A company called Faith in Nature sells bath products in the U.S., the UK, and parts of the EU. You can find their products in Walmart, Sam’s Club, and Bed Bath & Beyond if you can still find one. Or you can also purchase them at Target, although you may want to think twice about using the handmade soap or avocado body wash in one of Target’s bathrooms.
The mantra on the company’s sustainability page is “Nature Harnessed, Not Harmed.” And apparently, Nature also has a seat on the board of directors. I’m not even sure how to continue to write this piece since Nature has not informed us what its pronouns are. I’m just going to go with “it.” Is everybody good? Let’s forge ahead.
Faith in Nature released a statement that reads:
We’ve put our faith in Nature for almost 50 years, both in our products and in our ethos. But 2022 calls for a different approach than 1974. So we’ve re-written our constitution to give Nature a voice and a vote on how Faith In Nature is run.
By making Nature a director of our company, we hope to make better informed decisions around topics that impact it. And let’s face it, everything does. That’s why this matters.
We have faith in a future where Nature’s rights are represented, and respected, in every business. So we’re sharing our process in the hope that others will do the same.
Watch our film for the 5 minute story or get technical with our Q&A below. If you’d like to give Nature a vote at your company, please leave your details and we’ll be in touch.
Nature is going to need a pretty big corner office.
You can watch the video here, but if you want to save five minutes of your time, you can read a quick recap below.
The company posits the question of how business could change if Nature had a voice and vote and what might happen if Nature was the boss of the company. Since the company could not answer the question, they asked other people to provide them with the answers that they wanted to launch a campaign stunt that would hopefully garner some attention from the green base.
A lawyer said that the rights of nature will be to the 21st Century what human rights were in the 20th, making it an exciting area to work in and insisting that we need to have Nature’s voice and interests represented in the legal, political, and economic realms. He achieved this moment of enlightenment while sitting under a yew tree where he realized that he could create a corporation with more legal rights than the tree. Yes, you read that right.
Grant Wilson, the executive director of the Earth Law Center, said that our current legal, economic, and social systems are centered around humans. This means that nature is left out of the conversation, a situation that has allowed humans to exploit nature.
Nature will now have a vote equal to any other director. Now, even Faith in Nature knows that you can’t get Nature to return an email or attend a meeting, no matter how good the bagels are or fresh the coffee may be. So there will be an independent person who will represent Nature on the board and act in its best interests. The company vows to do no harm and protect nature, along with giving it rights and power.
The video is full of scenes of trees, streams, birds, and animals. And yes, nature does have its moments of serene sunrises, babbling brooks, majestic mountains, bees pollinating flowers, and gentle deer peacefully grazing in a wooded glade.
But nature can also be a fickle b***h. It is full of predators that eat smaller, weaker animals as well as animals that kill the young of others of their species to propagate their own DNA. Nature also offers up tornadoes, earthquakes, wildfires, blizzards, hurricanes, droughts, floods, and extinction. Nature can involve watching squirrels cavort as they feast on the contents of the feeder in your backyard, but it also involves a hawk carrying off a cute, tiny kit fox for lunch. As an employee of the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources once quipped to me, “The circle of life is not always pretty.”
So how will Nature’s representative and other board members deal with Platonic questions such as how much wildfire is good for an ecosystem? How many bear cubs should a grizzly be allowed to kill? When is there enough drought? Were there enough tornadoes this year?
Not that any of those questions have anything to do with making soap except for the fact that the company may rack up some ESG points. Nature is not good, nor is it bad. It simply is. It does what it does without regard for whether the action in question is good or evil. It is a massive collection of stimuli and responses. Nature has no opinion on anything. Although its designated representative, who I am sure will be carefully vetted, will have many.
A standup comic I used to know had a bit about her father being a deer hunter. As a little girl, she used to watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. That holiday favorite has the reindeer Clarice singing the sweet song “There’s Always Tomorrow.” The child asked her dad how he could shoot such a gentle creature. Dad replied, “Hell, honey, they don’t all sing that good.” We like to hike and tent camp in bear country. We know that if we meet a bear, it may run away, or it may charge us and rip us to shreds. But it won’t do a little dance and sing us a song about “The Bare Necessities.”
Nature does many of the things humans do, because like it or not, Nature is no better or no worse than humans, who are also a part of nature.
No word yet if Nature will have stock options.
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