In this episode, I speak with my good friend, Kaleo Fernandez. He currently works as a Business Development Manager at ProService Hawai’i. We previously worked together at Renoster. We discuss:
How growing up in the Hawaiian diaspora shaped his approach to bridging indigenous wisdom with modern climate solutions.
Why the Polynesian Voyaging Society's message that "Earth is our canoe" resonates deeply with climate action.
How his experience working on corporate sustainability at Watershed revealed the practical challenges of implementing climate solutions.
Why measuring and pricing biodiversity presents fundamentally different challenges than carbon accounting.
The delicate balance of bringing conscious capitalism to Hawai’i while respecting historical wounds.
How his spiritual journey through Buddhism and other traditions informs his approach to environmental stewardship.
David Valerio: How does your spirituality impact your view of the natural world and how you think about engaging with it?
Kaleo Fernandez: It's a very interesting question, and one I've been thinking very deeply about. It has evolved over the course of my entire life.
My dad was a religious studies major in college and grew up as a devout Catholic. He attended Catholic school all his life. Upon studying religious studies in college he came to understand a variety of other religious contexts outside of his childhood conditioning. After being introduced to the likes of Joseph Campbell and other inter-religious figures, he decided that he would introduce my siblings and I to a lot different religious philosophies, worldviews, and approaches to life.
I would describe myself as a salad bowl spiritually, in that I am deeply engaged with spiritual questions on a daily basis but tend to pull from a variety of traditions and try to synthesize them into my own worldview. I tend to lean towards Eastern philosophy, Buddhism in particular, because I think there are multiple doorways into the great mystery of things. There are the top doorways, which have to do with metaphysical questions about the nature of reality, the universe, creation, et cetera. Then there are the bottom doorways, which focus on ethical questions, how to live your life, and seeking to understand the different qualities of your mind. The latter were the most fruitful for me as I started to explore these sorts of questions.
David Valerio: It's Interesting that your father was a religious studies major. It sounds like he exposed you to the gamut of world religions. What did that look like practically?
Kaleo Fernandez: We were the kind of family who would have Alan Watts podcasts on in the background while we were doing chores, have Joseph Campbell books laying around the house, and watch his TV series where he engaged with different interviewees on the deep mysteries of the universe and mythology.
My mom was into new agey Christianity. We went to Sunday school with her community the most, and that was the kind of religious practice we engaged with on the weekends. Over the dinner table we often had conversations about the difference between Islam and Christianity, the difference between different sects of Christianity, and the difference between different kinds of Buddhist philosophy. It was an atmosphere of open discussion, a lot of which was driven by my childhood curiosity.
My dad was and is a salesperson as well, and he asked great discovery questions. We talked about sales discovery a lot. He was able to draw a lot of that curiosity out of us at a young age.
David Valerio: I like that connection you made to sales. What do you think about the overlap between sales and spirituality? How do you apply your philosophical training to the work you do day to day?
Kaleo Fernandez: Coming out of college as a philosophy major at Berkeley, I had all sorts of big questions about the world and how to fix all of its problems. The last thing I wanted to be was a salesperson. My secret dream throughout undergrad was of finding a cave in the Himalayas, robing up, taking a vow of poverty, and dedicating myself to the teaching of the Buddha.
I graduated early, in the midst of COVID and all of the social movements going on at that time. I didn't really know what I was going to do with my life. I figured I would learn more about where my family comes from, which in part is Hawai’i. That's one of the ethnicities. So I came to Hawai’i and very shortly realized that in order to sustain a life here, I'd need to get a job. My dad said I should try a sales development role. He said I didn't have to do it forever, but I could do it remotely and it would be fun. He said it would be like a paid MBA. I bought that and ended up getting a job in marketing technology sales.
Growing up in a progressive part of the world, I had a lot of questions about capitalism and its discontents. But I came to believe that capitalism is the best of the worst evils in terms of how to allocate goods and services in society. It's an enduring need that we need to have a system to facilitate. In the better versions of itself, it could be a really powerful agent for change. I found that through sales development, we were able to move markets and move the world on a different trajectory.
