Who profits when the business of nature outpaces the responsibility to protect it?
Photo: Martin Edström/Sagarmatha NextEmme Hayes is a Los Angeles based environmental strategist working across climate, outdoor culture, and animal equality. She brings a cultural systems lens to public conversations about nature, connecting environmental urgency to the larger questions of how we live, what we value, and what we are willing to protect.
The Business of Nature
(Image credit: Namgyal Sherpa/AFP/Getty)Nature has become one of the most powerful commercial languages in modern life.
Wildlife and wild spaces are used to sell a lifestyle from vehicles to apparel, events, outdoor identity, and escape. It gives brands a sense of trust, freedom, vitality, and belonging. It turns landscapes into lifestyle and wildlife into symbolism, and the wild spaces into a backdrop for what people want to buy, become, or experience.
But the living world behind that value is disappearing. Wildlife populations are declining rapidly. Habitats and families are being fragmented. Permanent biodiversity loss and climate instability are reshaping the places people claim to love.
My work begins with that contradiction: the more nature is used to sell modern life, the more urgent it becomes to ask who is responsible for protecting it.
Brands use nature to build aspiration. They sell a lifestyle through the promise of connection to the wild. Mount Everest becomes a symbol of endurance and resiliency. Wildlife gives products character, and remote landscapes make ordinary consumption feel like aspiration.
These stories create attention, identity, and commercial value. None of that value returns to the places and wildlife that make the story possible. Nature generates the sale but is excluded from the profit.
If Earth is our only shareholder, where is its dividend?
Environmental responsibility often breaks down between the image an organization projects, the behavior it encourages, and where its money and influence ultimately go.
I examine those relationships together: how an environmental story frames the problem, what it asks an audience to feel or do, what commercial interests shape the message, and whether protection is supported in practice. That can mean tracing the gap between a brand’s use of nature and its investment in the living world, expanding a film, campaign, or public program into the larger cultural and commercial questions it raises, or building climate and wildlife protection into how people participate and spend.
The goal is not to make environmental responsibility sound better, but to make it easier to understand and harder to ignore.
What Nature Doesn't Get Back
AREAS OF FOCUS
Environmental Strategy 🌿
Identifying the gaps between cultural value, public behavior, and ecological responsibility. This is the diagnostic work: where a story, a campaign, or a program claims care for nature and where the follow-through stops.
Climate Culture 🌎
Taking climate and wildlife conversations past awareness and into accountability, through public writing, screenings, and Land & Line.
Counterculture to Consumption 🎿
Building resale as a direct challenge to the outdoor industry's obsession with gear.
Speaking, Writing, Advisory 👩🏻🏫
For festivals, publications, NGOs, and cultural institutions building sharper conversations about wildlife, climate, and outdoor responsibility.
