How an ecologist ended up on Wall Street
by Suzanna Buck, Senior Impact Investment Associate at Domini Impact Investments (named to the 30 Under 30 list at The SRI Conference in Nov 2019)
I might be the only ecologist on Wall Street, but I don’t mind. It’s exactly where I want to be: after a winding journey through field research, advocacy, and legal work, I believe changing the financial system may be the most effective solution to climate change.
I’ve always felt a duty to devote my life and career to solutions to climate change: everything I value is exposed as terribly fragile by this unprecedented threat. What good is a well-funded retirement in a world of extreme inequality and climate disaster? After searching for solutions from personal action to ecology, I now believe the answer is to change the paradigm of the investment community, so that it supports its own sustainability by combating climate change.
I became an ecologist, studying how Lyme disease affects its hosts. Then I went to Argentina, working to equip communities with the tools they needed to advocate for themselves by using UN human rights principles to curtail encroachments by hydraulic fracturing companies. I helped take on ExxonMobil. After a grueling appellate battle, we won the largest ever award in a Clean Air Act citizen suit. The penalty, however, was less than $20 million. I was forced to realize I was thinking too narrowly. To take on the enormity of climate change, our economic systems had to be changed more dramatically than I had imagined. A $20 million fine doesn’t alter Exxon’s single-minded focus on short-term profits. How could we fix the system that encouraged this folly?
At Domini Impact Investments, I have had the chance to confront that foundational dogma of modern finance. When I joined the firm, they were attempting to understand and confront the macro risks that threatened our portfolios, from inequality to climate change. Entranced by the potential of this big-picture thinking, which proposed using systems-thinking tools to act on the root causes of macro risks, I jumped at the chance to work on the initiative and learn. .
Read Suzanna's full article at- https://greenmoney.com/a-journey-to-sustainable-finance
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