Why have I decided to launch LynnJohnson.News now?
One of Einstein’s famous quotes was “You Don’t Have to Know Everything. You Just Have to Know Where to Find It.”.
When you want to know about the very real risks associated with the extinction crisis and climate change where do you turn? When you want to know about simple and pragmatic actions that can help mitigated the crisis, where do you go? When you want to get to the root cause of the environmental collapse we are currently facing, how to you find information and solutions that have often been ignored for years and even decades?
When you have access to a fuller picture of what we are collectively facing, then you can make informed decisions about how you shop, eat, vote, invest and where you work.
Getting this information is what drives me to investigate the issues and connections which makes what I cover meaningful. When you only focus on what’s happening in the moment, you often miss how you got here. “What am I missing?” was the question I started asking myself a decade ago when looking at the accelerating extinction crisis and more.
One thing is clear, we don’t have that much time left to change our relationship with the natural world, 2030 is seen as a tipping point. The science is clear and we have run out of time for procrastination.
Countdown to 2030
I hope the investigations and articles published in LynnJohnson.News help you answer some of the questions you have about our changing world and what needs to be done to manage how deeply we all fall.
The articles in LynnJohnson.News cover the forces shaping our world, with a focus on those driving biodiversity loss and climate collapse. Our collective success in softening the environmental breakdown will depend on our willingness to demand significant levels industry regulation, domestically and globally. Businesses and their investors have had 50 years to prove they could curb their excess with voluntary governance systems. They have decisively failed. Will we continue to let corporations and investors stand in the way of the modern international, independent governance we need to stem environmental collapse?
Even now, in the face of the natural and heath disasters, the success of new iterations of voluntary self-governance is being exaggerated. LynnJohnson.News includes investigations into the overselling of sustainability and ESG investing. We highlight the lack of transparency in supply chains in the legal trade of wild species and the decades of undermining any independent regulation of this trade.
The delusion of the need for constant growth, which is the desired state for investors, business and governments is accelerating the world to a tipping point from which we will not recover. We already live in a changed reality and even some of the key institutions who have driven us to this precipice are changing their tune; recently the World Economic Forum stated that environmental degradation was now considered a threat to humanity that could “bring about societal collapses with long‑lasting and severe consequences”.
The problem now is that many of the same institutions that have profited from this over exploitation want to profit from the ‘fix’ and in many cases the fixes they propose are simply an illusion to maintain a business-as-usual approach.
Articles in LynnJohnson.News aim to cut though the noise that for too many years has created the pretence of a genuine discourse and action on saving the natural world.
All the articles and campaigns on LynnJohnson.News are free to view, free to republish, free to use. While this page is branded LynnJohnson.News the research and the articles are products of a nearly 30-year partnership with my husband, Peter Lanius. We both write articles and we both do research. We work many hours to investigate the issues, pick apart the complexity, discuss the insights and write about what we have found and what can be done.
But we don’t charge money for our time; you have open access to everything we write. We just have a digital tip jar at the bottom of every article for you to toss a few coins into if you want to. Finding the time to do the research and writing is helped by the goodwill of people who are also looking for real answers to what is happening but can’t necessarily devote the time to investigating something that they care passionately about to find the solutions available, if not yet enacted.
I hope that LynnJohnson.News will provide you with the information you want and need to make some urgent and critical decisions.
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Who am I?
I am a curious scientist with a strong strategic and commercial mindset and experience.
My first job was as a research physicist, investigating fires, explosions and other risks for the petrochemical industry. The first time I walked away from the corporate world was 1991, I was 26 years old. Everyone told me I was crazy selling my house and leaving a great job to go back into full-time education, but I recognised early that all you really have is your integrity and I wasn’t comfortable with what I was seeing.
After completing my PhD in Particle Physics, my research in the area of neural networks. I was approached about a job in the City of London, no way was I taking this path!
Only with the evolution of Corporate Social Responsibility and Emotional Intelligence did I consider heading back to the corporate world. By this time, I was living in Melbourne, Australia. I started my own business consulting and leadership coaching in 2001. By 2003, I saw that the initiatives which in the first instance provided real hope for genuine change had deteriorated into simple tick-box governance and bolt on PR exercises creating the pretence of a genuine discourse and action to address social and environmental needs.
Still, I had some wonderful individuals as clients, people who were trying to drive real cultural change for their teams and in some instances still, their companies. Industry response to the Global Financial Crisis clarified business systems were changing in such a way that individual, good leaders, no matter their great values and courage, could not drive any significant transformation. My second withdrawal from the business world started in 2009, first going to a 4-day consulting week. By 2014, I was consulting 2 days a week and living on 20 acres over an hour outside of Melbourne.
The days I wasn’t consulting I was deep diving into conservation issues and biodiversity loss.
My consulting transitioned from working with executives who wanted to be great leaders to working with people who wanted to get clarity on how they create a “freedom to act” in accordance with their values. This has continued, but with most of my consulting moving to Zoom since the start of the pandemic.
Much of my time, together with my husband, Peter is spent figuring out what solutions are appropriate given the ever-increasing risks we are facing in the areas of biodiversity loss and runaway climate change. Right now, we are heading for collapse and that is not a scenario that appeals to us.
Changing course is still possible, but it will require level of public outrage to dislodge the status-quo dominating business and politics. So far the scale of public outrage has not reached the levels needed to dislodge this status-quo.
This has left the small percentage of caring citizens trying to protect what is left too vulnerable, as can be seen by new laws targeting peaceful protesters around the world. These new laws should send a chill up our spines. I for one would like to thank these peaceful protesters for everything they do.