How do I make people care about nature being an integral part of the city?

Christine: 00:08

Welcome to the More The Brainier, the brave space where creative minds come to share and solve their most pressing burning questions. From Montreal, I'm your host, Christine Renaud, CEO of Braindate.

Over the last decade at Braindate, I've seen firsthand how knowledge sharing discussions can be transformative, how unexpected insights emerge when brilliant minds think together. Feeling stuck on a challenge? Sometimes all it takes is a fresh perspective, or three, to light the way forward.

In the studio with me today is Jane Gibb, our Creative Producer.

Jane, who are the guests on today's show?

Jane: 00:57

This month, our three guests work hard at forging a path off the beaten track: Alex McLean, Co-Founder and CEO at Alveole, Mara Sandoval, Head of Event Design and Interaction at the World Economic Forum, and Cindy Gallup, CEO and Founder of MakeLoveNotPorn. This month, we'll be covering the themes of the birds and the bees; how to find money from people you can actually work with and how to make the switch from simply gathering to true collaboration.

Christine: 01:36

Thank you, Jane, Cindy, Mara, Alex, bonjour. Welcome to our first series. Before we dive in, can we get an idea of where everybody's calling in from today? Mara?

Mara: 01:46

Yeah, I am actually in Switzerland, so calling in from a little mountain town called Arzier-Le Muids.

Christine: 01:53

Amazing, Alex?

Alex: 01:55

In Montreal calling from our office here.

Christine: 01:58

Lovely and Cindy?

Cindy: 02:00

I'm calling in from my apartment in New York in midtown Manhattan.

Christine: 02:05

Which is gorgeous by the way, we can see, we're lucky, the people who can have some visuals right now from ⁓ Cindy's apartment. And so we share our offices with Alveole, actually, Braindate. And the last social event a couple of days ago was a gardening party that our friends at Alveol organized so that our beautiful rooftop terrace could actually be a lush home for the bees that Alex is taking care of. So I want to know who are the green thumbs among you? What is the last thing you planted or grew? Mara?

Mara: 02:38

I actually grew, well planted, I didn't grow, I bought them, but planted some giant poppies. And I'm excited that they're growing very well and there's going to be about five poppies on each plant that I planted. I can't wait.

Christine: 02:51

I love poppies, so gorgeous. Cindy?

Cindy: 02:55

I am famed for having zero green thumbs. I kill plants regularly. And so I guess a major achievement is, and obviously our listeners can't see this, but you can see in the background there is a green thing over there. And that is a friend's fern that he bequeathed to me when he moved to LA several years ago. And it's come near death on a number of occasions, but somehow I've managed to keep it going. So I guess that's my biggest growing achievement to date.

Christine: 03:25

Yeah, I think ferns are hard, are hard to take care of. And what about you, Alex, apart from what happened two days ago at the office?

Alex: 03:32

Oh no, that's what I was going to mention. I feel like that's the most recent one. So we just moved into a new office five or six months ago and yes, we share with Braindate and unfortunately in Montreal in November when we moved, it’s very, very cold and not the right moment to plant anything. So we've been waiting for warmer times to arrive to actually plant and we made this beautiful garden.

I think I didn't plant that many. I think I planted a little probably sage plant is my contribution to that garden, but beautiful to have ⁓ plants around us and to wait for them to grow.

Christine: 04:05

I think you're very humble right now because I saw you in terms of contribution taking up the stairs about 50 pockets of soil. So I think that even maybe even though you didn't plant a lot yourself, like all of the folks there at the office had something to do because you took all this soil up the stairs on the ninth floor.

On my end, so my daughter just discovered gardening after I've been trying to get her to be interested in it for like 10 years. We had kind of a bazaar like at her school and she decided to do her own homemade chips in the microwave. And then she was like, huh, it would be even more profitable if I had my own potatoes. So she decided to start planting potatoes.

She was asking me questions and I was busy, you know, doing like the breakfast and everything. So was like, why don't you ask ChatGPT to help you? So she started like taking pictures of her garden and engaging with chat. Like what you think, like what's happening? Like, is it still alive? Is it still good? And so she is now planting just like everything and growing a garden. And now she has a new project of actually having her own small farmers market in front of our home. So I will report back in a couple of weeks.

