population; a separate study draws a random sample from a defined list to test the pattern properly. And "no public record" is not proof of "doing nothing", since a small firm may do real work it never writes down. The finding is about what firms disclose and build, not a charge that they are idle. Even read carefully, though, the result is plain: in a group already willing to give money for nature, the deeper forms of commitment are rare, and the deepest are all but absent. The gap the framework describes is real, and it is the opportunity.

5. Four practices the framework proposes

Alongside the five levels, the work names four practices that do not yet exist as settled standards. Each has a working precedent; none has been named and shaped into a method others can copy.

A nature label. A per-product disclosure of nature impact, in the way some firms already print a carbon figure. It would show the land a product used, the certification behind it, and the nature contribution built into each unit sold. It need not be perfect to be useful; it needs to be honest and specific enough to compare.

A connectedness test. A question asked in the design of a product or service: does using this bring a person into contact with the living world, or wall them off from it? The science gives this weight. Since connectedness predicts both wellbeing and care for nature, a product that builds it is doing real work, and almost no design team asks the question on purpose.

A family programme. An employer benefit aimed at the strongest lever in the whole system. The evidence is clear that a parent's own bond with nature is the strongest predictor of a child's, so the decline passes down through families (Richardson 2025). A firm that helps its people build their children's bond with nature works the one lever with the most reach, and no employer yet does this on purpose.

Unit-level nature accounting. A fixed nature contribution tied to each unit sold, set as a cost rather than a gift at year's end. When the contribution is specific and built into the price, the commitment is legible to the buyer and hard to drop.

6. The long horizon

Behind every level of the framework sits a question of time. A firm that answers to nature is a firm that has widened the horizon it plans against, from the next quarter to the next century and beyond. This is the deepest reason the framework is hard: not that its tools are missing, but that most firms are built to work to a span of months, and nature keeps time in decades and generations.

The habit of short horizons is itself a large part of the problem. Quarterly reporting rewards the near term and discounts the far; a cost that lands in thirty years barely registers in a model built around the next earnings call. Soil, forests, fisheries, and the climate all pay the price of that discount. To put nature at the centre of a firm is, in large part, to lengthen the horizon the firm plans against.

Indigenous practice has held this longer view for centuries, and it offers a plain standard the framework can borrow. The clearest form of it is the seventh-generation principle of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Six Nations also known as the Iroquois, whose Great Law of Peace holds that every major decision be weighed by its effect on the seventh generation to come (Haudenosaunee Confederacy, n.d.). The teaching is not the Haudenosaunee's alone; related ideas run through Anishinaabe, Maori, and many other Indigenous traditions. But its source is specific, and it deserves to be named rather than folded into a vague appeal to ancient wisdom. The investor and author Jenna Nicholas brings this principle into the language of finance in her book The Enlightened Bottom Line, using it to challenge the short-termism of quarterly reporting: she asks investors and business leaders to weigh a decision against seven generations ahead and seven behind, and holds that every choice a person makes as an investor, an employer, or a buyer leaves a trace, so the work is to make sure the trace is one of healing rather than harm (Nicholas 2026). A firm that asks what its choices do to the seventh generation is a firm already growing roots and seeds, because those are the levels where a commitment is built to outlast its makers.

Seen this way, the whole framework is an argument about time. Measuring and improving are the near work. Representing, locking in, and answering to nature are the long work, the parts that hold when leaders change and quarters turn. A firm that treats nature seriously is a firm that has decided to be a good ancestor.

7. Why now

Three shifts make this the moment. Nature has become a measured financial risk, named as such by central banks and by the reporting standards firms now face. The rights-of-nature idea has crossed from seminar to statute in several countries. And steward-ownership, once a curiosity, has entered the mainstream since a large company was given to a trust to protect its purpose. At the same time, public money for nature is retreating in many places, which makes the private structures set out here matter more, not less. The firms that learn to measure, improve, represent, lock in, and answer to nature will be better placed as the century's pressures grow. The rest will meet those pressures having built nothing to meet them with. To run a company the way of nature, dòigh nàdair, is not a retreat from hard business. It is the longer and steadier form of it: patient where the market is hasty, reciprocal where the market is extractive, and built, like a tree, to stand.

8. Literature review

This section places the framework within existing work across five fields. It is selective, not exhaustive, and aims to show both the ground the framework stands on and the gap it fills.

Biodiversity's worth and the scale of the shortfall. A now-large body of work has tried to state, in economic terms, how far nature underpins the economy. The Dasgupta Review, commissioned by the British government, argued that standard economics has treated nature as limitless and that growth measured without it is a false account (Dasgupta 2021). The World Economic Forum put over half of world output as dependent to some degree on nature (World Economic Forum 2020). The United Nations Environment Programme has measured the money gap between what nature receives and what nature needs (United Nations Environment Programme 2023). Together these set the size of the problem. They do not tell a single firm what to build, which is the work this framework takes up.

Rights of nature and legal standing. The legal root of the framework is Stone's 1972 argument that natural objects could hold rights, defended by guardians (Stone 1972). For years the idea stayed largely academic. It has since become law in several forms: legal personhood for rivers and forests, constitutional rights for nature, and, in Europe, rights for the Mar Menor lagoon (Cano Pecharromán 2022). A growing literature tracks how these arrangements work in practice and where they fall short. The framework draws on this work for its two deepest levels, represent and answer, and treats the firm, not only the state, as a place where standing can be granted.

Steward-ownership and mission lock. A separate literature, closer to practice than to theory, examines how firms protect a purpose against the pull of sale and short-term gain. It covers perpetual purpose trusts, golden shares, and foundation ownership, and points to long-standing European examples where a trust or foundation holds a company for its mission. The gift of Patagonia to a trust and a non-profit in 2022 brought the idea wide attention. Practitioner work has since started to join ownership design to nature directly: the Earth Law Center's Onboarding Nature Toolkit, honoured at New York University's law school in 2026, offers firms four models for giving nature a place in governance and ownership, from a line in the founding documents to a seat on the board to a stake held on nature's behalf (Earth Law Center 2025; Ioselevich 2026). The framework's roots level rests on this work and applies it to nature in particular: not purpose in general, but a lock that holds nature's place when owners change.

Biodiversity measurement, credits, and rewilding. A newer and less settled literature concerns how to measure gains in living systems and pay for them. Methods now exist to read biodiversity from environmental DNA and to define a credit as a fixed improvement per unit of land (Wallacea Trust 2022), and a market in such credits has begun to form. This work is promising and contested in equal measure: writers on the subject warn that a credit is only as good as its proof that the gain is real, lasting, and additional, and that credits should top up direct action rather than stand in for it. Alongside the credit literature sits a growing literature on rewilding as a business, showing that letting degraded land return to life can produce measured biodiversity gains and a working income at once. The framework draws on both, and carries their caution: measurement is real enough to build on, the markets built on it are young enough to watch closely.

Time horizons and long-term value. A final strand concerns the cost of short horizons. A wide literature in finance and management treats short-termism, the pull of quarterly results, as a drag on long-term value. A parallel body of thought reaches past finance to Indigenous governance, above all the Haudenosaunee seventh-generation principle, for a longer measure of what a firm owes the future; Nicholas (2026) is a recent attempt to carry that measure into everyday investment practice. The framework's two deepest levels, lock it in and answer to it, are attempts to build that longer horizon into the structure of a firm rather than leaving it to the good intentions of whoever holds the reins.

Nature connectedness. In environmental psychology, a mature literature now treats the human bond with nature as a measurable trait. Tested scales capture it; large studies link it to both wellbeing and care for the environment (Richardson 2025). Recent modelling adds two findings the framework leans on: the bond has fallen far over two centuries in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, and its strongest driver is passage from parent to child rather than a person's own experience (Richardson 2025). This body of work answers the oldest objection to the softer side of this field, that the human bond with nature cannot be measured, and so lets the framework rest its human-facing practices on evidence rather than sentiment.

Reciprocity and the ethics of relationship. The framework's deepest levels rest on an older idea than any of the above: that the human relationship with nature is one of mutual obligation, not ownership. This idea recurs across cultures rather than belonging to one. In the Andes it is named sumak kawsay, or buen vivir, and has passed from Indigenous practice into Ecuador's constitution and the wider rights-of-nature movement (Erazo Acosta 2022; Richter 2025). Among the Haudenosaunee it runs through the Great Law and the Thanksgiving Address (Haudenosaunee Confederacy, n.d.). The botanist and Potawatomi writer Robin Wall Kimmerer has brought the idea to a wide modern readership, framing the natural world as a gift economy in which receiving creates an obligation to give back (Kimmerer 2013). And it is not solely a distant or non-European inheritance. Celtic peoples across Iron Age Europe held particular natural places as sacred, groves, springs, and oaks above all, and centred ritual life on them rather than on built temples; the sacred grove, or nemeton, is attested in Roman accounts, inscriptions, and place-names that survive from Iberia to Scotland to Asia Minor (Koch 2006). The written record of Celtic religion is thin and largely filtered through hostile Roman sources, so it must be read with care, but the reverence for the living world it points to is plain. The through line is that treating nature as kin, and as owed, was once broadly human; industrial economies are the anomaly for forgetting it. The framework does not import this ethic for show. It tries to give it a structure: to turn reciprocity from a felt duty into a governed one.

Sustainable business, measurement, and its limits. Finally, a vast literature on corporate sustainability covers footprint measurement, reporting standards, certification, and the business case for cutting environmental harm. Its strength is method; its blind spot is power and ownership. It rarely asks who speaks for nature in the firm's decisions, or how a commitment survives a change of owner. The gap between this literature's tools and the two traditions above, rights and stewardship on one side, connectedness on the other, is the space this framework is built to fill.

