Annarie Lyles: Business, biology and technology to improve living systems

This week, our TTI Interview Series covers TTIer Annarie Lyles. An experienced investor, Annarie is on a mission to protect and restore biodiversity and healthy living systems. Her current work spans corporations, networks, R&D, and impact investing. She co-founded a robotics company, Solaris Cybernetics, to prevent eutrophication and harmful algae blooms.

In this interview, Annarie explains how she integrates business, biology and technology to improve the health and wellness of living systems. She urges to hinder the collapse of natural ecosystems and the loss of biodiversity, and build the bridge between nature-based solutions and business. She wishes to see corporations integrate sustainable solutions by restoring and replenishing functional ecosystems.

Integration of business, biology and technology

Annarie, can you tell us more about your work and how it intersects with the impact space?

My work this past decade has been inspired by “gardening,” metaphorically. I seed promising ventures and help them flourish. A commonality across my work is integrating business, biology and technology into opportunities to improve the health and wellness of living systems, from individuals to ecosystems. The tricky thing about this sort of “gardening” has been weeding the less promising ventures from my portfolio – purpose driven entrepreneurs don't give up easily and fail fast! So my garden easily tips into a “tangled bank.

Three roles that I currently enjoy are:

  • Managing my business Bio-Gist Ventures and its portfolio of three dozen investments. An interesting example that I co-founded is Solaris Cybernetics, which has an aquatic robot, powered by solar and wind, which finds and vacuums harmful algae blooms from the water, and converts the biomass to biofuel.

  • Coordinating owners and businesses as family council chair and corporate board member for a diversified, closely-held, four-generation business that is California's leading environmental and water contractor. A lesson learned from planning longer-term, over decades and generations.

  • Serving on two non-profit boards: I'm Treasurer of As You Sow, which organizes US shareholders to hold corporations accountable, and was named by Ethos as 2020's top corporate watchdog. I also support a local nature organization and find huge satisfaction in getting my hands dirty, helping to restore an 18 acre patch of forest.

Positive impact is good intentions made real through actions

How do you define “impact” for yourself, Annarie?

Positive impact is good intentions made real through actions. It starts with getting clear on the desired outcomes, a testable theory of change, and how to monitor for signals or metrics of positive change. 

The collapse of natural ecosystems and the loss of biodiversity

Can you tell us, based on your experience, what  you believe is one of the most important issues that needs to be solved over the next 10 years?

We urgently need to slow the collapses of natural ecosystems along with the concomitant loss of biodiversity. We need to start stabilizing and restoring the environment. People need a healthy planet, but humanity has overshot planetary boundaries. Unfortunately, most people can't even see how much we've already lost – very few grand spectacles of abundant life remain. Humanity has been depleting wild populations and degrading ecosystems for longer than most of us have been alive. We have created a toxic stew of pollution that significantly threatens the fecundity of all life on Earth. Dysfunctional ecology is our new normal.

We urgently need to innovate ways for humanity to co-exist fairly with all other forms of life. We need to see beyond climate change to its equally evil twin: biodiversity loss. We need to restore the natural productivity of places we have diminished, and protect the “healthiest” places that remain. Keeping some wild places and wildlife is about much more than economic utility, it is also critical for our mental, physical and spiritual well-being.

  • Nature-based solutions are complex and slow. Business tends to like outcomes that are simple, clear and fast. We need to bridge the gap.

  • There is widespread, false belief that we must choose between healthy places and a healthy economy. It is becoming increasingly clear that this is wrong and deeply naive. When ecosystems are degraded, they don't provide the services humans need to live well, including functions like cleaning-up pollution, managing water, pollinating, controlling pests, and growing food/ fiber/ fuel. When ecosystems collapse, vulnerable people suffer.

  • Policies around the world tend to perversely subsidise degenerative practices – over-harvesting, extracting, land conversion, pollution. Unfortunately, these subsidies may be something like 40-50x greater than planet-positive funding. Clearly, this needs to change.

Acceptable corporate environmental practices

Annarie, could you elaborate on the long-term vision you have for your work and how you measure & quantify your impact?

Opportunities to create life-giving, sustainable change can be complex, challenging and emergent. Thus, it is important to devote time to visionary non-profits and networks like TTI. We need a diversity of thought and expertise to co-create many simultaneous solutions. Ecologists need to work more closely with business people and technologists. There will be no going back. Eight billion people can only fairly share this planet by adapting forward and learn how to become stewards and gardeners of this Earth.  

The bridge between nature-based solutions and business, and the myth of healthy places vs healthy economy

Annarie, what do you think are some of the biggest challenges currently faced by the impact space?

I am trying to understand the big obstacles to aligning our economy with planet positive initiatives, and I'm hoping to get help with this fromTTI colleagues. A few significant challenges I'm currently thinking about, in addition to getting past our myopia about our eco-dysfunctionality, as mentioned before:

My goal is to shift the curve for acceptable corporate environmental practices. I'd like to see the social norm for a company's environmental goals go beyond “sustainability” and “net-zero”, and towards restoring and replenishing functional ecosystems and the biodiversity they contain.  I think it is important to focus on business, because business-as-usual is responsible for much of the degradation of our biosphere. It would be great to have useful metrics for ecosystem “health.” One insight gained during a TTI Biodiversity Working Group was that there are a lot of parties working on metrics now. So perhaps widely accepted standards will emerge soonish. Meanwhile, ecosystem “health” doesn't really mean anything measurable. It seems more useful to focus on functional metrics such as: area protected/ restored (e.g. rewilded, planted with natives, etc), amount of hydrology improved/ restored (cleaner water, recovered biota, more natural flow, etc), increased numbers of a target species, increased diversity of species, productivity increases in ecosystems that are protected, improved, and/or restored, amount of pollution reduced/ avoided (including excess carbon and other nutrients).

Parallel solutions to shift towards a more sustainable economy

Through the work you do, have you come across misconceptions regarding the meaning of “impact”? 

After leading several impact investing groups, I learned that “impact” is highly personal and hard to nail down. People get passionate about diverse things, and readily convince themselves that their “thing” is impactful.

That said, I don't believe all issues and causes are equally important, I choose to focus on fundamental life-support systems. Yet, with so much entanglement, interdependencies and interconnections in our economy and our living planet, we need massive parallel solutions across sectors to shift towards a more sustainable economy.

The quest for scalable, disruptive technologies is much-ballyhooed in the venture capital community. Ventures that can scale their positive impact, either in the conventional sense or by serving as replicable models, can be disruptive. Yet technology disruption can be a dangerous trope, at least for the planet, because things that seem positive or benign at small scales can become degenerative when scaled bigger, and also because ecosystems are both hyper-local and massively interconnected. I hope technology can help us create “glocal”, bespoke, locally optimized solutions that can also spread globally.