And Alex, thinking about how cities and nature can coexist is actually something that you do on a daily basis as the CEO and Co-Founder of Alvéole. Would you care telling us more about your work there?

Alex: 05:34

Yeah, sure. So the work that we do as an organization, we started about 10 years ago. And our mission is to connect people to nature and cities. That's what we exist. And we do it using bees, actually. So I became a beekeeper when I was about 15 years old with my uncle, got really interested in the world of bees, and realized there was this kind big disconnect between rural areas and cities and wanted to bridge that and started doing it with bringing boxes full of insects on rooftops and on buildings and trying to get the people in those buildings to actually start caring about what's going on on the roof.

And so we built a business around it. We have these bees now on thousands of rooftops in New York, not in Switzerland, Mara, we'll see them soon, but in New York and Montreal and London and all these big cities. And our goal in life is to try to connect people to nature directly in cities.

Christine: 06:23

And what was your first prototype? What was the first insects that you brought on a rooftop?

Alex: 06:28

It was honey bees were the first ones. So I grew up in the city of Montreal, but I would go and work in this kind of rural area for my uncle, thousands of kilometers away from Montreal. And one year after working on that farm for maybe five or six seasons, one year we said, let's do it. Let's buy a pickup truck and put a couple of beehives on the back of it and drive them back to drive them back to the city. And it started very much as a let's produce a couple of jars of honey and let's do a bit of this with our friends to actually people getting really interested in wanting to do this for themselves. And we kind of started building a business around it. And today we work with some of the largest organizations in the world, places like the Empire State Building that have had our bees today. But it started with honeybees and has kind of continued along the way with those two. And then we've had native and wild bees along the way and are slowly trying to think about how we think about nature and biodiversity in a more complete way, steps that were steps along the way.

Christine: 07:24

It's amazing. had a moment together where ⁓ somebody from Montreal, I was saying that we were a roommate and that person from Montreal was like, yeah, it's a small nonprofit, you know. And I was like, no, no, it's not a small organization. They're actually having a huge impact. And I think it's really, we're really proud of your success.

Alex: 07:45

people still ask me if it's a full-time job. And I have to find my way from going to, yes, it's full-time and we also employ 150 people and I have to like do that in a, try to find a humble way to do that.

Christine: 07:57

Yeah, because you have to have kind of distribution centers all over the world. Your material, your bees have to live. They're not all in Montreal, basically. You don't ship them necessarily from Montreal.

Alex: 08:08

No, no, we find local bees in each location and then we find customers that are interested in doing this at their building. And then we will have our own beekeepers on staff that will go to these locations on a regular basis. We go every two to three weeks, we go at each building to essentially care for the bees, make sure that they're doing well. It's a of a complex thing, right? There's a queen, there's 50,000 bees, they depend on the environment around them. You don't actually feed them, they feed themselves these diseases. So you have to be there quite often.

And that's why we have such a big team is that we're very regularly checking on these hives at each location. So each of the cities that we operate in, there's about 70 of them. We have a small team on site that will go and tend to the hives on those locations. And then we do workshops and education. It's all about, again, connecting people to nature. It's getting them to understand what's going on the rooftop and making that link with them.

So we do thousands of workshops every year with people that have never seen bees in their life, go to a rooftop, we open it up, talk about nature, talking about all these things. As Jane said, the birds and the bees, we bring that up with them.

Christine: 09:12

So yeah. And I wonder, maybe it's a very like naive question, but I wonder is there an environment where you put your bees and they actually don't have enough nature around them to sustain themselves? Is that a thing?

Alex: 09:26

It can happen. It's actually quite surprising, ⁓ Cindy, because you're in Manhattan. mean, I'm going to link with New York. New York for us was the kind of biggest test of that was, we're going to bring a box of bees on a rooftop of a midtown office building. What's going to happen? Where are they actually going to forage? It's actually impressive the amount of trees, I'll take again, New York as an example, that actually bloom and provide nectar and pollen. The first year we set up that hive was one of there was a midtown building, we were blown away. think we did like 150 pounds of honey on that particular location. So it turns out there's a lot of trees and a lot of areas that the bees can go and forage in.