Across all five fields the pattern is the same. The pieces exist. What has been missing is a single frame that a founder, an investor, or a board can use to see where a firm stands and what it might build next. That is what The Tree is meant to provide.

References

Cano Pecharromán, Lidia. 2022. "Rights of Nature: Rivers That Can Stand in Court." Resources 11 (2): 17.

Convention on Biological Diversity. 2022. Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Montreal: Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Dasgupta, Partha. 2021. The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. London: HM Treasury.

Earth Law Center. 2025. Onboarding Nature Toolkit. In collaboration with B Lab Benelux and Nyenrode Business University. Earth Law Center. https://www.earthlawcenter.org/naturegovernance.

Erazo Acosta, Eduardo. 2022. "Sumak Kawsay-Alli Kawsay-Buen Vivir, Epistemology in the Indigenous Communities of Ecuador and Colombia, an Opportunity for Environmental Justice and Rethinking the Global Community." In Economics and Policy of Energy and Environmental Sustainability, edited by Narendra N. Dalei and Anshuman Gupta. Singapore: Springer.

Haudenosaunee Confederacy. n.d. "Values." Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Accessed July 2026. https://www.haudenosauneeconfederacy.com/values/.

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This is a working paper describing a framework in development. The research it reports is early and, where noted, drawn from chosen rather than random samples. Company examples come from a verified evidence base compiled for the book of the same name. Comments and challenges are welcome.

I confess an old man's habit of measuring the present against the design of the past, and I hope you will indulge it once more, for I find the exercise presses on me with unusual urgency.

You will recall — though perhaps only as a schoolbook footnote now — that the great labor of the Convention was not to prevent bad men from seeking power. That, we knew, could never be wholly prevented, in any age or any nation. Our labor was to build a structure in which bad designs, however cunningly pursued, would break upon the resistance of ambition checking ambition, of branch jealous of branch, of a Senate not moved by the passions of the hour and a House answerable to them. I wrote at the time, and believe still, that a dependence on the people is the primary control on government, but that experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions besides.

I set this down now because I have watched, from whatever vantage the dead are permitted, a man rise to your highest office who seems to me the very character our auxiliary precautions were built to contain — not a monarch by title, but by temperament: one who mistakes the Presidency for his person, who treats the courts as obstacles to be defied rather than as coordinate guardians of the same Constitution he is sworn to preserve, and who regards the public trust as an estate to be worked for private advantage rather than a trust to be rendered back undiminished.

I do not say this lightly, nor do I say it as a partisan of one faction against another — you will remember I despised the factional spirit itself, and warned against it before either of your present parties existed. But I must say plainly: a President who treats an adverse ruling as illegitimate rather than binding attacks the load-bearing wall of the whole edifice. I argued at the Convention, in language you may consult for yourselves, that impeachment was necessary because a chief magistrate might betray his trust to foreign powers, or turn his office into a scheme of private gain. I did not imagine these as remote hypotheticals. I put them into the frame because I believed some future generation would need the door I left open.

And yet I would be doing you a disservice, and myself an injustice, if I left you with only the alarm and not the diagnosis beneath it. A demagogue does not rise in a vacuum. He rises where the ordinary channels of representation have gone stale — where citizens feel, rightly or wrongly, that the distant apparatus of their government answers to itself and not to them. I insisted the House be elected directly and frequently for precisely this reason: that the People must never come to believe their government is a fixed estate belonging to others. If a great number of you now feel unheard by the very structures I helped build, that grievance is not proof of your foolishness. It is a signal the structure requires tending — and demagoguery is what fills the silence when tending is refused.

So I ask you to hold two things at once, difficult as it may be. The remedy for feeling unrepresented is not to invest your trust in one man's will above the office's constraints — that path, I promise you, ends in a worse and more durable capture than the one you sought to escape. But neither is the remedy to sneer at the grievance and call the matter settled. The Constitution I helped build was never meant to be admired like a finished painting. It was built to be tended — amended where amendment is due, defended where defense is due, and above all, understood by those it governs.

I wrote once that a popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both. You live now in an age of information without precedent in abundance, and I confess I do not know whether that cures the disease I feared or merely gives it new vectors. That, more than any single man's character, is the question I would spend my remaining attention upon, were I granted it.

Guard the office from the officeholder. Guard the structure from the moment. And do not mistake exhaustion with your institutions for permission to abandon them.

I remain, as ever, your fellow citizen in the labor of self-government,

A Publius for the present hour

Author's note: This piece is a work of speculative interpretation, not a historical document — an attempt to reason from Madison's actual writings (Federalist 10, 51, and his remarks at the Constitutional Convention on impeachment) toward what he might say, not a claim about what he did say.

#july4 #constitution #jamesmadison #governance

I think about that a lot this week.

On Friday, the Trump administration issued a policy memo eliminating what immigration lawyers call “adjustment of status” — the longstanding process by which people already living legally in the United States can apply for permanent residency without leaving. From now on, most temporary visa holders who qualify for a green card must return to their home countries to complete the process through a consulate.

At first glance this might sound like a procedural tweak. It is not. It is, depending on where you’re from, a trap with no exit.

Here’s why. The same administration that issued Friday’s memo has also banned nationals from more than 100 countries from obtaining U.S. visas. So the directive — go home, apply at a consulate, come back — assumes a functional return path that simply does not exist for enormous numbers of people. A Somali family that came here legally, built a business, enrolled their kids in school, paid taxes for a decade — they are being told to return to a country they may have fled for their lives, stand before a consulate officer operating under a travel ban, and try to come back. That is not a process. That is a door that has been bricked over and painted to look like it still opens.

Immigration lawyers estimate this policy could affect hundreds of thousands of people who file adjustment applications every year — graduate students who earned their degrees at American universities and got sponsored by American employers, nurses and doctors who staffed understaffed rural hospitals through the pandemic, elderly parents of American citizens who came to be near their families in their final years. These are not abstractions. They are people embedded in American communities, American institutions, American families. Ripping legal status from them doesn’t make those communities safer or more prosperous. It makes them hollower.

When legal status is stripped away, the costs don’t disappear. Some are measurable — informal labor, uncompensated emergency healthcare, kids falling through educational gaps, lost tax revenue — real burdens that land on municipalities, hospitals, schools, and communities rather than on any ledger the administration has to answer for. The people making the decision don’t bear those costs. So from where they sit, it looks free.

It isn’t. There are costs that don’t show up in budgets at all. A family separated across two continents because a consulate won’t issue a visa. A child who grows up knowing their parent was legal here until the government decided legality was inconvenient. A doctor who spent fifteen years serving a rural community and is now gone. And then there is what this does to the country’s reputation — the signal it sends to every skilled worker, every researcher, every entrepreneur anywhere in the world who is weighing whether America is a place worth betting their life on. That calculation is not slowly changing. It has already changed. This policy is not an aberration — it is the continuation of a deliberate agenda, and the damage is severe, compounding, and happening right now. What makes it worse is that Congress and the Senate have had every opportunity to draw a line. They haven’t. That silence is its own kind of answer and every representative, every staffer, every aid who allow this to continue need to be held to account.

I’ve spent the better part of a decade working at the intersection of forced displacement and economic integration — first building the Refugee Investment Network, which works to mobilize private capital and develop the ecosystem for refugee economic inclusion, and more recently with my wife Christine Mahoney writing a book, Banking on Belonging, about what actually happens when societies choose to treat newcomers as contributors rather than threats. The evidence is not complicated. Legal stability is the variable that determines almost everything else. When people have it, they work, they start businesses, they buy homes, they send their children to school. When it’s stripped away — or made deliberately inaccessible — the costs don’t disappear. They just become invisible to the people who made the decision.

What makes me furious about Friday’s policy — and I want to use that word plainly — is the contempt it shows for the premise of the system itself. These are not people who gamed anything. They got visas, they reported to USCIS, they renewed their status, they hired immigration attorneys, they did exactly what the United States government told them to do to remain here legally. The implicit deal was: follow the rules and the pathway exists. That deal has now been voided. Not because they failed to comply. Because the administration decided the pathway itself was the problem.

That is not immigration enforcement. That is a betrayal.

When my mom became an American citizen, like every American immigrant, she pledged allegiance to the U.S. Constitution and our laws, promised to defend the nation and perform civic duties. She’s voted in elections, raised a family, paid taxes, and built a full life here. She belongs here in the fullest sense, not just legally, but in the way that accumulates over years of ordinary life in a place. That didn’t happen automatically. It happened because a process existed that was, whatever its frustrations, a real process. It was a door that opened to her, and 24 million other naturalized patriots who went through the same process.

What was announced Friday is something different. It is the deliberate manufacture of a dead end — dressed in the language of procedure, justified with the rhetoric of integrity, aimed at people whose only crime is having believed that doing things the right way would matter.

So what do we do?

First, get informed. Then get loud. If you employ people affected by this — and if you run any kind of business in this country, you almost certainly do — say something publicly. The silence of the employer community on legal immigration restrictions has been one of the more disheartening features of the past several years. Economic self-interest and basic decency point in the same direction here. Use your voice.

Second, contact your representatives. This policy was issued as an administrative memo, which means it can be challenged, litigated, and legislated against. Organizations like the American Immigration Lawyers Association and World Relief are already mobilizing. Support them. Amplify them. Ask your senators and representatives specifically what they intend to do about a policy that strands legal residents in bureaucratic limbo with no viable path forward.

