Who We Are
Bank of Nature is a design project of a sustainability-focussed nonprofit where we think creatively about what’s next in sustainability.
For example: Can there be a planet-scale proxy for nature that is independent of traditional government and business/market-based enterprise? And, how does that move us toward endgame sustainability, a future time when we have secured environmental and human dignity security?
It sounds complicated but it’s really a challenge to the planet-scale fiduciaries of public trust, like vastly rich pension funds with obligations to future members, to exercise stewardship over the largest crises of our time. They are supposed to live forever. What are they doing, in the complex world of pandemics, to ensure that they live forever?
Bank of Nature is an innovative and practical channel for fiduciary finance, which is our evolution of big money investing in stewardship that pays for big solutions.
The creation of history’s first planet-scale proxy for nature is the channel for that stewardship with the single focus: Address planet-scale crises regardless of a growth motive. This site is full of big ideas. We hope you engage with them.
Bank of Nature is a program of Cape Cod Center for Sustainability, a 501c not-for-profit social enterprise based in Provincetown, MA USA. We use transdisciplinary experts in substantive collaboration to innovate new ideas that challenge conventional practices.
We are not yet a bank and offer no banking services.
Our Team
Ian Edwards
Tim MacDonald
Cape Cod Center for Sustainability
Arizona State University’s
Center for Science and Imagination
Mission/
Vision
To envision a successful climate endgame with today’s existing financial tools that puts substantive forward momentum toward climate security and an economy that accounts for nature as an investor.
Theory
of Change
Humans can define the Anthropocene by revising their exceptionalism narrative to include paying nature for climate security. “If we win, nature wins more.” Public trusts can be climate heroes and economics that accounts for nature can drive an interactive, rather than extractive, partnership with nature.
A Work
in Progress
We welcome contributions, suggestions, challenges and advice as we move through this design phase and get ready to meet the world. We’re expanding our global community and ask that you join us in executing on this metaphor as a real world solution.
Support
our work
Bank of Nature is a program of Cape Cod Center for Sustainability, a 501c3 nonprofit in Provincetown, MA and can accept donations and generate tax receipts. Please consider a donation.
"We’re designing a safer alternative path through nature-building financial stewardship and a new economic human-nature partnership
Our cofounders
Tim MacDonald
Bank of Nature Design Co-Lead
Tim is a lawyer, philosopher and Fierce Financial Theorist who brings to the Bank of Nature project much critical and creative new thinking about Money, Finance, Fiduciary Duty, and especially the fiduciary duties of intergenerational loyalty and prudence of the Fiduciary Owners of society’s shared savings aggregated into Pensions and Endowments to programmatically provide certainty against certain of life’s future financial uncertainties.
Ian Edwards
Bank of Nature Design Co-Lead
Ian Edwards is the founder of Bank of Nature, executive director of Cape Cod Center for Sustainable and also founder of Broto: Art-Climate-Science. He has an MBA in sustainability and a career as a journalist and sustainability consultant. He is a fellow of Arizona State University's Center for Science and Imagination.
The pitch for Bank of Nature:
A voice for nature
A proxy for nature
An act of global co-creation
To create endgame sustainability
Within a two-way human-nature partnership
That is interactive, not extractive.
Bank of Nature is not a bank and offers no banking services. It is a program of Cape Cod Center for Sustainability, a 501c3 nonprofit.
Thank you to Arizona State University and its Center for Science and the Imagination for the fellowship support.