I was in text marketing technology, which was a new category at the time. At the beginning of the arc of the company we thought that there was no way anyone would sign up for text messages from brands. I saw that as we continued to reach out to more and more brands, and their customers were signing up more and more, that there was this shift in public consciousness with respect to their preferences. I thought that this could actually be a really good way to solve climate change and other world problems, so long as the economic incentives were properly aligned.
So I thought that if I could scale conversations with the most important stakeholders in the private sector on climate solutions via sales development, selling and closing deals, then I think that it could affect positive change. I developed a dream about walking up to the front doorstep of large banks, financial institutions, and corporations to speak with to them about how we might be able to rectify our relationship with Planet Earth, and was very fortunate to be able to pursue that dream at Watershed.
To your point about discovery, philosophy is all about questions and breaking down claims to assess them. I find sales to be the embodied experience of doing philosophy in a business context. So funnily enough, it actually did end up being quite an applicable degree for the career I've wound up in.
David Valerio: It's amazing how that works. I studied Earth science in undergrad and in grad. Like, what does that have to do with business? But I've found that the way it makes you think in systems, about how they are interconnected, and what levers you can pull to change them is very applicable in the business context as well. The human economy is ultimately a system that facilitates flows of materials and energy. I think about engaging with the capitalist economy from that perspective.
I also used to be left-libertarian, philosophical anarchist that sympathized with degrowth ideology. I thought that the only way to positively impact the natural world was to restrict consumption. Then I realized that wasn’t going to happen, as it doesn’t accord with human nature. With that being the case, I figured I would have to figure out how to do good in the world business even if with hesitation.
I want to go back to something you had mentioned earlier, the higher and lower gates of philosophy. I likewise was attracted back to my Catholic faith through the lower gates of practical ethics. I couldn't just live in empty nihilism and be satisfied with my life. But then by engaging with those lower questions I became more interested in the higher ones. Could you expand on this concept and what your own path looked like?
Kaleo Fernandez: Certainly. Its not a novel concept that I can take credit for, but I'm forgetting the name of the teacher who I heard it from.1 The idea is that the higher doors have to do with what's true, and that as you get deeper into dividing up the nature of reality and consciousness that it's increasingly harder to tell with clarity what is fundamentally true.
We tend to describe things with different metaphors, and the idea of indivisible atoms is an incredibly helpful on. But then as you peel apart the so-called indivisible parts, there seems to be more mysteries to find. I think we have very strong indicators about the nature of reality, so I'm not denying that there can be progress in knowledge. But I am saying that there is some mystery left over after all is said and done.
A Zen saying goes that all fingers point toward the same moon. Each finger is the representation of an object that's pointing at the thing in and of itself, which is ultimately unspeakable. And that thing is the totality, the unity, the whole.
I found that in my philosophy studies I was studying sorts of different metaphors that were all pointing at the same moon from different directions. I decided not to pry at the mysteries of that moon any longer, and to focus more on the lower doors that have to do with ethical principles—how to live your life, how to be a kind and generous person, how to be a gentle spirit, and try to do good in the world. Those are much more approachable questions.
For many folks, the term spirituality makes them somewhat uncomfortable. But I think we can all get on board with the idea trying to develop our character, and doing good things in our lives rather than bad things.
David Valerio: I've always been a deep seeker of truth, and have gotten angry when things did not ascribe to what I thought was true. When I came to my faith, I encountered that same blockers that you mentioned. What were all of these indications in creation pointing at? I couldn't find it, and wasn't sure if I'd every be able to do so.
I've never read Kierkegaard, but when I do read him I suspect I'm going to sympathize with his leap of faith idea. The idea that you just have to jump with fear and trembling into belief. It's not so much a rational process based on argumentation and reason. I chose to believe. And in choosing to believe, I began to act on those beliefs. True belief came afterwards.
Kaleo Fernandez: In Buddhism, and Eastern tradition more generally, there's an idea of the thing behind all spirituality that is described as unsayable, unspeakable, and ultimately impossible to describe. But in these traditions, and in Western traditions as well, there is a way to encounter that indescribable thing, which is through direct experience. Through deep states of meditation and alternate states of consciousness. Over and over again across history, you see folks who climb to the top of a mountain, sit down for a while, maybe years or decades. Then all of a sudden they seem to have a closer understanding of this indescribable thing than what normal folks moving through their daily lives tend to have.