Cindy: 10:07

yeah, I was gonna say, mean, where I'm in Midtown, I'm across from the New York Public Library, Bryant Park is just over there, you know, that's the country. And then, you know, Park Avenue is very well planted all the way down, you know, the median. And so actually, even in Midtown Manhattan, which is prime like business office area, Alex, it's surprisingly verdant.

Alex: 10:33

And typically what cities will do is try to find types of trees that will flower and that will produce a lot of nectar. So you actually have this beautiful mix of many different flowering trees that will produce a lot of nectar. And you have the opposite of a monoculture where you might expect a beehive on a corn field to be successful. It really isn't because all you have is corn there that actually doesn't produce any nectar.

Whereas in right in the middle of Midtown, you have dozens of different types of ⁓ tree species that will bloom at all these different moments. have all these gardens and flowers that have been planted too. So ⁓ what looks like an entirely built up unlivable area for bees is actually quite a fantastic area. ⁓ You have to be careful and not put too many on each building. We limit to one hive per location. ⁓ But ultimately there's a lot of stuff to go and forage on.

Christine: 11:32

Fascinating and I think this brings us perfectly to your burning question Alex. I would love if you share this with us and you can include any context that would help us understand your challenge better.

Alex: 11:44

I find my question so simple, but it's the one that I've been tackling for all these years. it's how do we get people to care about nature in cities? And I know we do care about nature in cities. We tend to think about parks and gardens and no one wants to live in a city without parks and gardens. But nature is a much broader thing than that, right? There's a lot of things that we can't even see. There's things in soil, there's things all around us that are part of the natural environment.

The barrier that I've been trying to break with Alveole for all these years is How do we break this conception that you have to escape the city to enjoy nature? And how do we actually make cities where you can enjoy nature on a regular basis? And I think people have a feeling of that and an interest in that. To me, success, and this might be my life's work, would be that you can completely escape to nature in the middle of cities, and that's kind of the journey that we're on. So my question is, how do you get people to care about nature in cities?

Christine: 12:43

Mara and Cindy, this is the time for you to ask your clarifying questions. Who wants to start? Cindy?

Cindy: 12:50

When you say, Alex, how do you get people to care about nature and cities? What kind of people do you need to care about nature and cities? I.e. who are the people who will actually move the needle on making that happen?

Christine: 13:06

I have the same question.

Alex: 13:07

It's a really good question. So also the way we've tackling it and so we've tackled it more from a corporate direction. So we've actually tried to get companies to care about nutrients. So the people that own most of the real estate. Sorry, I keep taking New York because you're there. So I'll keep with the New York example. The people that own the most real estate in New York, these real estate owners, for us, these are the people that we are trying to convince to care about nature because they control what's the built environment around us. Obviously government and there's a shared space.

I think ultimately it's citizens and people that lives in the cities that we're trying to convince, but we've been tackling it through the people that actually own the land and operate the buildings and for them to think about nature as, yeah, I'm going to think about my building, not as something completely disconnected with nature, but actually something that could ⁓ help nature, get the nature positive. So to answer your question, people that own the buildings are the people that I'm trying to convince.

Christine: 14:02

Mara?

Mara: 14:05

Alex, what is the link for you between bees and nature? I mean, there's the obvious one that bees live in nature, but how do you describe that link more philosophically, I suppose?

Alex: 14:15

Yeah, let's go philosophically. The moment to me that is so interesting with bees is we do this thing, we call it the frame moment. So I mentioned we do these workshops, we pin people to a roof and we do a very simple activity, but a very unique one where we open up the beehive and we pull this frame out and on a single frame you might have a couple thousand bees that are kind of sitting there.

When you do that in front of people, we purposely don't wear any protective suits. These are really gentle if you are gentle with them. And then we bring a group of people around them, around this, ⁓ you know, fair distance, but just not wearing suits. ⁓ What happens is this beautiful moment of, it's like everyone becomes a child immediately. It's like all of the kind of, not naive, yeah, yeah, just questions around. ⁓ In awe and inspired. there's these series of…

Mara: 15:01

In wonder

Alex: 15:09

… 10 questions that kind of follow after about how, you know, what are the bees doing? How do they organize? And the more the questions advance, the more they're actually, you start thinking about the environment around, because the bees are feeding and are kind of a representation of what's going on around them. If they're successful, it means that the environment around them was a good one.