Third — and I say this as someone whose work is rooted in the belief that private capital and civil society can move faster than government — don’t mistake action for the absence of outrage. This requires both. The legal challenge matters. The political pressure matters. The moral clarity matters. Don’t let the complexity of the process become an excuse for doing nothing.

The people Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are targeting with this policy have done nothing wrong. They came legally. They stayed legally. They built lives here in good faith. That faith is not naive — it is precisely what we asked of them. That faith deserves defending. So does their right to stay.

The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and the Mayors Migration Council (MMC) released a significant report this week — Creating Inclusive Urban Economies for Migrants and Refugees — and if you work in refugee economic inclusion, impact investing, or urban philanthropy, you should read it. It’s the most thorough synthesis I’ve seen of what cities are actually doing to connect migrants and refugees to economic opportunity, grounded in consultations across eight cities from Chiang Mai to Gdańsk to St. Louis.

It’s also, almost by design, a document that stops just short of the most important conversation, but this is more a consequence of its audience and not a criticism. The report is written for municipal policymakers, and it serves them well. But the argument it makes points directly toward a set of actors it never quite reaches: investors, employers, and philanthropists who could help change the capital picture entirely.

That’s the conversation I want to have.

What the Report Gets Right

The central claim is one Christine Mahoney and I make throughout our book Banking on Belonging: economic inclusion isn’t charity — it’s a growth strategy. The MPI/MMC report puts hard numbers to it. Underemployment among college-educated immigrants cost the U.S. economy an estimated $39 billion in forgone wages and more than $10 billion in lost tax revenue as of 2016. That’s a lot of cost for a lot of untapped human talent.

The report is clear-eyed about what cities actually control. National governments hold the strongest levers — work authorization, visa policy, credential recognition at scale. Cities are mostly working around those constraints, not through them. The best programs described here are intelligent workarounds: pooling fragmented administrative data, building employer-jobseeker matching services, embedding newcomer upskilling into green transition workforce programs, running one-stop service centers that reduce friction for people navigating unfamiliar systems.

Two things in particular stood out to me.

The distinction between opportunity-driven and necessity-driven entrepreneurship is one of the most important conceptual tools in this field, and the report deploys it carefully. Too many programs celebrate refugee business creation without asking whether the business is viable — or whether someone started it because the job market was closed to them. A survival food cart is not a scalable enterprise. Conflating the two serves no one, including the entrepreneur.

The report is also unusually honest about evaluation. Most economic inclusion programs don’t track job quality, income progression, or business survival after the program ends. The report frames this as a data problem. I’d call it something more serious: without that data, you cannot make a credible investment case to private capital. Participation rates don’t move institutional investors. Returns data does.

Where the Report’s Frame Runs Out

The report is frank about the funding crisis. U.S. aid cuts have forced organizations to close offices or cut services. Most programs in lower-income settings run on short-term, competitive donor funding that can disappear overnight. Even the stronger models, like Zurich’s Capacity program, which supported 172 entrepreneurs and helped develop 93 businesses over eight years, depend on volunteers because they can’t fund staff.

The report’s response to this is to gesture toward pooled funding models, blended finance, innovative financing. The Mexico pilot it describes — a fund drawing from philanthropy, employers, and multilateral banks, launching in July 2026 across Mexico City, Nuevo León, and Jalisco — is the right architecture and it is exciting to see. But the report describes it from the city’s perspective, as a mechanism to be accessed. It doesn’t examine what it takes to build that mechanism from the other side.

That’s where the private sector and philanthropy need to enter the room, not as funders of last resort, but as architects.

What the Investment Lens Adds

We started the Refugee Investment Network because the humanitarian system has chronically under-resourced the economic agency of displaced people, and because the investment world has chronically underestimated the opportunity. Banking on Belonging is, at its core, an argument that those two failures are connected — and that fixing one requires engaging the other.

The MPI/MMC report makes the economic case for inclusion. The investment case is related but not the same.

On blended finance: The report mentions it without unpacking what actually makes it work. The structural innovation is risk layering. Philanthropic or government capital absorbs the first losses; that makes the risk profile acceptable to institutional investors who follow. This has now worked in social impact bonds, in development finance, and in the refugee-focused investment funds that have begun to scale. Community foundations are uniquely positioned to play the first-loss role at the municipal level. Their mission already aligns with the community benefit. Their investment horizon is longer than a typical fund. Many are already doing program-related and mission-related investing in affordable housing and small business development. Refugee entrepreneurship is a natural extension of work already underway.

The city doesn’t have to be the lead capital. It can be the convener and the data provider while a community foundation anchors the blended structure. The report describes that model through the Mexico pilot without naming it as a replicable template for U.S. cities. It is.

On employer engagement: The report rightly frames employer connections as workforce development But the investment frame asks a different question: what is the return to the employer? In sectors with genuine labor scarcity — care work, green construction, food processing — the cost of an unfilled position is measurable. That cost is an investment thesis. Employers facing those shortages shouldn’t just be partners in workforce programs. They should be co-investors in the talent pipeline that fills their hiring needs. The report describes this as political strategy, building buy-in by demonstrating tangible returns. I’d push further: it’s a viable financial model, and it should be structured like one.

On patient capital: The Re:BUiLD program evidence, showing cash grants to refugee entrepreneurs outperformed mentorship in cost-effectiveness, in both Nairobi and Kampala, is one of the report’s most important data points. But it only measures short-term business outcomes. What the broader impact investing literature shows is that businesses receiving patient capital, follow-on investment, growth-stage loans, and working capital, are dramatically more likely to scale and create jobs. Most entrepreneurship support concentrates at the start-up phase and disappears just as ventures begin. The next iteration of this work is a fund story, not a program story: revolving loan funds, capitalized by community foundations and CDFIs, specifically targeting refugee and immigrant entrepreneurs who’ve cleared the idea stage and need growth capital.

On belonging as a performance variable: The report documents, across multiple country contexts, that social capital and local networks are among the most powerful determinants of economic inclusion outcomes. Somali refugees in Jijiga outperform those elsewhere in Ethiopia because of shared cultural systems and the economic networks those systems create. The Toronto mentoring program doubled employment rates because it gave newcomers access to professional relationships they had no other way to build. Migrants confined to ethnic enclaves grow more slowly than those integrated into mainstream business networks — which is why programs like Bogotá’s Migración Productiva focus specifically on embedding refugee entrepreneurs in local supply chains, not parallel ones.

This is the argument at the center of Banking on Belonging: inclusion isn’t just an output of economic integration — it’s an input. When people experience genuine belonging in a community, they invest in it. They hire from it. They pay taxes into it and stay. The ROI is real and measurable across business longevity, tax revenue, neighborhood vitality. Philanthropists and investors who treat belonging as infrastructure, not sentiment, are funding something with a genuine return.

A Direct Challenge to Community Foundations

The report calls for innovative financing at the city level and is transparent that it doesn’t have a clear answer for how to get there sustainably. I respect this honesty! Community foundations are well placed to help here but most cities and most community foundations aren’t working together on this.

Community foundations have local knowledge that no national foundation can replicate. They have community trust that city government often lacks. They have long investment horizons and the legal structures to hold both grant capital and investment capital in the same institution. And they are already doing the work — in affordable housing, small business loans, workforce development — that refugee economic inclusion plugs directly into.

What I’d ask them to consider, specifically:

Anchor a local blended finance vehicle. Work with city government as convener and data provider, and serve as the first-loss layer in a pooled fund targeting refugee and immigrant entrepreneurs. Employer contributions and CDFI capital follow you in. This is what the Mexico model does; it can be adapted for any mid-size American city with a meaningful refugee population and a labor shortage.

Fund outcome measurement as a standalone investment, not overhead. The report’s most consistent finding is that no one knows what works because no one is tracking what happens after the program ends. Longitudinal outcome data including job retention, income progression, business survival at two and five years is the evidence base that makes future capital deployment possible. Foundations that fund this infrastructure are building the field, not just a program.

Back employer-side engagement programs. The St. Louis Mosaic Project model that connects immigrant entrepreneurs with ethnic chambers of commerce, advising local businesses on how to access international talent, is generating returns visible to business leadership. That’s a different conversation than the one most social service funders have. It’s absolutely worth having.

Integrate refugee and immigrant entrepreneurship into existing small business portfolios rather than creating standalone refugee programs. The mainstreaming argument in the MPI/MMC report is right: programs that serve all residents are more sustainable, more politically durable, and better for the people they’re trying to help. A community foundation that adds an explicit refugee and immigrant inclusion lens to its existing SBDC partnerships and small business loan programs doesn’t need a new initiative. It needs a policy change.

What This Report Can’t Do on Its Own

Creating Inclusive Urban Economies for Migrants and Refugees is the clearest picture I’ve seen of what cities can accomplish with the levers they hold. The documentation of programs, the honest accounting of what’s working and what’s chronic and stuck, and the cross-regional scope make it genuinely useful to our field.

But the report’s core insight — that economic inclusion is an investment, not a cost — points toward a set of actors it cannot, by design, fully address. Cities can set agendas and break down siloes and run job fairs and match employers to workers. What they consistently don’t have is patient, flexible, appropriately-structured capital. And without that, the programs stay small, the promising models stay underfunded, and the entrepreneurs who could be building businesses that serve their communities for a generation are instead running survival enterprises or leaving the formal economy altogether.

The private sector, employers, investors, and philanthropists — especially community foundations — can change that math. The architecture exists. The evidence is building. The question is whether the people with capital will engage as investors or keep funding the gap with grants.

