Your mission may not be as impossible as it seems.

Many seemingly-intractable situations can be shifted to a new state with the proper analysis and plan. That’s why ET exists.

ET exists as a resource

to analyze issues, create out-of-the-box plans, and to steer the real world in better directions.

If you’ve looked through the other case histories, you’ll see that EarthTrust tackles things that others see as impossible.
Indeed, things that are ARE impossible if approached with traditional methods.

ET is a one-of-a-kind resource for “impossible” tasks, because its mature and experienced leadership can assess systems and situations in ways which simply wouldn’t occur to most people. This involves;

  • knowing how audacious to be; how far to push beyond normal boundaries
  • understanding the way complex systems interact and effects propagate, in the abstract and in the real world
  • a probabilistic framing of outcomes
  • Scientific credibility in a number of fields
  • analysis of a system’s stable states, potential cascades, and phase transitions, and its overlap with systems around it
  • a deep understanding of the working of the human mind, of realpolitik
  • the ability to create and inject new iconic concepts into world cultures
  • the chops to take advantage of chaotic situations without unreasonable fear
  • the analytical awareness to often be first to an issue
  • the ability to move quickly and consolidate gains before they become contaminated by other systems and actors
  • the discipline to stay under the radar and control information flow until an issue can be shifted into a new state, which is increasingly necessary with the politically-sensitive overlapping crises the world now faces.

The case histories highlighted are all 20 years in the past. There’s good reason for that: in addition to being pretty good examples, the sort of backstory we’re offering here remains sensitive for years. There are many ET campaigns we simply can’t discuss in this way because the backstory remains too sensitive, and may always be. The way things actually happen in the world is often not as simple or romantic as the narratives which grow around them afterwards.   We manipulate the very stuff of world events, and doing that will always be politically sensitive, if not dangerous.

But we hope the examples make our point: The planet is under attack. At some point, the “good guys” who care about the world’s future need to move beyond protests and blogging. We’re not the only folks who can steer world events. It’s just that most of those who do it don’t have the earth’s or humanity’s best interests as a priority.

Some will see such planning and intervention as a bit sneaky. After all, it feels better to save the world through driving a hybrid car and eating local tomatoes, and hoping your kids grow up to solve everything. We hope that too.

The problem is, our time is up, and that upbeat fun stuff isn’t remotely sufficient to the tasks at hand. We’re in a mass extinction event that’s accelerating, more species lost daily. We’re killing the evolved life of the oceans, which will revert to primordial-slime conditions this century without radical change. We’re heading for a world of 3C-7C average climate heating which will burn croplands to desert and depopulate the human world amid wars and forced migrations.

It’s a world of impossible missions. And we can’t be everywhere. But we can teach our methods to others, and help prevent scarce advocacy resources from being wasted.

So bring us your impossible mission, and we’ll have a look at it. Because it may be slightly less impossible that it seems to you at the moment.

We can help make your resources count.

Most conservation and environmental funding is wasted, in the sense that it doesn’t much change the situation it hopes to change. That’s no secret.  And that’s why it’s a big responsibility to have some funds to use in changing the world.

The largest and most famous conservation and environmental groups already have a lot of funding, and don’t innovate much. There are a lot of new people who want to do good things, but they may not be highly functional in the real world.

That’s why track record and “bang for the buck” matter. It’s a way to sort out who really knows what they’re doing, and determine the range of situations in which they can function effectively.

EarthTrust’s analysis not only makes impossible-seeming things happen, it does it with reasonable budgets. And if we don’t determine we have a real chance of fundamentally altering an issue, we don’t take it on.

You bring the funding or the funding plan, and we consider that as part of the whole.  We can’t take on everything, but we like to be challenged, and we like people who think big.

Don’t have an impossible mission in mind? Maybe you’d like to fund one of the ours.

We can work creatively with your funding situation.

Some of the most productive environmental funders in history have gotten that way by funding ET.  We hope you’ll consider joining them.