⁓ And so the connection to me is that moment of awe and kind of connecting the dots of, the bees are actually kind of a representation of what's going around this thing, around this building, it suddenly triggers something for people. like, if I plant more flowers, it's not just beautiful flowers. It's also going to feed the bees and butterflies and all. If I remove the kind of pesticides that are be used in this land, it might actually help the soil. So the bees to me is that kind of moment of connection with the natural environment around us. And you seem to suddenly care a little bit more about the natural environment around you, making that, making that linked or for the people that we speak to.

Christine: 16:03

Awesome. And I had a question around any examples that you've had where ⁓ nature is taking over the city? Because I'm thinking about places, know, like Berlin, for instance, where, you know, there are… so many gorgeous parks and then you think about you're talking about real estate you're thinking about the real estate of a city where most of the land is already occupied and then what you did is embrace the rooftops and it reminds me of Lufa farms that we have here in Montreal as well that is growing food on the rooftops what have you seen in your travels and in your research as examples of just nature kind of taking back its ⁓ righteous place in the in the city?

Alex: 16:43

I think European cities or some European cities tend to do this a little bit better. But I think that the most prime example for me is Singapore. Singapore is a place where I wasn't there. apparently, 40 or 50 years ago, it wasn't a city that particularly embraced nature. It was actually high pollution. I think, I don't know the exact dates, but I think there was a moment where the government decided to take a different route and not have a city that would be kind of constantly polluted and filled up with cars.

I had the chance to go to Singapore a couple months ago just to visit and it's incredible, right? The buildings are not only covered with nature, but there's these constantly across downtown, there's essentially these carve-outs of four or five stories in the middle of these high rises where they've planted these like middle of building parks that you can navigate with these massive trees. They've put nature in every single building essentially.

And apparently, again, you see these photos and it was not the case. It's not like...it's been like that for hundreds of years. There was this purposeful transformation of the city. So to me, that's a huge inspiration. It's like if there is a strong willingness to bring nature into a city, Singapore seems to have done that. It transforms completely that city. And then you can see it across a lot of, I think London is doing a lot of work to include nature as well. There's a lot of cities that are doing it, but Singapore I think is the kind of prime example.

Christine: 18:03

So inspiring. Thank you, Alex. ⁓

And now it's time for you to sit back and relax and enjoy Cindy, Mara and I doing all the work for you. So it's a moment where you're actually not allowed to speak and you're just encouraged to listen and take it all in. And for us, Mara, Cindy, it's the right time to share any feedback, share any case studies, ideas, other questions that you have that could support Alex in his quest.

Alex: 18:34

Brilliant. ok.

Cindy: 18:36

I will just articulate what was coming to my mind as I was listening to you, Alex, because, by the way, I was in Singapore 40, 50 years ago. I'm half Malaysian Chinese and grew up in Asia, you know, went to Singapore a lot as a kid, subsequently worked there in the late 90s. And Singapore was able to do that because Singapore has a government that is effectively a benevolent dictatorship. I mean, it's a very beneficial one for the population. So it's not thought about in those terms, but basically, the Singapore government has absolute control of how its citizens live and what it chooses to do.

And I bring that up because when you asked the question, how can we make people want to connect more to nature in cities, and I asked which people, and you said completely understandably that your clients are the people that own the buildings. That is continuing what is regrettably an area of privilege with any city, the property owners who are able to implement what you do, which by the way I think is wonderful, do so for the benefit of white collar workers. And we were talking about New York, you I'm sitting in the center of New York, I'm sitting in Midtown, and out in the Bronx and Queens, you can go street after street and never see a tree. And that is very bad for all sorts of reasons, including in the world of climate change, the fact that that is why there are areas of cities that are way hotter than the more privileged affluent areas because they do not have the nature that helps bring the temperatures down and create more pleasant living conditions.

And so the people who most need to be connected to nature within cities are the people who are not the building owners, not the white collar workers, but the people who absolutely have virtually no evidence of nature at all as they live their daily lives and they work their daily jobs. And I know this is not your business, but I really wish there was a way to make.. connect with nature in cities much more mass market than it currently is.