John Kluge Jr. is Co-Founder & CEO of Thistlerock Mead Company, Co-Founder of the Refugee Investment Network, and co-author (with Christine Mahoney) of Banking on Belonging: Why Investing in Refugee Entrepreneurs Benefits Everyone (Columbia University Press, July 2026).

Last night I stood in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress and offered a few remarks at the 25th anniversary of the John W. Kluge Center. It is a place I have visited many times over the years, for many different reasons. But standing at that podium, I kept thinking about a summer more than twenty years ago, and a man recovering from surgery who had more to say than anyone realized.

In 2005, shortly after graduating from Columbia, I spent the summer with my father as he healed from a hip operation. We talked for hours — the kind of unhurried, ranging conversations that only happen when the calendar clears and there is nowhere else to be. Stories surfaced that I had never heard. Connections between his life and his thinking that I had never understood. Out of that summer came a shared resolve: to gather his archives, organize them, and write down as many of those stories as seemed worthy of keeping.

I did that work at the Kluge Center. To sit in those study rooms in the Jefferson Building — surrounded by scholars of extraordinary accomplishment, each absorbed in their own pursuit of understanding — and pursue that quiet, personal project alongside them was one of the most humbling experiences of my life. The place has a particular quality. It takes serious thought seriously. In Washington, that is rarer than it should be.

My father founded the Center in 2000 with a gift of $60 million to the Library of Congress. His vision, developed in close collaboration with then-Librarian James Billington, was simple in conception and ambitious in scale: bring the world’s finest humanistic thinkers into residence at the Library, give them access to its unparalleled collections, and create the conditions for genuine conversation between scholars and the people who govern us. In the twenty-five years since, more than 1,000 scholars have passed through. They have written landmark books, shaped public debate, and helped Members of Congress and their staffs think more clearly about history, ethics, culture, and the long arc of human affairs.

Last night, I also told a story I have not told publicly before. At the 15th anniversary ScholarFest in June 2015, I attended a private dinner where Romila Thapar and Fernando Henrique Cardoso — two of the most luminous recipients of the Kluge Prize — spoke in conversation moderated by Center Director Jane McAuliffe. I brought a colleague from UVA, a scholar I was collaborating with at the time. I was careful, I recall, to clarify it was not a date. We returned a few months later for the ceremony honoring Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor. Somewhere between those two evenings, something shifted. She is now my wife of ten years. We are raising a family together and still collaborating on work that sits, not coincidentally, somewhere in the territory this Center was built to cultivate. Magic happens here. Not all of it is written into the charter.

The anniversary deserves more than nostalgia, though.

We are living through a period of profound stress on democratic institutions — at home and in democracies around the world. Governments are cutting support for public media, universities, cultural institutions, and the arts. The assumption that an educated, humanistically literate citizenry is a public good worth investing in is no longer shared as widely as it once was. And into that vacuum comes something darker: the substitution of information for wisdom, of data for judgment, of engagement metrics for genuine understanding.

The humanities are not decoration. They are not a luxury for comfortable times. It is precisely in moments like this one — when regimes dehumanize and other our neighbors, when wars kill thousands and displace millions, when the language of belonging is weaponized rather than honored — that we discover how urgently we need what the humanities offer. History teaches us how power fails. Philosophy asks us what we owe each other. Literature reminds us that every policy has a human face.

My father understood this. He was a businessman, not an academic. But he saw clearly that a democracy unable to think historically and philosophically about itself was a democracy in trouble. His answer was to invest — substantially, strategically, and with a long time horizon — in the infrastructure of humanistic thought.

Which brings me to a direct appeal.

Philanthropic foundations have long supported the natural sciences, medicine, and technology. They fund laboratories and clinical trials and engineering breakthroughs. That work matters enormously. But the ratio of investment in humanistic scholarship to investment in technical fields has grown increasingly lopsided — and we are living with the consequences.

We have extraordinary tools and insufficient wisdom about how to use them. We have unprecedented access to information and a weakening capacity to interpret it with historical and ethical depth. We are building the future faster than we are asking whether we should, and for whom, and at what cost.

Foundations are unusually well positioned to address this — precisely because they are not dependent on electoral cycles or quarterly returns. They can take the long view. They can fund the kind of patient, rigorous humanistic scholarship that doesn’t produce a product or a patent but does, over time, produce citizens and leaders capable of governing well and thinking clearly about why it matters.

The Kluge Center is one model. There are others. What they share is a commitment to the proposition that thinking well about what it means to be human is not optional for a democracy.

Twenty-five years ago, my father made a bet on that proposition. It has paid off in ways that are documented in a thousand scholarly careers and dozens of landmark books — and in at least one marriage that might not have happened otherwise.

The bet is still worth making. The stakes are higher now. I hope more foundations will have the courage and the vision to make it.

The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress was founded in 2000. Learn more at loc.gov/kluge.

For new readers: I’m John Kluge, co-founder of the Refugee Investment Network (RIN), a nonprofit that works to mobilize private capital for refugee entrepreneurs and the communities that host them. Over the past decade, RIN has helped develop what we call the Refugee Lens — a framework that defines and tracks investments based on how meaningfully they benefit displaced people, from refugee-owned businesses at the top tier to broader funds that finance the ecosystem. It has helped shift the conversation from refugees as a humanitarian burden to refugees as economic contributors and entrepreneurs. My wife Christine Mahoney and I explore this at length in our forthcoming book, Banking on Belonging (Columbia University Press, July 2026). This Substack ranges fairly widely — across regenerative business, impact investing, and what it means to build institutions worthy of human dignity — but the question of refugee belonging is close to the center of it all.

There’s a question I keep returning to as I look at the growing field of refugee lens investing: Are we doing enough?

The Refugee Investment Network’s Refugee Lens — our framework for categorizing and tracking private sector investments that benefit displaced people — has helped mobilize hundreds of millions of dollars. It gives investors a clear taxonomy, from R1 ventures that are refugee-owned to R6 funds that finance refugee-related enterprises across the ecosystem. It works. And yet.

When I sit with the framework honestly, I notice that it is primarily an economic instrument. It tracks ownership stakes, employment ratios, and capital flows. These things matter enormously. But they don’t fully capture what we’re actually after — which is not just refugee economic inclusion, but refugee belonging.

That distinction, small as it might sound, changes everything.

The Missing Dimension: Belonging Without Othering

John Powell at the Othering & Belonging Institute is one of America’s foremost thinkers on racial equity and structural inclusion, and his framework has profoundly shaped how I think about what impact investing is actually for. He has spent decades articulating something that resonates deeply with the work we do. He argues that true belonging is not the same as tolerance, or even inclusion. Belonging, in Powell’s framing, means that people are empowered to co-create the institutions, spaces, and decisions that shape their lives — free from the subtle (and not so subtle) divisions that mark some people as insiders and others as perpetual outsiders.

That second category — outsider — is what Powell calls “othering.” And if we’re honest, a great deal of refugee economic programming, even well-intentioned programming, risks replicating it. When refugees are treated as passive beneficiaries of jobs rather than active agents of enterprise. When their labor is sought but their leadership is not. When impact metrics count employment without asking whether workers have any meaningful voice.

The Refugee Lens, as it stands, doesn’t fully guard against this. An investment can qualify under R3 or R4 — refugee-supporting, or host-community-weighted — without generating a single degree of genuine belonging for the people it’s meant to serve.

I think we can do better.

Toward a Belonging-Infused Refugee Lens

Here’s what I’ve been working through: what would it look like to overlay Powell’s principles directly onto the existing R1–R6 framework? Not to replace it — the economic scaffolding is essential — but to deepen it.

First, add a belonging threshold. For investments to qualify at the top tiers (R1, refugee-owned; R2, refugee-led), they should demonstrate that refugees aren’t just holding equity — they’re holding power. Board seats. Participatory governance. Real decision-making authority. Belonging, Powell reminds us, means co-creation. An R1 business where the refugee founder is a nominal figurehead doesn’t clear that bar.

Second, measure bridging, not just output. Powell’s complementary concept is bridging — the active, intentional work of building connections across difference. In host countries where refugees and local communities are in competition for jobs, housing, and political goodwill, investments that only track economic outputs miss the relational dimension entirely. What if R3 and R4 investments were also evaluated on whether they generate joint training programs between refugees and hosts? Shared supply chains? Community dialogues that reduce tension and build trust? These aren’t soft metrics — they are predictive of whether an investment will generate durable social returns or simply displace conflict into a different register.

Third, require anti-othering due diligence. At the fund level (R5, R6), I’d propose what we might call “bridging audits” — an assessment of whether a fund’s portfolio actively challenges dehumanizing narratives or inadvertently reinforces them. Does the marketing frame refugees as innovators and partners, or as problems to be managed? Does the fund require anti-bias practices from its investees? These questions should sit alongside financial due diligence, not after it.

Finally, apply targeted universalism at scale. This is Powell’s elegant solution to the trap of one-size-fits-all programming: pursue universal goals — economic inclusion, community resilience — through targeted, context-specific strategies. For the Refugee Lens, this might mean designing R1 investments for high-density refugee areas in ways that explicitly generate benefits for host communities, so that belonging becomes a shared destination rather than a zero-sum contest.

Why This Matters Now

I think about the Shemal Start incubator I visited in Irbid, Jordan — Syrian refugees and Jordanians founding companies together, side by side, testing ideas, prototyping products, building and failing and learning in the same rooms. What made it work wasn’t just the programming. It was that the design forced daily contact, shared risk, and mutual dependence. You cannot spend weeks debugging a product with someone and still think of them as other. Belonging wasn’t a byproduct of Shemal Start; it was baked into the model.

