Who profits when the business of nature outpaces the responsibility to protect it?
Emme Hayes is a Los Angeles-based environmental strategist working across climate, outdoor culture, and circular systems. She identifies the gaps between environmental urgency and public action, helping turn overlooked solutions, cultural influence, and proximity to nature into climate and wildlife responsibility.
The Business of Nature
Nature has become one of the most powerful commercial languages in modern life.
It sells vehicles, apparel, travel, wellness, homes, media, events, outdoor identity, and escape. It gives brands a sense of purity, freedom, vitality, and belonging. It turns landscapes into lifestyle, wildlife into symbolism, and the wild 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. Habitats are being fragmented. Biodiversity is being lost. Climate instability is 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.
The Gap
The gap I keep seeing is between the version of nature people are sold and the living world they are becoming disconnected from.
Industries borrow from the wild to sell freedom, escape, wellness, identity, adventure, beauty, and belonging. But the actual living systems behind those images, the wildlife, habitats, waters, forests, and ecosystems, are being pushed further into the background.
That is where responsibility breaks down. The feeling of connection becomes marketable, but the work of protection remains separate, optional, or unclear.
My work starts with the question of what actually moves people toward protection.
Not just what makes them feel connected. Not just what makes a campaign beautiful or a story emotionally compelling. What changes the relationship between people and the living systems their choices affect?
I care about the places where narrative, behavior, commerce, and responsibility are out of alignment, and how to build ways to bring them closer together.
In practice, that can mean designing circular systems that reduce waste, shaping public conversations that bring wildlife back into view, or helping an organization understand what its audience is being asked to feel, buy, support, or protect.
The goal is not to make environmental responsibility sound better. It is to make it easier to understand and harder to ignore.
Strategy for A Living World
Areas of Focus
Environmental Strategy 🌿
Identifying the gaps between cultural value, public behavior, and ecological responsibility.
Climate Culture 🌎
Shaping public narratives and conversations that move climate and wildlife protection beyond awareness.
Circular Responsibility 🎿
Building resale, reuse, and circular systems that reduce waste and connect participation to protection.
Speaking, Writing, Advisory 👩🏻🏫
For organizations, publications, festivals, and events looking for a sharper conversation about the business of nature, wildlife, and outdoor responsibility.
Platforms In Practice
Articles In Common
A circular outdoor resale marketplace extending the life of gear and redirecting value toward climate and wildlife work.
Wild for Climate
A climate culture platform bringing wildlife, ecological responsibility, and harder environmental conversations into outdoor spaces.
If you are building work around climate, wildlife, circular systems, outdoor culture, or the business of nature, I’d like to hear what you are trying to move.