I did a lot of meditation in college and experimented with the contours of my mind in different ways, and I started to have some clues into the direct experience thesis in a novice way. That was enough for me to realize that the more important question to pry at, and to more diligently scrutinize within yourself, has to do with who you are as a person, how to be in the world rather than pushing at the mysteries of things.
David Valerio: You have a strong relationship with the natural world. How did that love and appreciation come into being? How did your growing up with Filipino Hawaiian roots shape the form that your relationship with nature took?
Kaleo Fernandez: I grew up in Santa Cruz, California. I was a surfer all my life. Santa Cruz is a scrappy, surfery skater place where people tend to spend their time outdoors doing funky things, rather than being indoors working in the business world. I always loved the ocean. I was a junior lifeguard when I was growing up.
When I came to Hawai’i, I got involved with Polynesian voyaging through the Ohana Wa'a, which means Polynesian Voyaging Society in English. Wa'a means canoe in Hawaiian. What these folks do is use traditional voyaging methods to navigate their canoe around the world and engage with different indigenous communities about how to protect the planet and our oceans, as well as make sure that indigenous peoples have a voice in the conversation around climate solutions. I found that to be incredibly inspiring.
After college, when I didn't know what I was going to do with my life, I figured I might as well go learn from these people about where I come from and maybe where I'm going. It seemed like voyagers must be quite good at getting where they are going.
That totally altered my entire relationship with nature. I had been meditating about how to protect creation while pondering its great mysteries for many years before that. But when I got out on the ocean and saw open horizons out in front of me, learned from folks who have been using the stars to conduct celestial navigation for generations, and engaged with other indigenous peoples who have and incredibly privileged understanding of their corner of the Earth through having been there for thousands and thousands of years... I saw just how indescribably mysterious the creation is, especially in each of its little corners.
I decided that after volunteering with the canoe for the voyaging society, that I would dedicate the next chapter of my life to doing what I could to help solve climate change. That's what led me to work with Watershed, then with Renoster.
David Valerio: Were you actually traveling with the voyagers around the Pacific or were you supporting the canoe? Tell me more about that experience.
Kaleo Fernandez: Here's what happened. I dropped everything to move to Hawai’i, and found a little place to stay with an uncle who I had met maybe twice in my life. A couple of weeks after I moved I put on the Moana soundtrack to put myself up and walked up to the office where the crew typically stays.
This was coming out of COVID. I was envisioning coming up and saying, "I am Kaleo Fernandez. I will board your canoe. You will teach me how to voyage, and we will save the Earth." The thing a young 22 year old would think. I got there and no one was there. I found a couple of phone numbers on the wall next to where the dock and ended up making my first cold calls. I eventually got a hold of a guy who helped manage the dock and he told me the people I needed to email.
I reached out and eventually showed up to the dock one day. It was very Mr. Miyagi-like for the first several months, I helped sand the canoe and take care of it. In the Ohana, in the community, we say the Earth is our canoe. So the way that you treat the canoe is the way you'll treat the Earth.
They really want you to have experience taking care of the canoe before you go out and try to sail with it. So for months I was showing up tying knots, moving stuff around, sanding the canoe, getting to know the crew, attended classroom sessions to learn about the different parts of the canoe, learned how to read the stars, and then they eventually took me out on a couple of sailing trips around the island.
But in the midst of all that, I started to realize that where I might actually be most helpful for the canoe was not on the canoe. If I could help catalyze climate action in the private sector, especially across corporate America and in large financial institutions, perhaps that would be more impactful. I found that very few Indigenous folks were able to speak the language of that world. Whereas for me, being a member of the native Hawaiian diaspora, I was living a Hannah Montana existence anyways where I had one foot in one world and one foot in another.
What we were trying to do when I was first volunteering with the crew was to prepare the canoes, Hōkūle‘a and Hikianalia, for a four and a half year voyage around the Pacific, which they are now on. They are crossing hundreds of thousands of nautical miles to meet with hundreds of indigenous people all over Oceania and the Pacific Rim, in order to engage with them on how to protect Moananuiākea, which is our word for the Pacific Ocean.