That’s the kind of investment the world needs more of. And it’s the kind the current Refugee Lens, for all its strengths, doesn’t yet fully incentivize.

The good news is that the architecture is already there. RIN’s State of Refugee Lens Investing tool could track relational and belonging-oriented metrics alongside financial ones. Impact reports could include narrative analysis alongside employment figures. Fund mandates could require bridging as a condition, not an aspiration.

The shift I’m proposing is not a reinvention. It’s a deepening — from a lens that asks how much capital flows to refugees to one that asks whether that capital is building a world where refugees, and the communities that receive them, can truly belong.

That’s the question that keeps me in this work. I hope it keeps you here too.

John Kluge is the co-founder of the Refugee Investment Network and co-author (with Christine Mahoney) of Banking on Belonging: Why Investing in Refugee Entrepreneurs Benefits Everyone (Columbia University Press, July 2026).

Last December, the Trump administration did something genuinely surprising. Standing alongside Secretary Kennedy and Dr. Oz, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins announced a $700 million Regenerative Pilot Program — real funding, routed through existing NRCS conservation programs, designed to give American farmers a voluntary pathway off chemical dependency and toward soil health. Kennedy called it an “off-ramp.” He said the goal was to help farmers transition “to a model that emphasizes soil health, and with soil health comes nutrient density.” Rick Clark, a fifth-generation Indiana farmer who had already made the transition himself, called it “historic.”

Two months later, President Trump signed an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to mandate the expanded domestic production of glyphosate — the active ingredient in Roundup, the subject of tens of thousands of cancer lawsuits, and the chemical that Secretary Kennedy spent years calling one of the likely culprits in America’s chronic disease epidemic. Kennedy’s response? He backed it immediately. “Donald Trump’s Executive Order puts America first where it matters most — our defense readiness and our food supply.”

This isn’t a story about a policy disagreement. It’s a story about what happens when an announcement is made without the infrastructure to deliver it and what it means when the same administration that promises you an off-ramp simultaneously floors the accelerator on the highway you were supposed to be leaving.

Most Americans haven’t heard about the $700 million regenerative program, and the ones who have probably don’t know what happened to the agency that was supposed to run it. The Regenerative Pilot Program is administered by the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (the NRCS) the agency closest to American farmers at the local level. It’s the one that helps farmers apply for conservation programs, conduct soil assessments, and build whole-farm plans. Without NRCS staff on the ground, the program is a press release.

Here’s what’s happened to that staff: NRCS has seen at least 2,400 employees take voluntary buyouts, and the agency’s workforce is on track to be cut from roughly 11,000 to 8,000 in 2026. The proposed USDA budget called for over $750 million in cuts to NRCS conservation technical assistance on top of those departures. Nearly two-thirds of all USDA staff departures have come from the agencies that work most directly with farmers — NRCS, FSA, and Rural Development. These are the people a farmer calls when they want to understand if they qualify for a program, what practices count, or how to submit an application. They’re leaving.

So the administration announced $700 million to help farmers transition away from chemicals, then gutted the workforce that would have made that transition possible, then signed an executive order mandating more of the very chemicals farmers were supposed to be transitioning away from. And the Secretary of Health and Human Services, a man who spent decades in environmental law arguing that glyphosate causes cancer, called it putting America first.

It’s worth pausing on Kennedy’s record here, because it’s not ancient history. He helped win a landmark $289 million verdict against Monsanto on behalf of a man whose cancer was linked to Roundup. As recently as 2024, while running for president, he said publicly that glyphosate “is one of the likely culprits in America’s chronic disease epidemic” and that his administration would ban its use as a wheat desiccant. His own MAHA Commission report, released in September 2025, cited concerns about pesticide links to adverse health outcomes in children. Last month, Bayer — which owns Monsanto — proposed a $7.25 billion settlement in ongoing Roundup cancer litigation.

None of that science changed this week. The only thing that changed is that the President signed an order and Kennedy supported it.

This matters beyond the politics, because the argument for glyphosate expansion is framed as protecting American farmers. That framing deserves to be challenged directly. True food security is not achieved by locking agriculture into permanent dependence on a single herbicide with billions of dollars in cancer liability attached to it. A supply chain built around one input, one company’s patent history, and one set of regulatory approvals is not resilience. It’s fragility wearing the costume of efficiency. The farmers I know who have transitioned to regenerative systems didn’t do it because it was easy. They did it because they understood that soil health is the actual foundation of long-term productivity — that you cannot keep extracting from land without restoring it, and that real food security starts with living soil, not with a chemical that suppresses everything growing in it.

What those farmers needed from their government was a credible commitment to the transition. They got a press conference in December and a contradictory executive order in February.

The regenerative pathway is not theoretical. Cover cropping, crop rotation, integrated pest management, reduced tillage, nutrient management — these are proven practices, not fringe ideas. Farmers who have adopted them describe real reductions in input costs over time, improved water retention during drought years, and long-term yield stability that chemical-dependent monocultures can’t match. The $700 million program, if properly staffed and funded, could have reached tens of thousands of producers in its first year alone. The first application window just closed on January 15th. Whether those applications will be processed by a workforce that’s been cut by 20% and counting is an open question nobody in the administration is answering.

What a genuine commitment to this transition would look like isn’t complicated, even if it isn’t easy. It starts with honest accounting—a full picture of glyphosate dependency that includes healthcare costs, litigation liability, the long-term soil degradation that forces ever-increasing chemical applications, and the growing market premium for chemical-free produce. It continues with properly staffed NRCS service centers that can actually help farmers apply, plan, and transition, not skeleton crews processing a backlog. It requires a published, predictable phase-down timeline that gives farmers and industry the certainty needed to invest in alternatives, the way Germany and France have approached partial restrictions. And it means federal procurement like school lunches, military food supply, beginning to reward regeneratively farmed goods—creating the market signal that makes the economics of transition work.

Instead, what American farmers got this week is an executive order that locks in the status quo and a Health Secretary who used to know better, publicly endorsing both.

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Secretary Kennedy, you were one of the most effective environmental attorneys in the country before you entered politics. You understood the science. You understood the human cost. You helped document it in courtrooms and commission reports and campaign speeches. The MAHA voters who helped deliver this administration trusted that you would bring that record with you into government — that the position would give you leverage, not the other way around.

What happened this week is not a defensible policy tradeoff. There is no version of “protecting American families” that involves the Secretary of Health and Human Services endorsing the expanded production of a chemical that his own commission flagged as a health concern, while the workforce tasked with helping farmers find an alternative is being systematically eliminated.

If you cannot use the platform you have to push back on decisions that contradict your stated life’s work — if the job has become a vehicle for lending credibility to outcomes you once fought against — then the most honest thing you can do for the farmers, families, and movement that trusted you is step aside.

The off-ramp you promised is still there. The question is whether there’s anyone left in government willing to build it.

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Sources: USDA NRCS Regenerative Pilot Program announcement, December 10, 2025; Regenerative Food Systems Investment analysis, January 2026; AgWeb NRCS staffing analysis; CNBC reporting on Kennedy’s glyphosate statement, February 2026; Truthout, The Hill, Fox News, and New York Times coverage of the executive order; Jezebel reporting on Kennedy’s prior statements.

It’s the question everyone in the humanitarian sector is asking right now. The January 2025 dismantling of USAID — a 97% workforce reduction, 92% of contracts terminated — sent shockwaves through the development community. Catholic Relief Services lost funding for eleven of thirteen international food aid programs. The International Rescue Committee laid off thousands. The Norwegian Refugee Council halted aid to 1.5 million people in twenty countries.

So will it come back?

My answer surprised him: Yes, probably. But not in a way that solves the displacement crisis. And that’s actually good news.

Let me explain.

The Pattern You’re Missing

US foreign aid has never been primarily about humanitarian compassion. It’s been about strategic competition.

Look at the history:

1948-1952: The Marshall Plan pumped $13 billion into Europe (equivalent to $173 billion today). Why? Not just generosity — strategic necessity. We needed stable democracies to counter Soviet expansion.

1950s-1980s: Aid tracked Cold War competition. Countries got US dollars if they aligned against the USSR. When Soviet influence receded in a region, so did our aid budget.

2001-2021: Aid spiked again during the War on Terror. Afghanistan received $146 billion over twenty years — not because of humanitarian need but because we had troops on the ground and a counterinsurgency strategy to fund.

2021-2024: The moment we withdrew from Afghanistan, development aid started declining. No troops, no strategic rationale, no budget.

The pattern is clear: Aid follows geopolitical competition, not simply humanitarian need.

When the US has a clear adversary to counter, aid becomes a tool of statecraft. When we don’t, it gets cut.

So What Brings It Back?

China.

Not because Congress suddenly remembers the 123 million forcibly displaced people worldwide. Because China is building influence through Belt and Road infrastructure projects across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia — and we can’t afford to cede those relationships.

But here’s what most people in the humanitarian sector are missing: When aid comes back, it won’t look like the old USAID.

China’s competitive advantage isn’t humanitarian relief. It’s investment and infrastructure. If the US responds (and we will, eventually), it will be through the Development Finance Corporation — loans, equity investments, guarantees — not grants to refugee camps.

We’ll see three possible scenarios play out:

Scenario 1: Transactional Development Finance (Most Likely — 2027-2030)

DFC gets expanded authority and budget. The US starts competing with China by financing infrastructure, energy projects, and private sector development in countries where we need influence.