Christine: 20:41

Mm. Mara?

Mara

Yeah, when I was thinking about your question, Alex, I was thinking about, OK, an example. I love that what Christine was saying, an example of a city where there is a lot of nature. And I did think about London. I thought about the suburbs of London especially. And I thought about Sir David Attenborough. I thought about how Sir David Attenborough has sort of brought about this culture of caring about nature. You know, people grow up, I believe, sensitised or sensitivised to this idea that know, nature is a part of your environment. And when I was in London the last time I stayed at an Airbnb in the suburbs of London, and there was a family of foxes that lived right under the deck. And it just seemed very normal when I was like, my God, this is amazing. the owner was like, yeah, like this is normal. And these foxes just live in the neighborhood and everybody just is with them. And it's just part of life.

And so then I was thinking about, if you grow up with someone like Sir David Attenborough, you know, on TV your whole life, and you think about this as being, you know, just how things are or valuable, then it's really about kids. And then I was thinking about, Alex, you said that you guys do a lot of workshops and, you know, what other kind of outreach do you do that is specifically targeted to kids? And also thinking about, you know, kids today on social media, videos, like maybe there's a before and after the bees were there. Like, are there ways that you're also communicating specifically to children, also to Cindy's point about like, is the audience? And also, know, children who, to Cindy's point, don't see evidence of nature anywhere and didn't even know to think about it in that way.

Christine: 22:12

The first place my mind went to was ⁓ the benefits of nature on health.

And I was thinking, hmm, you know, when you start like just doing some research and reading around the benefits of walking in a forest in terms of mental health and physical health, you know, more and more research actually is documenting the benefits of that. And I was kind of since also going the route of who are we talking about here and who has the power to create this change, you know, and it's kind of this like what comes first, like the chicken and the egg question of how do you bring in more nature in the city is if nobody's asking for it.

And I think for me, the moment in my life where I actually reconnected with nature is when I started being interested in the connection between the humans and the nature. And especially for me, you were talking about bees foraging, Alex, but for me, when I realised that there's so much of nature around us that is actually that has an intent and a purpose in terms of, you know, the interaction between nature and human being like, okay, this is eatable.

You know, this is a medicinal plant that, you know, our ancestors and, you native populations, for example, in Canada knew how to use to cure X, and Z. And just like sometimes walking around Montreal and seeing that, okay, this bush has small fruits that are actually eatable and delicious, but we've kind of been taught that either nature is, especially in the cities, that nature is ornamental or dangerous.

You know, it's like either it's just like to be pretty or it's this berry is very dangerous for your survival. ⁓ So for me, the connection between me caring more about nature was food, was like this connection of like, wow, nature is gorgeous and it's impactful, but it's also delicious. And Mara, you were talking about awe and magic a bit earlier. And I think there's something really magical in walking in a forest and knowing which mushrooms you can eat and which you can't. So that's that ⁓ connection between nature and food and wellbeing I think for me is very, very strong.

Mara: 24:16

And that also makes me think about storytelling, Christine, because I was thinking about the kids or people that don't have opportunities to go to nature, but just to hear about these experiences and that this is possible and they may want them to figure out ways to have it themselves. So maybe that is like a spark.

Christine: 24:33

Absolutely. Honestly, I think even like small gardening, a lot of communities now have major gardens, but I'm just seeing my daughters, you're talking about the children, Mara, looking at my daughters and we call it in my household, we call it “walking our land”. So it's basically, you know, 2000 square foot. So it's not, it's not very long to walk around, but you know, we just walk our land and look at the rhubarb and look at, okay, we have like little kiwis that grow in Montreal and looking at the berries and the flowers and you know what is in which state and just this just having a small garden I think is such a powerful statement for for families and for communities. Cindy I wonder if you have something to add?

Cindy: 25:17

A couple of years ago, I spoke at a big Danish tech conference that happens every year, Tech Barbecue. And so I spent several days in Copenhagen and I stayed for the weekend and I went to the Copenhagen Architecture and Design Museum and they had this phenomenal exhibition there, basically about how Copenhagen has been planned out and designed as a city. Absolutely to bring nature into the city. They realised over the years that all the big commercial interests had built up all the office blocks along the waterfront of the river. And so they embarked on a program that was about stopping that kind of development, moving them back, giving people access to the waterfront. The water in Copenhagen, the harbour is so clean you can swim in it. We're encouraged to do so. You know, there are ladders down into it at points along the, know, anybody can swim.