I decided that, as much as I wanted to be barefoot on that canoe under the stars, where I would actually be most helpful in solving climate change would be in an office in San Francisco, helping charter Watershed. So I back to San Francisco for a few years while we were building out the initial go-to-market team. I believed that the first domino for climate solutions had to do with helping companies wrap their arms around the extent of their own potential impact on climate solutions, which involved helping them develop their own measurement, reporting, and reduction plans.
After we built out the initial infrastructure there, I continued to follow my mission statement and came back to Hawai’i, where I transitioned in to my role at Renoster. Unlocking transparency in the nature-based solutions space felt like the next major thing that needed to be unblocked. We need to scale engineered solutions and make them cost-effective, and fix the transparency issues in the nature-based space so that companies feel comfortable investing in nature.
David Valerio: That's an amazing connection, going from the very embodied experience of working on the canoe to the realization that the culture of canoe is a symbol for the whole Earth. And that the best way you could serve the canoe of the Earth was by working on climate in private industry.
Have you found that shift to be satisfying? Do you sometimes wish that you were on the literal canoe? Or do you feel that you are on the path you should be pursuing?
Kaleo Fernandez: As much as I would love to be barefoot out on the canoe under the stars, it's not where I would be most helpful to its mission. At Watershed I tried to bring a lot of the values and teachings that I had learned on the canoe into the office, which I started to call our canoe. I emphasized that the energy we bring to this canoe is the same energy that's going to travel around the world and influence the sustainability programs of the corporations we were working with. We thus needed to treat our office community with reverence each and every day. I hope that rippled through the culture within the four walls of Watershed. What we were able to accomplish in the last three years with respect to catalyzing real climate action in the private sector is something that I will be deeply proud of for the rest of this life and the next.
The Polynesian Voyaging Society will always be there. The canoe needs volunteers to stay afloat just like the world needs people who care to stay afloat. But I believe that in Hawai’i there is so much of the spirit of Aloha that the canoe will be well taken care of for many generations. So it's certainly in the stars for me to get out and be barefoot on the canoe at some point in the future when it makes sense. When I retire, I hope to have my own sailboat, shape my own canoes, and spend all of my time on the ocean.
David Valerio: I want you to reflect more on the diaspora experience that you alluded to earlier. Any thoughts and reflections you have on that would be interesting to hear.
Kaleo Fernandez: I tend to reference this Hannah Montana-like existence when I discuss this, and it does feel that way sometimes. As I mentioned, my dad has Filipino and Native Hawaiian ancestry, and my mom grew up on a dairy farm in Michigan. My dad was a traditional Hawaiian musician. All of my childhood, we would go to these luaus at my uncle's Hawaiian restaurant in town called Pono Hawaiian Grill. My window into the stories of the old, pre-colonial Hawai'i, and the way we bonded as a family, was by singing songs about its mountains, rivers, and flowers.
The mythology of Hawai'i is incredibly diverse and fascinating, depending on what time period you are looking at. I dreamed about Hawai'i in my mind without ever having lived there. I revered the values of that culture, and was a proponent for what it stood for. But before I came out to live here, I didn't feel that I really understood it because I hadn't been back to the source. I had been back on vacations for around ten or fourteen days at a time maybe four times in my life, but I hadn't really lived there.
So I came back and I faced the identity questions that are common for Native people, especially when you're mixed race: Am I Hawaiian enough? Do I deserve to represent this culture? It's very uncommon to find someone who's legitimately, one hundred percent Hawaiian nowadays because of the course of history. There are a lot of other diaspora folks in the Pacific Islander community broadly, but especially Hawaiians, who grapple with this living in two worlds thing.
I then had a realization that I'm going to turn this into a form of empowerment. Instead of being neither here nor there—not being able to represent my Western, American identity while also not being able to represent my Native Hawaiian identity—I want to be a bridge between the two. That is what I've tried to embody in my work so far.
I bring the values of Ohana Wa'a into places where you can scale up impact. Tiger-team startups where people have their eyes on outsized objectives and are working their tails off every day to make those dreams a reality. I strive to bring this knowledge about how to exist in a globalized world to building scalable solutions that can ripple through society. I also have the ambition to help bring some of that world into Hawai'i as well.