What returns: Investment in strategic countries.

What doesn’t return: USAID’s humanitarian relief budgets, refugee resettlement programs, or long-term camp assistance.

Scenario 2: Strategic Humanitarian Aid (Possible — 2028-2032)

A major crisis — climate disaster, pandemic, or migration flow that directly threatens US interests — forces renewed engagement. We rebuild targeted humanitarian programs tied to specific geographic priorities: Central America (to manage migration), Middle East (to prevent instability), maybe parts of Africa if China’s influence there becomes threatening.

What returns: Narrow, transactional humanitarian programs.

What doesn’t return: Universal commitments or the broad refugee resettlement apparatus. I do hope I’m wrong on this one.

Scenario 3: New Internationalist Coalition (Least Likely — 2030+)

A major political realignment brings back something like USAID, rebuilt under a different mandate focused on climate resilience, pandemic prevention, and migration management.

What this would mean: Even in this best-case scenario, budgets won’t return to 2020 levels. And the new paradigm will emphasize economic integration and self-reliance over dependency — because the old camp-based model demonstrably failed.

Here’s Why This Actually Matters Less Than You Think

In all three scenarios, the fundamental reality doesn’t change:

123 million people are displaced. Aid at its peak couldn’t serve them all.

Even when USAID was fully funded in 2022, humanitarian need exceeded available resources by 200%. The average displaced person lived in limbo for 20 years. Resettlement numbers were declining. The system was failing before it was dismantled.

The 2025 collapse didn’t create the crisis. It made visible what was already true: the humanitarian aid model cannot scale to meet global displacement.

So whether aid comes back or not, we need a different system.

The System That Works Whether Aid Returns or Not

This is where my answer to the NGO executive got interesting.

I told him: “Stop asking whether aid will return. Start asking what works in the absence of aid — because that’s the system we should be building either way.”

What works is economic integration through a blend of public and private capital.

Let me give you the data:

Uganda’s Opportunity Bank received a $9 million facility from the US Development Finance Corporation to lend to refugees and host community members. Results: 18,000 loans, 60,000 small enterprises created, 96.6% repayment rate. Not charity. Investment with real returns.

Kiva’s Refugee Investment Fund deployed $40.7 million to 51,400 refugee borrowers globally. Repayment rate: 96.6% — matching non-refugee borrowers. Turns out refugees are excellent credit risks when given the chance.

The EU’s Temporary Protection Directive granted 4.3 million Ukrainian refugees immediate right to work. Result: 25,000 businesses created in Poland alone in the first year. Ukrainian entrepreneurs filling labor shortages, paying taxes, contributing to growth.

This isn’t theory. It’s happening right now, at scale, generating returns.

Why This Approach Survives Any Scenario

If aid stays dead (Scenario 1): Private capital is the only game in town. What is called “refugee lens investing” becomes essential infrastructure.

If aid returns strategically (Scenario 2): Private capital complements limited government resources. Together they create sustainable solutions.

If aid fully returns (Scenario 3): Even the new aid paradigm emphasizes economic integration and livelihoods — exactly what refugee lens investing provides.

In other words: There is in fact hope, no matter the scenario.

The question isn’t whether to build this system. The question is how fast we can scale it.

What the Humanitarian Sector Gets Wrong

Most NGO executives I talk to are still operating in the old paradigm. They’re lobbying for aid restoration, hoping a new administration brings back USAID, writing op-eds about American moral leadership.

That’s an important fight, but it’s also the wrong fight.

Here’s what they should be doing instead:

1. Retool for investment and blended capital, not grants.

Your field relationships, your trust with displaced communities, your on-the-ground presence — these are assets that can source deal flow, provide technical assistance, and de-risk private investment. But only if you stop thinking like aid distributors and start thinking like investment intermediaries.

2. Partner with DFIs, not just donors.

The US Development Finance Corporation, European Investment Bank, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, Japan’s JICA — these institutions have $100+ billion in deployment capacity and mandates to invest in emerging markets. They need pipeline. You have it. Build the bridge.

3. Measure what investors care about.

Stop reporting on “people served.” Start reporting on businesses created, jobs generated, loan repayment rates, tax revenue contributed. The average investor doesn’t care about your inputs. They care about outcomes and returns.

4. Accept that displaced people are contributors, not just vulnerable people.

Refugees have a 13% entrepreneurship rate in the US versus 9% for native-born Americans. They paid $25 billion in taxes in 2019. They launch businesses at higher rates because they’ve already demonstrated extreme resilience and in many cases often have no other choice. And while not everyone can be or should be an entrepreneur, most people, regardless of where they come from or what their background is, wants to live a life of dignity and contribution. But for the world’s displaced, too often that’s an option because other people limit their potential by perpetuating narratives of need or fear.

If you’re still framing them as vulnerable populations in need of help, you may be part of the problem.

The Answer I Gave

So here’s what I told the NGO executive this morning:

“US foreign aid will probably come back in some form — smaller, more strategic, more focused on investment than grants. But it doesn’t matter. Because even at peak funding, aid couldn’t solve this problem. You’re asking the wrong question.

The right question is: How do we build a system where 123 million displaced people aren’t waiting for governments to act? Where they’re accessing capital, building businesses, creating jobs, and integrating into economies as contributors, not forced into cycles of aid dependency?

That system is refugee lens investing. And it works whether USAID exists or not.”

He paused. Then: “So what do we do?”

“Stop focusing on lobbying Congress. Start calling investors.”

What Happens Next

I’m not naive. I know the political fight for aid restoration must continue. Faith communities, advocacy groups, and parts of the development sector will push to rebuild USAID or something like it.

Good.

But while they’re focused on Washington, the rest of us should be focused on what can work now: deploying private capital to create economic opportunity for displaced people.

Because here’s the thing about displacement that most people still don’t understand:

Displacement is not a temporary emergency. It’s a permanent feature of the 21st century.

Climate change is accelerating. Conflict is rising. 123 million displaced people may become 200 million by 2030. Humanitarian aid — even if it comes back — will never scale to meet that need.

But capital markets can.

Global impact investing is a $1 trillion+ market. If even 1% of that capital deployed through a refugee lens, we’d have $10 billion in annual investment — more than USAID’s entire refugee budget at its peak and more than would be needed to fill UN Refugee Agency’s funding gap (last year’s gap was around $6.68 billion).

That’s not a fantasy. That’s math. And the infrastructure to make it happen is being built right now.

The System We’re Building

My co-author Christine Mahoney and I have spent the last decade documenting what refugee lens investing looks like in practice — from Uganda to Jordan, Mexico to Poland, New York to North Dakota.

Through our work with the Refugee Investment Network, we’ve identified six categories of investment (R1-R6), built due diligence frameworks, measured outcomes, and shown that this approach generates competitive returns while creating durable economic integration.

Our book, Banking on Belonging: Why Investing in Refugee Entrepreneurs Benefits Everyone publishes in July 2026. It’s the first comprehensive guide to refugee lens investing — the framework, the evidence, the playbook for practitioners.

But the book is just documentation of what’s already happening. The real work is scaling the system.

So Will Aid Come Back?

Yeah, probably. In some form. Eventually.

But here’s what I know for certain: 123 million people can’t wait to find out.

They need economic opportunity now. They need access to capital now. They need pathways to self-sufficiency now.

Refugee lens investing provides all three — whether governments are engaged or not, whether aid returns or not, whether the political winds shift or not.

That’s the system we’re building. And if you’re still waiting for USAID to save you, you’re already five years behind.

Last night, as millions tuned into Super Bowl LX at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, Bad Bunny didn’t just perform—he made history. The Puerto Rican superstar delivered the first-ever halftime show entirely in Spanish, transforming the world’s biggest sporting stage into a vibrant celebration of Latino heritage and Puerto Rican pride. Joined by icons like Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin, Bad Bunny’s set was a high-energy explosion of reggaeton rhythms, cultural nods, and unapologetic joy, from hits like “Baile Inolvidable” and “DTMF” to dancers channeling the island’s rich history. Wearing a cream Zara jersey emblazoned with “OCASIO” (his family name) and the number 64—speculated to honor his mother’s birth year—he spiked a football in triumph, symbolizing a cultural touchdown for Latinos everywhere.

This wasn’t just entertainment; it was a powerful statement on belonging. In a nation built by immigrants, Bad Bunny’s performance—outspoken as he is on U.S. immigration policies—reminded us that cultural contributions from newcomers enrich the American tapestry. But belonging isn’t just about culture; it’s economic too. What I call “economies of belonging” recognize that when we invest in immigrants and refugees, fostering their integration and success, the benefits ripple out to everyone—reducing divides, boosting growth, and even balancing budgets.

Enter a timely new study from the Cato Institute, released just days ago, that shatters myths about immigrants as fiscal burdens. Titled “Immigrants’ Recent Effects on Government Budgets: 1994–2023,” the report analyzes three decades of federal, state, and local data to show that immigrants—legal and undocumented alike—have been a net positive for America’s finances every single year since 1994. Far from “sucking us dry,” as some politicians have claimed, immigrants reduced the U.S. deficit by a staggering $14.5 trillion over that period. Without them, the deficit would have ballooned to $48 trillion, meaning they’ve cut it by nearly a third in real terms.

How? Immigrants pay more in taxes than the average person, thanks to sky-high employment rates that offset lower wages, leading to higher per capita incomes and tax contributions. They account for 14% of tax revenue but only 7% of government spending. Even if we somehow collected their taxes without spending a dime on them, the deficit would still be $20 trillion—proving immigrants aren’t causing our fiscal woes; they’re alleviating them. Public debt would exceed 200% of GDP without their contributions, a level that could spark a crisis.

