Post date 6 Apr 2026 (original LinkedIn date)
Original LinkedIn version· 1,760 words
‘Proud Mary’, by Creedence Clearwater Revival, from their album ‘Bayou Country’, January 1969
The song ‘Proud Mary’ speaks to a radical life change, leaving a structured “good job in the city” to live “rollin’ on the river,” which (with some imagination) could be interpreted as a change in personal systems. I’ve often thought about Rebalance Earth as working within the current system, trying to make it behave a little better. I imagine and hope that there are other working on the new system that will eventually replace the current one.
However, the Berkana Institute’s Two Loops model confirms that maybe something more ambitious is going on in the background. Its central claim is that system change rarely comes from the dominant model reforming itself in time. More often, the old system begins to lose coherence while a new one emerges alongside it. The important work happens in overlapping time. Pioneers begin building what comes next, with network weavers connect scattered efforts into something more visible and coherent. Others translate between the two worlds, helping capital, institutions and language move from one logic to another. That feels very close to the territory that I feel Rebalance Earth is operating in.
The dominant financial system still largely treats nature as external. At best, nature appears as a risk to disclose, a compliance issue to manage, or a social good to support once the real economic activity has already been defined elsewhere. Even where progress has been made, the framing is still often very defensive. Nature is a constraint, a cost, or a source of liability. But that frame is now surely breaking down.
The deeper problem is that the economy has been built on ecological function while treating that function as either free or basically invisible. Forests regulate water, wetlands attenuate floods, peatlands store carbon, estuaries buffer storm impacts, and healthy soils support yields, infiltration and resilience. Biodiversity is not sitting politely outside the economy waiting to be protected; rather it is quite clearly part of the operating system that makes the economy possible.
This is where Stanford’s work on Gross Ecosystem Product becomes so useful. GEP is compelling not because it solves everything, but because it makes a basic truth harder to ignore. Ecosystems are productive; they generate real value, and they do so across multiple dimensions, many of which conventional GDP either misses altogether or captures only after ecological value has already been degraded, extracted or converted elsewhere. That matters because once ecological function is recognised as productive, the conversation changes. The question is no longer simply how to account for damage. Instead it becomes how to recognise, protect, restore, govern and finance the living systems from which economic value flows. That is exactly where I believe Rebalance Earth sits.
Our work is already doing more than making a conventional sustainability case. It says nature is no longer free and invisible. It argues for nature as an asset class and insists on operating with velocity because the task is too urgent for slow institutional drift. And it is explicitly trying to influence how capital flows in the real world. That is not just a call for marginal improvement, but rather an attempt to build a different financial logic around ecological reality.
Seen through the Two Loops lens, RE is not simply a participant in the old loop. It is helping construct the investible grammar of the new one. In this sense our work is pioneering because it is developing structures in which restoration can produce revenues, resilience can become contractable, and ecosystems can be treated not as amenity value at the edge of the economy but as infrastructure within it. We collectively are a network weaver because none of this works without linking actors who too often sit apart. Land managers, local communities, insurers, utilities, regulators, asset owners, public agencies and corporates all depend, in different ways, on the same underlying ecological functions. Someone has to connect those dependencies into a coherent financial proposition.
And RE is a translator because it is working through the language incumbent capital can actually hear, ie cash flow, avoided loss, resilience, duration, contractual revenue, asset creation, portfolio relevance, etc. Institutional capital does not move because it has been morally scolded. It moves when a new category becomes legible and compelling. This is where thomas morgan‘s BASIN formulation becomes so helpful. “We are not financializing nature. We are naturalizing finance”, he states. And that strikes me as a very important distinction.
The phrase ‘financialising nature’ carries an understandable discomfort. It suggests that nature is somehow pure until markets arrive to price it, package it and trade it. But that is historically naïve. As Morgan points out, finance was built on nature from the outset. Timber, cotton, coal, grain, fisheries, soils, water, minerals, land. Economic value has always rested on ecological value. The problem is not that nature is only now entering the financial system. It is that the financial system we inherited was largely designed around extraction, depletion and invisibility.