It's a delicate balance. There is a lot of historical hurt feelings around western society in Hawai’i, and for very good reason. There's this whole history of America overthrowing the queen of Hawai’i by initiating a coup that led to a provisional government usurping the throne. It's a difficult history to read. It has led to a lot of folks here totally neglecting the energy transition and economic development.
In many ways that's merited, but I think that there are advantages being left on the table should we be able to do engage in conscious capitalism. I hate to be a buzzword guy, but that seems to sum up the idea quite well. Technology guided by wisdom. That seems to me to be one of the great challenges of our generation. All of a sudden we have developed these incredibly powerful, scalable technologies, and due to the nature of game theory and economic competition they're bound to proliferate.
The problem of our age is as much containment as it is building new technologies. It seems to me that if we are going to do containment well, then we should look to the most wise people of the past, from all traditions, to think through how we should approach these kinds of problems.
David Valerio: It's an interesting situation that indigenous peoples around the world encounter nowadays. They have terrible histories with Western societies, but now there's this trend of people in the West wanting to return to indigenous sources of knowledge. How should they properly engage with these new overtures? You could see a version of this where the indigenous are made into a mascot to carry some Western ideology.
Given your background and interactions with indigenous peoples on a day-to-day basis, what do you think about that? How has the rapprochement between the globalized world and indigenous society been going so far?
Kaleo Fernandez: I'll try to keep my comments restricted towards Hawai'i because it's hard for me to speak for other indigenous groups. In fact, it's even quite hard for me to speak for Hawaiians given that I'm from the diaspora. I was listening to my kumus and my kupuna—my teachers and my elders—on the mainland, who are a little bit further away from the painful history than a lot of the folks who were born and raised here. So I certainly want to be sensitive to that.
On this point about mascots, there is so much marketing around how you think about Hawai'i. Paradise, hula dancers, ‘ukuleles, pineapples—all are representative symbols of how corporates think about the place which is interesting. There's a lot of exotification that goes on. It's a really unfortunate and difficult context in which to try to form an identity for a people whose traditions have been outlawed by law in many cases. So there were a lot of folks in my grandparents generation, and even my dad's generation, who were quite confused about how to represent themselves as Hawaiians.
But thanks to this canoe, Hōkūle‘a, the Polynesian Voyaging Society and its many followers, the great movement for Hawaiian sovereignty, and other expressions of the Hawaiian Renaissance from the seventies onward, there's been a reclamation of Hawaiian identity by second and third Hawaiians like myself. We're trying to redefine what being Hawaiian means for ourselves by referencing the values and teachings we've learned from our ancestors when engaging in this new world that we're attempting to inhabit. Hopefully we're doing a pretty good job.
I think it's particularly relevant when working in nature-based solutions. Solving climate change is a multi-decade problem, and we will be relying on small land stewards for a long time to get it right. If we develop all of these clean energy and carbon projects in local areas without nurturing those relationships, and we burn a significant portion of them, then those areas of the Earth will no longer be accessible to help solve climate change for decades to come.
When working with small landowners in Maine, I want to treat them just as I would treat my kupuna because they care so much about their land. They've been on that land for generations. They're the stars of this whole climate solutions show. It should be none of us in these backend corporate offices. Without them, we can't solve this generational problem. I'm glad I grew up with a bit more natural sensitivity to the difficult relationships between landowners and corporate America, because it's hopefully going to serve me well as we try to tackle this problem for decades to come.
David Valerio: I wanted to ask some questions about your experience at Watershed.
Did you find that work interesting? Personally, I get bored by all of the carbon calculators out there, but obviously Watershed is doing great. How did you approach engaging with that work?
Kaleo Fernandez: I felt like I was carrying out a dream that had been brewing in me for a long time. I had this idea about walking up to the front door of some of the most powerful people and having a dialogue with them about climate solutions. It just seemed evident that the first domino on the way towards unlocking climate solutions was to help them measure their own emissions. You can't manage what you can't measure.
I grew to love the practice of carbon accounting. It's not something I had any experience with prior to being in the space, but it's a very dynamic field. There has clearly been a lot of movers and shakers who have been pioneering that work for many decades.