On the spending side, immigrants cost less across the board. They save billions on education because they arrive as adults (average age 25), sparing the U.S. the expense of their schooling while still contributing as workers. Old-age benefits are lower too—many are ineligible for Social Security or Medicare due to status or late arrival. And despite higher poverty rates, they use welfare at average levels, largely because undocumented immigrants are barred from most programs. Even low-skilled immigrants without bachelor’s degrees reduced debt by $2.8 trillion, and undocumented ones by at least $1.7 trillion. Including second-generation kids—who are poised to become taxpayers—the total debt reduction hits $7.9 trillion.

This isn’t projection or snapshot; it’s hard data over 30 years, building on models from the National Academies of Sciences. It debunks nativist fears: Immigrants subsidize the government, helping cover fixed costs like military spending and debt interest that don’t rise with population. As the study notes, the average person is fiscally positive in this system—and immigrants outperform the average.

Bad Bunny’s show and the Cato findings converge on a truth: Immigrants don’t just belong; they elevate us. His performance highlighted cultural vitality, while the study quantifies economic strength. This is the essence of economies of belonging—systems where inclusion drives prosperity for all.

That’s why I’m excited to introduce my forthcoming book, Banking on Belonging: Why Investing in Refugee Entrepreneurs Benefits Everyone, co-authored with Christine Mahoney and published by Columbia University Press. Drawing from years of research and real-world examples, we make the case for targeted investments in refugee-led businesses. Refugees aren’t just survivors; they’re innovators. When we provide access to capital, training, and networks, they create jobs, spur innovation, and build resilient communities. Our book offers a roadmap for policymakers, investors, and philanthropists to harness this potential, showing how such investments yield outsized returns—not just financially, but in fostering social cohesion and economic growth.

Think about it: Refugees often arrive with entrepreneurial grit forged in adversity. In the U.S., they start businesses at higher rates than natives, revitalizing neighborhoods and economies. Yet barriers like credit access hold them back. By “banking on belonging,” we unlock their talents, turning potential fiscal contributors into engines of wealth. The Cato study proves immigrants already reduce deficits; imagine the impact if we supercharged refugee entrepreneurship.

In a polarized time, economies of belonging offer a unifying path. Bad Bunny’s halftime triumph wasn’t just a party—it was a reminder of what America gains from openness. Paired with data-driven insights like Cato’s, and actionable strategies from books like mine, we can build a future where immigration isn’t a wedge issue but a shared strength. Let’s invest in belonging; the returns will benefit everyone.

Bibliography

•  Acevedo, Yoselín. “Review: Bad Bunny brought Puerto Rico’s history and culture to a revolutionary Super Bowl show.” AP News, February 9, 2026. https://apnews.com/article/bad-bunny-super-bowl-2026-halftime-show-review-fbcd3dff50a4c6b0548bfa4712677eb0

•  Bier, David J., Michael Howard, and Julián Salazar. Immigrants’ Recent Effects on Government Budgets: 1994–2023. White Paper. Cato Institute, February 3, 2026. https://www.cato.org/white-paper/immigrants-recent-effects-government-budgets-1994-2023

•  Kluge, John, and Christine Mahoney. Banking on Belonging: Why Investing in Refugee Entrepreneurs Benefits Everyone. Columbia University Press, forthcoming 2026.

•  Pareles, Jon. “Bad Bunny’s Halftime History Lesson.” The New York Times, February 9, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/arts/music/bad-bunny-super-bowl-halftime-show-review.html

•  Ramos, Liam. “Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show performance redefined what it means to be an American patriot.” CNN, February 9, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/09/entertainment/bad-bunny-america-super-bowl-liam-ramos

•  Ruggieri, Melissa. “Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show brings powerful message, celebrities to world stage.” USA Today, February 9, 2026. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2026/02/08/bad-bunny-super-bowl-performance/88204912007

The largest single-day protest in U.S. history wasn’t a Soros-funded flop, as MAGA X posts claim with wild turnout lies (“2% showed up!”). It was a constitutional cry against a presidency that’s racked up over 60 documented power grabs since January 2025, shredding the guardrails of democracy. Let’s walk through why millions felt compelled to march, while MAGA’s echo chamber spins clownish conspiracies.

The executive branch is now a loyalty machine, not a public trust. Trump fired 17 inspectors general in his first week, no congressional notice, installing yes-men to dodge scrutiny. Ethics offices? Gutted. Lobbyist gift bans? Gone. “Schedule F” is back, axing 10,000 federal workers for disloyalty, including the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief for an unflattering jobs report. MAGA calls this “draining the swamp”; it’s a king stacking his court, crushing accountability.

The judiciary—meant to check power—is treated like a pesky vassal. Over 160 court orders defied by July, from federal grants to deportations to habeas corpus, even Supreme Court rulings. Trump attacks judges, files baseless complaints, demands impeachments, and his allies float court budget cuts. MAGA spins it as “fighting activists,” but it’s a middle finger to the rule of law, acting like the president’s word trumps all.

Congress, the people’s voice, is a doormat. Trump froze all federal spending day one, violating the Impoundment Control Act, then siphoned billions from EV programs, refugee aid, and Head Start for his border obsession—no vote needed. Tariffs via emergency powers, “pocket veto” threats, an $11 billion blue-state fund freeze during the shutdown? It’s robbing Congress’s constitutional purse, yet MAGA X posts call the rallies “anti-democracy” for daring to notice.

Free speech? Only for loyalists. The Associated Press is banned from the White House; networks face “defamation” suits; NPR and PBS get FCC probes and funding cuts, shuttering stations. “Enemy of the people” rhetoric fuels threats, tanking our press freedom score. MAGA’s take? Protesters are “terrorists” in clown costumes, not citizens using their First Amendment rights.

Civil society’s under siege: 32 probes on nonprofits, loan forgiveness yanked for “illegal” advocacy, universities like Harvard defunded over DEI, students deported for protesting. Law firms lose clearances for anti-Trump cases; Los Angeles saw Marines and Guard with smoke grenades at rallies. Yesterday’s peaceful 100,000-strong NYC march faced “heavy force” threats, yet MAGA ties it to “Antifa invasions.” Delusional.

Elections are gasping: January 6 pardons, 2020 fraud lies, third-term teases, voter purges via citizenship rules, dropped DOJ voting rights cases, federal election takeover pushes. It’s entrenchment, not security, but MAGA insists it’s “the people’s will”—ignoring the 7 million who marched.

Immigration’s a due-process slaughter: 1798 Alien Enemies Act for no-hearing deportations, birthright citizenship attacks, visa yanks for scholars’ speech, student detentions at protests. It’s executive whim as law—purely kingly.

Services are collateral damage: DEI bans, NIH cuts, 20% FEMA slash, climate fund axing, the “Big Beautiful Bill” gutting healthcare and aid, Education Department abolition, book bans in DoD schools. It’s ideology from on high, not governance.

States get trampled: Sanctuary fund threats, energy lawsuits, California’s Guard hijacked, DOJ intimidation letters, D.C. police takeover, surveillance bloat, Musk’s unelected “efficiency” squad slashing at will. Federalism’s a joke.

Scholars warn we’re sliding toward autocracy; Freedom House scores plummet. Over 60 actions, cataloged by watchdogs, fuel this fear. Yet MAGA’s in a parallel universe—poop-jet memes, “hate rally” smears, turnout denial. That AI video isn’t funny; it’s a confession of kingly arrogance.

I’m no saint, just someone who sees the Constitution as our North Star. The “No Kings” marchers—veterans, families, Democrats like Sanders, nonpartisans alike—aren’t hating America; they’re saving it, peacefully, massively. MAGA’s absurd denial, cheering a leader who treats the Constitution like a prop, is the real betrayal. The founders fought for a republic, not this sideshow. Wake up, or history will mark you as the courtiers who let democracy become a punchline.

Let’s start with why this matters. Nature isn’t just nice to have; it’s a cornerstone of our wellbeing. Research shows that 120 minutes a week in green spaces boosts health, cuts stress, and lowers the risk of mental health disorders. It sharpens our focus, lowers blood pressure, and sparks physical activity, while easing anxiety and depression. A review of over 800 studies found that simple acts—mindful walks, listening to birdsong, or sitting under trees—lift our mood and inspire us to protect the environment. For those of us juggling the grind of modern life, urban parks and green roofs can restore mental clarity, offering a lifeline to resilience and joy.

But nature does more than soothe—it speaks to our soul. Time outdoors stirs awe, connection, and a sense of purpose that no app or office can replicate. Studies show it reduces isolation, boosts mindfulness, and even strengthens our immune systems. In the wild, we find meaning, creativity, and a reminder that we’re part of something bigger. This spiritual lift isn’t just feel-good fluff; it’s a spark for innovation and hope, critical in a world that often feels fragmented.

Our survival hinges on this bond. Disconnection fuels the ecological crisis—less nature in our lives means less care for the planet. Since the 1950s, urban sprawl has widened this gap, correlating with worse health outcomes and a collective amnesia about our reliance on ecosystems for food, air, and water. Richardson nails it: low nature connectedness is a root cause of environmental destruction. If we don’t feel nature, we won’t fight for it. And without that fight, we risk everything.

So, what is nature connectedness? It’s not just hiking on weekends—it’s feeling nature as part of who you are. It’s the emotional and mental tie that makes you pause at a sunset, plant a garden, or advocate for cleaner rivers. It’s about seeing yourself in the ecosystem, not apart from it, and letting that spark action. This mindset shift is what turns apathy into stewardship.

