B. Lorraine Smith

I start by sharing how much value I get from participating in Lorraine's weekly coaching group. Then she shares her path to coaching on sustainability. She worked in the heart of the corporate sustainability accounting and reporting. She saw it mostly did nothing and often exacerbated the situations it purported to solve. She has created a practice that exposes and helps fix these problems. I ended up coaching her back in asking her to clarify what a potential client would see in her work to start working with her. As I wrote before, Lorraine understands our environmental situation more accurately than nearly anyone. We have to change our culture. Transforming leaders of industry is necessary if we expect to change the system.

Lorraine is one of the few people I know who saw mainstream sustainability efforts for what they are: ineffective and often counterproductive but self-congratulatory. I call most of them "stepping on the gas, thinking it's the brake, wanting congratulations." Unlike most others, once she saw their counterproductivity, if not outright lies, she left. She works to promote an "economy in service of life." I think it's easy to see that our current global economy is not serving life. The amount of life on earth is decreasing. Lorraine shares her history of ramping up on mainstream sustainability, her disillusionment, her acting by her values to exit, and her finding what to do. We also commiserate on the challenges we face in living by different cultures than mainstream. It's hard. We face headwinds every day, even from people who want to help us; especially from people trying to help us, like people who claim to be environmentalist but don't change culture or themselves.