The thing that was most exciting to me was the customers. You watch the twinkle in their eye when they realize that there are more areas where value creation and sustainability overlap than they thought. You start to see them become change-makers within their own organization, getting folks across different functions on board with the business case. That's when things really start to move and make significant waves in their supply chain, across their operations, and across their products. It was inspiring to be able to help guide them through that process.
Oftentimes I was just kicking that process off for them given that I was on the sales side of things. We would hand them over to the real wizards of it all, our customer success folks, alongside the champions of the whole show, our sustainability leads. Over the course of two years, we watched the world turn on a dime. Major GHG emissions reporting legislation dropped in virtually every major geography around the world, and investors began to ask more companies to uphold the standards we need in order to start actually making progress on climate solutions.
That was a really energizing space to be in. Our founder would say that all of our working helping them measure and figure out how to manage their emissions was just the potential energy needed to be converted into the kinetic energy of real climate action, which is changing practices within your own operations to reduce emissions and investing in natural and engineered climate solutions outside of your supply chain.
I hope that the work Renoster does helps companies realize that as long as there is a transparent, trustworthy way to invest in nature, then they are a viable, scaleable option for them to address climate change. It's easy to budget for, they don't need to make major changes to their products. They should still prioritize making changes to processes within their own control, especially the low hanging fruit, and push other organizations to change as well.
But there are fundamental business parameters that it's just not reasonable to step over, like protecting margins. When they do reach those limits, they should have an option they feel comfortable about investing in nature with. Markets don't work unless they're transparent. So it seemed like the issues we worked on at Renoster were the next important problems to solve.
David Valerio: That does sound interesting. I guess when I heard accounting I thought, "Oh my God, I don't really care about Walmart's emissions. Come on, dude."
But carbon accounting is necessary to see what is possible to do after they have their own emissions house in order. That's where stuff gets interesting.
Kaleo Fernandez: There's a kind of "so what?" question after the measurement journey, and to be clear Watershed is not just a carbon accounting tool. They also help report stuff to investors, regulators, and customers, while also helping set a goal with interim targets and laying out reductions plan. They also run a carbon credit marketplace where they help curate climate solutions for their customers. All of that was quite interesting for me.
David Valerio: Another question: how did Watershed differentiate themselves against competitors in the market? From what I've seen there are tons of them out there. It seems like a hard market to win.
Kaleo Fernandez: It's true that there are tons of carbon calculators out there. When you think about it, it's really a data ingestion and transformation problem. All of the flows of proprietary company data—financial, people, facilities etc.— require an enterprise grade control system. This is especially true for large public companies, which are the ones receiving the most pressure from regulators and investors to take action on climate, can't just buy some carbon estimator. They need something that has transparent carbon accounting chain that shows how financial, people, facilities, and other types of data are being transformed into carbon numbers. There needs to be an entire auditable data lineage can be referenced if those numbers are going to stand up on a 10K.
There's also the moving target of climate reporting that all sustainability organizations are having trouble keeping up with. The platform has incredible tools to help produce those kinds of reports. Templates are built straight into the measurement platform which enables them to be produced in a very streamlined way, saving a company using it hundreds of hours every quarter, or every reporting cycle, depending on how often you're reporting.
There's also the reductions tooling available via scenarios, where companies are able to look into the corners of their data and coming up non-obvious climate initiatives. In many cases, you do want to focus on the obvious ones. Most of those have to do with sourcing clean power and engaging with suppliers in most industries. Then there are those that are specific to certain industries, like alternative sourcing strategies for a consumer goods company.
I think you get a higher fidelity heat map with better carbon accounting tools. You also get more control around your data, you get reductions plans that will stand up to scrutiny over time, and you get more streamlined reporting. So it's not just a carbon calculator. It's all of the controls that fortune 500 companies need in order to be able to put report emissions data that their CFO can stand behind.
David Valerio: How much have you heard about nature accounting? It's basically people trying to set up the same infrastructure that corporates use to report on their climate impacts, but for nature and biodiversity instead. What's your take on that space?
Kaleo Fernandez: I'll start by saying that I'm absolutely not an expert on nature accounting, but I do find it to be a quite fascinating problem. In fact, I had brainstormed a potential nature accounting startup with a couple of friends a while back.