They've designed housing that is deliberately meant to bring cross-generational communities together. This exhibition absolutely blew my mind. And that exhibition should travel around every single big city in the world because it's an inspiration to urban planners and city government everywhere.

And the fact of the matter is, that I'm generally a great believer that change happens in the bottom up, not the top down. Every one of us taking micro actions every day, small, simple, easy to do actions to change what we want to see change, adds up at scale to enormous impact. But in the case of what we're talking about, I fear it has to be a top down model. It has to be the people who are responsible for urban planning for city budget allocation.

And in your case, Alex, I understand that with your business, it has to be the people who own the buildings who can take the decision whether or not to welcome nature onto their rooftops for the benefit of their employees. It's tough to see what bottom-up change can be affected, not least because, again, if we're talking mass market, people lead such very difficult lives.

They would absolutely love the chance to be able to sit and relax in nature. When you're working three jobs to survive, you know, when you're living in a homeless shelter, I mean, that you just do not have the time to do that, you don't have the mind space to do that. And I wish there was a way to mass market what you're talking about in a way that everybody benefits.

Christine: 27:39

Mara and Cindy, thank you.

Alex, you're granted your right to speak again. So I would love to hear any takeaways that you gathered from the conversation.

Alex: 27:55

Hard not to interact! I think there's fantastic points there. Mara said something about the foxes living under the balcony and it was kind of a completely normal thing. I love this idea of thinking that, not sure how quickly this would happen, that we would all kind of consider completely normal to have that level of nature into a city.

And Cindy, to your point of kind of gaining more traction and making this a kind of broader movement that actually touches more people. I'm totally interested in that. Years ago we started doing kind of a school program, maybe over 100 schools that we work with that we've the program with. Sometimes in varying degrees, I guess, of privilege in terms of schools. It's fantastic to see what happens in those workshops with kids and the same exact thing of that frame of mind. You know, adults will transform into little kids. Kids have this kind of similar reaction where they get extremely inspired. And I honestly wish we could do more of it. Like, I think it's a good point. It's probably the areas of the city that are the poorest that are actually having the least amount of nature. Hopefully that changes over time by getting more and more people interested in the case for it. ⁓ And to your point, Christine, I think there are tremendous health benefits of being closer to nature and having that daily interaction. So yeah, thanks for those thoughts. It's getting me going here.

Christine: 29:07

Would you think about a next step after this conversation on your life's journey?

Alex: 29:11

Oh this is the CEO talking here.

Christine: 29:14

This is a commitment.

Alex: 29:17

You know, we've started doing this program where we ask some of these real estate owners to actually donate their workshop to local organizations. And it's a little bit complex to manage because you then have multiple parties that you have to deal with. Here today, my next step will be to make sure that that's something we continue to push on to our customers because they do tend to want to have some level of positive impact in their...

We've had some pretty successful ⁓ partnerships there where we can actually donate the workshop or even go with a school to this building and actually use what they've built on location, not just for those people in that building, we use it for community rounds. Takeaway is, I can press the gas more on that.

Christine: 29:58

I love it. I have the goosebumps of a good idea. You're my roommate. I'll keep you accountable on that. I'll check on you in three months. Okay.

Alex: 30:01

Gotcha.

Gotcha.

Christine: 30:13

Thank you, Mara and Cindy. This was ⁓ really, really lovely. And thank you also to Jane Gibb, our Creative Producer here at The More the Brainier, and to Jenya Sverlov and Chris Leon, our delightful sound engineers.

Jane: 30:28

Thanks Christine. If you have a contribution to Alex's burning question, please share it on Braindate's LinkedIn page where we'll be posting this episode or send us an email at TMTB@braindate.com. We'll end today's episode with a quotation from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie taken from her TED Talk on the danger of a single story back in 2009.

“Show a people as one thing, as only one thing over and over again and that is what they become. [...] It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.”

What if there was more than one story circulating about sex? