Forests, oceans, rivers, and other ecosystems provide valuable services without asking for any pay in return. Yet, without steady focus on the health of our ecosystems, they tend to become degraded in order to provide more immediate economic returns to other industries.
The world tends to provide energy and transportation systems with the investments needed to sustain and improve their benefits to society. Today, the opportunity to do the same for ecosystems is bigger and more doable than ever, however, it remains extremely difficult for individuals to self-finance entry into this exciting and rewarding field.
With the help of the Make My Nut platform, I aim to help fund the salaries of a new generation of people who wish to develop projects in the Ecosystem Sector at every scale, and train them in ecological business, politics, and finance, fields that, lacking mentors, I learned slowly and with great difficulty over many decades.
By 1980, I envisioned that to assure the highest possible quality of life for humans and all living things, it would be essential to view ecosystems as living infrastructure, and develop an Ecosystem Sector on par with other major sectors like the Transportation, Health Care, even Entertainment Sectors.
Since 1983, I have spent the majority of my career focused on accomplishing this goal, starting businesses, charities, and finance companies aligned with this mission.
With each stage, it became clearer that there is no shortage of money in the hands of people interested in ecology, and that the main limit to success in building a vibrant Ecosystem Sector is that most individuals who want to be a part of this field can not sustain their basic living expenses while attempting to make progress in any aspect of this sector.
After mentoring several clients who only lacked the equivalent of US $1000 a month to quit their day job and focus on building out their vision, I decided to develop the Make My Nut recurring payment community with the aim to help 1000 new people take responsibility for the wellbeing of our vital ecosystems.
My career highlights include saving clients millions of dollars of water and energy annually, and leading a campaign that resulted in the President of the US reversing a destructive federal policy affecting over 200 million acres (over 80 hectares) of forests.
Then, in 2001, I entered the most difficult field, finance. Today I can say that I am an expert in starting and financing any project, from a food truck to a global enterprise.
So, at long last I can fulfill on my vision I started to mentor and help finance leaders in the Ecosystem Sector, thanks to this community platform.
With all of the supporting systems in place, I intend to spend 2026 raising recurring revenue from members and using those funds to hire leaders for a sequence of projects I’ve designed, or to help them build out their own vision.
I have already begun this process, so everything now is about increasing the rate and scale at which new project leaders can be funded and trained.
Given the range of local economies in the world, a realistic average figure for escaping the day to day hustle and focusing on a project that can make a difference is about US $3000 per month per leader.
For a near term goal of 100 new leaders, that would be only $330,000 a month, of which less than 10% will be used to cover operations support such as legal, accounting, tech, and my own salary. My supporting members will get financial updates in each monthly newsletter.
