The Hillary Symposium

From the programme: Melissa Clark-Reynolds is a mom, an environmental advocate, and an entrepreneur with 20 years of experience. Melissa founded GMV Associates Ltd, which was sold to Southern Cross Healthcare and became part of Fusion Insurance Services (NZ’s largest private Workers’ Compensation Insurer). She was the turnaround CEO of PayGlobal Ltd and INTAZ Ltd (two NZ software companies in trouble), and is a member of the GAV Trust (NZ Games, Animation and Video Effects Industry). Creative HQ, which has just selected her as an Executive in Residence, considers her one of Wellington‘s leading business minds due to her string of entrepreneurial successes. Melissa started her current venture, a kids’ virtual world called minimonos, in 2007, out of a desire to create games that have a positive impact on children. Grass-roots support for minimonos (via its Twitter account and its Facebook group) is growing, showing that the concept taps into an unmet need for parents. The virtual world asks some key questions: “How can we convey important concepts about sustainability without being preachy? What would a virtual world for kids look like if good values were already in the DNA and we could just concentrate on making it fun?”.

Her passion for our planet is profound, and reflects in how she is raising her daughter, how she gives back to her community, and how she is growing her business. One of only two New Zealanders trained up as an Ambassador for Al Gore‘s Climate Project, Melissa has presented The Inconvenient Truth over 20 times to more than 2000 New Zealanders to raise awareness and motivate people to take action. minimonos is an opportunity for her to combine her dedication to sustainability with her entrepreneurial skills.

Melissa starts by telling a story about her daughter kayaking on Lake Muller. Her father-in-law, who’s a keen mountaineer, pulled out a map and showed her that Lake Muller wasn’t on the map. She’s got a picture of this: at the end of the lake is what looks like a dirty cliff, which is in fact the terminal face of the Muller glacier. This is a 5,000 year old piece of ice that’s melting at such a great rate that it’s creating a lake just down the road that isn’t on her father-in-law’s map.

She is of this land — this is where she belongs; this is where she comes from. She’s always been an entrepreneur — started at 15 years old, hiring university students at $30/day and hiring them out to the asphalt works at $50/day. And since she started this journey of entrepreneurship, she’s been through a fair few crises — she started her first company with interest rates at 20%. Started a company in Vietnam and had to deal with the flu crisis. One of her proudest moments was when she was a student in the US: one day, she opened the NY Times to a full-page ad from David Lange explaining why New Zealand had gone nuclear-free — and burst into tears. She and all the other expat Kiwis took out another ad to show Lange their support.

She’s here today to tell a story. It’s got a cast of characters: individuals, businesses, governments, and the prize: Mother Earth herself.

Act I: The Infinite Resource Paradigm

The story starts with this infinite resource paradigm: we’ve got this abundance of air, this abundance of water. Even last week in Geraldine, she had a farmer say to her, “If the water gets to the sea, it’s a waste.” We’ve had this mentality that there’s so much air and so much water and so much earth that it just doesn’t matter. We’ve got so many bison that we can just keep killing them. We’ve got so many fish that we can just keep fishing. Or we’ve got so many trees that we can just deforest and there will always be more.

So maybe we need a new paradigm, one that isn’t infinite. If a depleted ecosystem is growing by 5% per year, and we’re depleting it at 10% per year, we’re going to hit a wall.

Act II: The ‘Either/Or’ Paradigm

The next paradigm, and the one that she grew up with, is the ‘Either/Or’ paradigm. Business vs. government. Government vs. individuals. Earth vs. business. So we’ve ended up in our new crisis: we can either make a whole lot of money OR we can save the planet.

She did this whole cradle-to-grave thing at the University, where they started to think even then about what kind of economic instruments can be used around carbon management. 19 years ago they were running seminars for the Ministry for the Environment, and they were around a carbon-trading kind of approach. She came back to NZ and opened an environmental consultancy — but nobody cared.

We see now that we all go down together: individuals, business, government, the planet. Economics and ecology both come from the Greek ‘oikos’, meaning ‘home’. It’s all about how we manage our home.

Act III: The Sustainable Paradigm

Act III seems to be the sustainable paradigm.’Sustainable’ means ‘you can keep doing it’. The way we’ve been thinking about sustainable business so far is an old paradigm as well. Sustainability is smart — Henry Ford figured out that if he didn’t start paying his staff well enough to buy his product, he wasn’t going to have any customers. He wanted to think about how he could build his industry so it could last forever.

Sustainability isn’t a luxury. When we think about that cradle-to-grave thing, it’s about downcycling — we take something that was a good resource and turn it into something crappier later. What she wants to know is what happens when that thing breaks? What does it become next? Anything that only takes out of a system will ultimately fail. How do we grow the communities we live in? How do we enhance our customers’ lives so that their entire experience of being part of the ecosystem is better?

This is big business, and the rest of the world is doing it — and we’re so far behind here in NZ. There are sustainable skyscrapers being built. We don’t have to be some sort of Luddite living in the countryside — we can have positive contributions and still do big business. Buckminster Fuller: “Wealth consists of physical energy (as matter or radiation) combined with metaphysical know-what and know-how.”

How do we use our know-what and know-how to grow wealth for us all, and particularly how are we going to feed 6 billion people? We need to move beyond reduce, reuse, recycle to this positive, contributing, not-ONLY-for-profit model.

We need new questions, and the answers aren’t just environmental. They’re going to be social, economic, military, lifestyle. The first time she gave the Inconvenient Truth presentation, someone asked her, ‘What are we going to do about it?’ and she said ‘Changing your lightbulbs isn’t going to do it — but educating women, which leads to the choice of lower fertility rates, will make a big impact.’

This is happening with major players — John Doerr, David Suzuki, Al Gore, Paul Hawken — and we need to get real or go home. Individuals are moving and businesses are moving, and we don’t even have a grey deal here in NZ. In ther latest budget we did pest control and weed control, and that’s great, but we really need to get our government to catch up on environmental issues.

There is no finish line on this. Kyoto was a starting point, and Copenhagen will be another starting point, and we all win or we all lose. This is not something business needs to be convinced on. What’s the next paradigm? She doesn’t know, but she wants people here today to think about what the role of business is in the coming revolution. What’s beyond cradle-to-cradle?