Here’s the exciting part: we can rebuild this connection, and it’s not as hard as you think. Start with small, intentional steps—smell a flower, walk barefoot on grass, or sketch a tree. These sensory moments boost wellbeing and deepen your bond. Make it a habit: journal about nature, meditate in a park, or join a community garden. Research shows these activities, especially when they engage your emotions, significantly increase connectedness. For lasting impact, get kids involved—forest schools and family nature outings pass this love down, breaking the cycle of urban isolation. On a bigger scale, push for policies that transform cities with green spaces, renewable energy, and nature-focused education. If we act now, this shift could become self-sustaining in 25 years.

Entrepreneurs and business leaders, you have a unique role here. I’ve seen how innovative businesses can drive change, and this is your moment. Embed nature into your company’s DNA—think biophilic offices with living walls, team retreats in green spaces, or “nature champions” who organize daily outdoor micro-breaks. Make nature-positive goals a core strategy: measure your team’s nature connectedness, partner with conservation groups, and choose suppliers who prioritize biodiversity. These moves don’t just help the planet—they boost creativity, reduce burnout, and attract talent who want purpose-driven workplaces. By modeling this shift, you’ll inspire customers and competitors alike, proving that profitability and planetary health go hand in hand.

There’s a spark of hope: Richardson notes that nature words are creeping back into books, down from a 60.6% decline in 1990 to 52.4% today. Is this a cultural shift, a nod to eco-awareness, or a deeper spiritual pull? Whatever it is, let’s seize it. We’ve drifted too far, but we can choose to return—to nature, to ourselves, to a future where both thrive. As I’ve learned from championing impact-driven causes, change starts with bold vision and practical steps. So, step outside today, feel the earth, and let’s build a world where we remember that we’re part of nature too.

#nature #environmentalpolicy #noplanetb #pachamama

Bibliography/Sources

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The E.U.'s roadmap is groundbreaking in its structure and scope. Released on July 7, 2025, it outlines a phased approach to establishing a voluntary market for nature credits, where actions like restoring wetlands, expanding forests, or enhancing soil health generate certified units that businesses can purchase to offset their environmental impacts. From 2025 to 2026, the Commission will conduct market assessments and launch pilot projects funded by the E.U., ensuring transparency and integrity to avoid greenwashing. By 2027, E.U.-wide certification rules will be in place, harmonizing standards across member states. Complementing this, the E.U. has pledged to dedicate 10% of its budget to biodiversity by 2026-2027 and double external spending to €7 billion, fostering public-private partnerships that could scale investments exponentially. This isn't altruism; it's recognition that nature's services—like pollination, water purification, and carbon sequestration—underpin over half of global GDP, valued at $44 trillion. By putting nature "on the balance sheet," as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen emphasized, the E.U. is creating incentives for private sector innovation while rewarding farmers, foresters, and landowners for their stewardship.

Contrast this with the U.S., where biodiversity funding falls woefully short, exacerbating a domestic financing gap that hampers economic growth and heightens vulnerability to climate shocks. Reports highlight that insufficient investment in nature could undermine key sectors, from agriculture (where bee declines cost farmers billions) to tourism (where habitat loss erodes coastal economies). While promising steps exist—such as Qarlbo Biodiversity's pioneering sale of voluntary biodiversity credits in May 2025 and events like the Natural Capital Investment Americas conference—these are fragmented and lack national coordination. The U.S. Treasury's recent support for high-integrity voluntary carbon markets signals openness to market-based solutions, but without a dedicated nature credits framework, we're missing opportunities to bridge our portion of the $700-900 billion global shortfall. Adopting an E.U.-style system could integrate with existing tools like the Inflation Reduction Act, channeling funds into restoration projects that create jobs in rural communities and bolster supply chain resilience.

The benefits for the U.S. would be multifaceted and profound. Economically, nature credits would unlock private investment, turning biodiversity from a liability into an asset class that attracts capital and drives innovation in sustainable technologies. Companies adopting nature-positive strategies could enjoy higher investor confidence, reduced risks from ecosystem collapse, and enhanced reputations—benefits already touted in E.U. projections for market growth through 2030. Environmentally, it would accelerate restoration efforts, such as rewilding prairies in the Great Plains or protecting wetlands along the Gulf Coast, mitigating floods and droughts that cost the U.S. billions yearly. Socially, it would empower American heroes: the farmers implementing regenerative practices, indigenous communities safeguarding lands, and conservationists preserving habitats, providing them with tangible economic rewards rather than mere recognition. Moreover, by fostering public-private partnerships, it could generate new jobs in green sectors, from monitoring ecosystems to developing certification tech, while addressing inequities in environmental burdens.

Critics might argue that nature credits risk commodifying the environment or enabling greenwashing, as seen in some carbon market pitfalls. Yet the E.U.'s emphasis on robust certification, additionality, and durability—ensuring credits represent real, verifiable gains—provides safeguards that the U.S. could adapt and improve upon. With bipartisan interest in rural economies and national security (healthy ecosystems buffer against resource scarcity), this isn't a partisan issue—it's a pragmatic one.

The E.U. has lit the path; now the U.S. must seize the moment. Congress and the Trump administration—or future administrations—should prioritize developing a national nature credits roadmap, starting with pilot programs in biodiversity hotspots like the Everglades or Appalachian forests. By doing so, we can reclaim global leadership in sustainability, safeguard our prosperity, and ensure a thriving planet for future generations. As von der Leyen aptly put it: "We have to put nature on the balance sheet. That’s exactly what nature credits do." America, let's make it our balance sheet too.

Years ago, as an undergraduate at Columbia University, I delved into J.R.R. Tolkien's worlds under the guidance of the late professor Karl Kroeber, whose explorations of fantasy and ecology illuminated how literature critiques human hubris. Now, amid gathering political storms—from AI ethics battles to surveillance scandals and the Trump administration's aggressive rollback of environmental protections—I find myself returning to Tolkien's tales, discovering in them a stark caution for our digital age. In Middle-earth, the palantíri—ancient seeing-stones meant for distant communication—become snares of illusion and domination. Saruman, the fallen wizard, is ensnared by Sauron's gaze through one; Denethor spirals into despair from obsessive monitoring. These artifacts, Tolkien warned, twist knowledge into control, isolating users and eroding free will. Today, Peter Thiel's Palantir Technologies, named after those very stones, has surged past $150 in recent weeks, closing at $148.42 on July 22 amid market volatility, on track for record revenue with Q1 alone hitting $884 million, up 39% year-over-year. Its AI platforms, used for intelligence analytics, migrant tracking by ICE, and homeland security data fusion, mirror Tolkien's parable: tools of insight repurposed for surveillance, risking a society where privacy dissolves and power concentrates. Under the Trump administration, these tools expand amid policies that open public lands for drilling, weaken endangered species protections, and block offshore wind energy—using data-driven oversight to enable the very industrial ravages Tolkien decried.

Tolkien, a World War I veteran haunted by mechanized warfare, harbored a deep distrust of modernity's "mind of metal and wheels." In his letters, he decried labor-saving machines as breeders of "new and horrible evil," likening them to the atomic bomb's madness—a symptom of humanity's overreach (Letters 75, 102). His stories aren't escapist fantasy but ecological and moral fables, where industrialization scars the land and corrupts the soul. Palantir's growth, fueled by contracts that integrate vast datasets for predictive policing and military ops, embodies this: a digital Isengard, where algorithms uproot human agency much like Saruman's factories despoil the Shire. This rings truer in 2025, as Trump's Project 2025-aligned policies—launching over 100 attacks on environmental safeguards in the first 100 days, increasing U.S. timber production by 25%, and repealing climate-focused executive orders—accelerate habitat destruction, worsen pollution, and undermine wildlife protections, potentially leveraging Palantir's tech to monitor opposition or streamline extraction permits.

At the core is a philosophical rift. Thiel, Palantir's co-founder, channels Ayn Rand's objectivism—a creed of radical self-interest, where entrepreneurs are heroic innovators unbound by collective ties. Rand's atheism and exaltation of the individual contrast sharply with Tolkien's humanism, rooted in communal bonds and humility. His hobbits prevail through fellowship and simple virtues, not technological supremacy or ego-driven ambition. Thiel's pivot to national conservatism, bolstering Palantir's "defense moat" with government partnerships, evokes Saruman's betrayal: wisdom allied with machinery, birthing unintended tyrannies. Thiel's support for Trump amplifies this, as administration policies favor deregulation that harms the natural world—e.g., ending offshore wind projects, easing pipeline safety, and changing endangered species rules to allow economic assessments over ecological needs—prioritizing profit over the stewardship Tolkien saw as essential to human dignity.

As Palantir expands in 2025, Tolkien's wisdom urges us to question tech's unchecked ascent. His tales remind us that power, even data-wrapped, corrupts—fostering division over connection, paranoia over trust. In the face of Trump's environmental assaults, which experts warn could decelerate global decarbonization, endanger species, and drive up long-term energy costs, we must heed this: technology like Palantir shouldn't enable the plunder of our planet. In an era of digital shadows, we might shatter these modern palantíri by demanding ethical AI governance, robust privacy laws, and a return to human-scale communities that protect both people and the earth. As Tolkien might toast, may the hobbits "outlast the Sarumans and see spring again in the trees." For in rejecting the dominion of Palantir and the despoiling of our world, we honor Tolkien's truth: true power lies not in surveillance or exploitation, but in the humble bonds that sustain both humanity and the earth.

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