It's interesting. Can you count nature the way you count carbon? They seem like quite different processes. Carbon is a discrete element, whereas nature exists within systems. So the approach to nature accounting has to be different fundamentally than carbon accounting.
In order to make this data actionable, you have to start from the same set of input data from companies as for carbon accounting. How do you get biodiversity insights from financial, people, and facilities data?
I was speaking with company that manages beekeeping programs for commercial real estate firms. They noticed that the health of different bee populations was indicative of the broader health of the particular ecosystem that the corporate beekeeping garden was placed in, because bees are such important species in the whole chain of life.
So I think there are some interesting ways to get at systems using proxy data. I do wonder what the accounting problem looks like for that, though. I hope someone builds a company around it one day, and I know there are plenty of people trying to do so now. So good luck to all.
David Valerio: I agree. It is a philosophical question. What is biodiversity? It's not a molecule like carbon dioxide equivalent, which can in principle be measured even if it is hard to do. Biodiversity is a web of relationships across different spatial and temporal scales. It's a fundamentally different paradigm to attempt to measure.
There's a good reason that nature is so complex. Regardless of whatever set of metrics are used, you're going to start optimizing for them. You're making the system legible. But is that a good thing?
Kaleo Fernandez: The other problem is that if you can't measure it, it is hard to price. I think that's one of the fundamental errors of at the heart of some of work around climate and biodiversity. The things that are hard to measure are the hardest to price, and therefore are hard to sell and create momentum around.
But you do see legislative initiatives like the CSRD and others in Europe starting to set a high bar for biodiversity impacts, wastewater pollution, and all sorts of other things. There's also the question the cost of compliance for corporates who are just now wrapping their heads around getting the data they need to measure carbon now. I think a phased approach is the compassionate way to go about it in any case. But we also don't have all the time in the world, and things are not going great as is.
Ultimately I think it would be useful for to find a proxy way to price biodiversity investments to help solve climate change, unless I'm wrong and that there is a precise way to measure biodiversity which I am not enough an expert to see.
David Valerio: I think if anything, not being an expert in the field is good for realizing that you can't measure it. Not that I'm an expert either, but I suppose I'm more of an expert, it just seems like an untenable problem to measure it. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist, however.
Kaleo Fernandez: I was going to say that as well. Just because it's hard to measure shouldn't stop us from doing something about it. The "so what?" question is the important question at the end of the day.
We need to invest in biodiversity in order to protect our planet going forward, so that we have time to figure out what this thing that we keep calling sustainability really is. Whether or not it's straightforward, we have to find a way.
David Valerio: What I admire so much about you is that you are idealistic and driven by values. You discern the reasons that you pursue the things you go after, because it's important for you. You're striving to have that highest impact in a very reflective way.
I'm curious, what are you striving to achieve in your life and work going forward?
Kaleo Fernandez: That's a great question. It's something that evolves and is always ongoing. The last five years I've been all in on solving climate change. I intend to be a change actor for climate solutions, hopefully forever.
As you look into the crystal ball of world decarbonization, we're in the really early innings of a long game. Companies are just now wrapping their arms around what they can do about the problem. Nation states are preparing for the geopolitical competition that is likely to amplify due to extreme weather and mass migration. So luckily for us, there's no shortage of problems to continue working on.
Being Hawai'i, I would love for there to be no work to do and just to go surfing all the time. But I intend to work on climate change for a very long time, in some capacity. Whether that be global, local, or in a human-to-human way by working on hearts and minds. That can be the place where you make your biggest impact, or at least where it starts.
So I don't have a concrete answer for you. I have an intention. My north star is set, which is to continue working on climate solutions. I think the important thing is to get down and keep standing in the canoe each day. Come to work, show up to the dock. We have this metaphor of an ocean of uncertainty between where we are now as a world economy and the island over the horizon, which is a decarbonized world economy and a sustainable world. All we can do is go star by star to get there. It's impossible to see all the stars right at this moment, but through skillful navigation we can continue to orient ourselves towards the right direction. So I'm most focused on continuing to pay attention to the world, and continuing to read how the stars are unfolding before us in order to do whatever I can from my position in this crew to help to orient the canoe towards what is hopefully a better island for us all to be living on.
From what I was able to discover, this idea comes from Initiation and Spiritual Realization by René Guénon.
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