So the real task is not to drag nature into finance for the first time. It is to redesign finance so that it begins to reflect the characteristics of the living systems it depends on. That is what makes the BASIN argument so relevant to RE’s work. The idea of financial instruments that work more like nature, diverse, place-based, adaptive, multi-dimensional, resilient and tied to ecological ground truth, is not some crypto detour from the real work. It is part of the same broader transition, in the sense that it asks what finance would look like/could look like if it were anchored not to depletion, but to renewal instead.
Rebalance Earth’s work is not identical to the tokenised or protocol-based models BASIN discusses, and it does not need to be. But the underlying direction of travel is closely related. Both start from the recognition that ecosystems generate multiple forms of value simultaneously. Both reject the idea that one metric or one instrument can fully express ecological reality. Both are trying, in different ways, to build mechanisms that allow economic systems to recognise, reward and sustain ecological function rather than consume it unpriced.
That is also why the distinction between measurement and mechanism matters so much. Aggregate valuation, whether through ecosystem service estimates or a concept like GEP, is important. It helps establish that nature is economically productive. But valuation alone does not move capital. A number on a page is not yet a cash flow, a contract, a risk transfer mechanism, or an investment structure. To move from recognition to allocation, you need institutions and instruments. And that is where RE’s practical contribution sits.
We are trying to answer questions that sit beyond valuation, though valuation remains important. Who benefits from a restored catchment, who should pay, on what basis, over what term, and against which evidence base. And there’s more - through what contractual form and with what distribution of upside and risk. These are not abstract questions; rather they are the actual bridge between ecological reality and capital formation.
Put differently, GEP helps us see that ecosystems produce value. The Two Loops model helps us understand why a new system has to emerge around that fact. And the naturalising finance argument helps clarify the design challenge. The job is not merely to prove that nature matters. It is to build financial architectures that behave less like extractive monocultures and more like living systems. And that has several implications.
First, diversity matters. Nature does not run on a single species, a single pathway, or a single point of failure. Nor should a mature nature-finance system depend on one market, one buyer class, or one revenue stream. Carbon matters, but it cannot be the whole story. Water, flood resilience, drought mitigation, habitat function, regulatory compliance value, public benefit and local economic resilience all matter too.
Second, place matters. Ecological value is always specific before it is general. A catchment, estuary, peatland or urban wetland is not interchangeable in any simple way with another. That creates a tension for finance, which likes standardisation and fungibility. The future system will have to handle both. It will need enough standardisation for capital to move, but enough fidelity to place that the thing being financed is not stripped of ecological meaning.
Third, resilience matters more than efficiency. Modern finance has often been organised like a monoculture, optimised for scale, speed and narrow forms of return. Living systems are different. They rely on redundancy, layered relationships, feedback, adaptation and diversity. If nature restoration is genuinely to become investible infrastructure, then the financial structures around it will need to become more tolerant of complexity and more capable of recognising systemic value. That, to me, is why Rebalance Earth is best understood not as a firm merely improving the old system from within, but as part of the overlap where the next one is being assembled.
It still works through institutions that exist today. It still has to speak the language of asset owners, fiduciaries, regulators and contracts. But it is doing so in service of a different organising principle. One in which nature is not treated as an externality to be priced after the fact, but as productive infrastructure whose condition shapes the stability, insurability and investibility of the economy itself. That is why the work can look both conservative and radical at the same time. Conservative in method, because it is grounded in contracts, structures, evidence and capital discipline. Radical in implication, because once ecological function is recognised as productive capital, the old categories begin to look thin. Conservation is no longer just moral repair, and restoration is no longer just a public subsidy case. Nature is no longer a decorative beneficiary of growth. Instead it becomes part of the balance sheet logic of a functioning economy. That feels, to me, like second-loop work, according to the Berkana model. It’s not about abandoning the current system in favour of slogans. Nor pretending the old one can simply be nudged into adequacy. But building, in the overlap, the institutions and instruments that allow a different logic of value to become real.
Perhaps that is the simplest way to put it. Rebalance Earth is not trying to financialise nature. We are trying, in a very practical way, to naturalise finance. We are both part of the old, and helping fashion the new.
References
Berkana Institute/Commonland, various materials on the Two Loops model
Stanford University, Gross Ecosystem Product materials
Thomas Morgan, BASIN Natural Capital, “naturalizing finance: characteristics”, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/naturalizing-finance-characteristics-basin-natural-capital-3iazc/?trackingId=P2F5%2BH6aboKF%2BfX25kX20Q%3D%3D