The missing voice in decision-making

I’ve not posted much recently on LinkedIn, partly because I’ve struggled to connect with the core idea of this post, and partly because, life got busy.

While I’ve been here in this place of distracted busyness, I’ve had the chance to reflect. I am so fortunate. I have worked hard. I have lived in and visited beautiful places. I strive to be the best person that I can be. I don’t always get things right. When I don’t, I hold my hands up and acknowledge it. I have grown. All the while I have great gratitude for my teachers and for the folks who’ve supported me.

Let’s rewind a bit, back to July, I spent 3.5 weeks travelling the wilderness of Botswana and Namibia. I wanted to experience some of the last great wild areas of Africa and was lucky enough to share this journey with my family and some good family friends. I found myself with a bit of time on my hands, and as one does, took a couple of great books along for the ride: A Guide for the Perplexed (E.F. Schumacher) and The Children’s Fire (Mac Macartney).

We landed back in the UK in late August, for the tail end of “summer”. It felt odd. It felt like something was missing, the something that I buried deep in my bones when I left Cape Town in 2017. I was missing Africa. When you’ve lived in Africa, it feels familiar. Homely even. I wonder that the small piece of Africa that is in this body of mine, remembers its time there — ?possibly from a couple of hundred thousand years ago. I also missed the people, the scenery, the wild.

England is so tame. Like I get excited when I see the bats flying around at dusk. I marvel at a hedgehog in my garden. And I was suitably amazed when a sparrowhawk paid a visit to the garden fence, scattering the pigeons and crows as it perched, looking slightly confused as to what all the fuss was about from his fellow avian friends. There’s no animal that is remotely dangerous (aside from an adder, or some angry cows) in this entire land. Nothing that can kill you. Nothing massive to marvel at.

Fast forward to the end of September, it was time for the final module of my systemic embodied life coaching course. And I still had not landed in the UK. I was here, but I wasn’t. The weekend allowed me to slow down. To really focus on my practice. I noticed that I was becoming more present. Listening better, deeper, with empathy, and finally partnering with my clients, to generate an emerging future, something that they hadn’t even dreamed of.

At the same time, I enrolled on the u-Lab 1x Leading From The Emerging Future course, run by MIT in conjunction with u-Lab. And suddenly…everything became clear. It clicked.

This preamble, frames how I ended up here, today on this unseasonably warm October afternoon, writing this. It feels like I have now landed back in the UK. Some 2 months after I actually arrived.

Back to the story. Back to July again.

We stayed in the Okavango Delta, for ten days. We drove with some vague directions and current local knowledge, for 5.5 hours to find a huge pack (about 30 – including the ten puppies) of African wild dogs. We had no internet and no mobile signal. It was wild and beautiful. The water was just flowing into the Delta, reaching the end of its journey some five months after it fell as rain in the Angolan highlands. The land was greening. And the animals were bountiful. You could almost. Almost believe that none of the animals we saw were rare, or critically endangered.

Those wild dogs I talked about just now. They number about 6 600, of these 1 400 are adults. They are completely endangered, coming into conflict more and more with humans and face an additional threat in terms of a warming climate. ?In a spot of about 100m2, were 0.5% of the GLOBAL population. Wow. What an absolute privilege to see them. To spend a couple of hours with them. Before the long and slow dive back to camp.

Of course, with my slightly strange brain this got me thinking – especially our (human beings’) relationship with nature. In the areas I visited, the Okavango River is critical to nature and ultimately to survival of the animals and people living there. The Okavango Delta is rich with wildlife, relatively unspoilt and a true wonder of nature.

A quick little bit of searching on the internet and behold: The Delta is under threat. The capital city of Namibia, Windhoek, faces water shortages. The Namibian Water Corporation’s solution; to pipe water from the Okavango River into the dams that supply the city: https://thebrief.com.na/2024/05/namwater-plans-n7bn-okavango-extraction-to-mitigate-can-water-crisis/. ?They’ve also found oil there: https://theconversation.com/oil-drilling-threatens-the-okavango-river-basin-putting-water-in-namibia-and-botswana-at-risk-209887.

In my recent experience, I’ve come across concepts like natural capital accounting, full impact decision-making, and organisations like the Value-Balancing Alliance. This week there’s also another COP, COP 16 on Biological Diversity — the aim to protect and enhance nature. Will it be a good COP or bad COP? I guess only time will tell.

Coming back to October, this is when it clicked. On one of my morning runs, I was able to make the connections between all of this. It’s not my place to judge. I’m not knocking the above initiatives per se, nor am I knocking the decisions being made in Namibia. I’m merely observing that a natural wonder of global importance is facing multiple threats. And that as far as I can tell, something rather critical is missing in all of the above initiatives. Something is missing globally in the way that we’re exploiting nature (not just in the Namibian examples above). And therefore something is missing in decision-making as a whole.

And that is the voice of nature itself.

I’d like to thank the following people who’ve knowingly or not helped me frame this; Jenny Mackewn ; Otto Scharmer ; Mac Macartney and my lovely family!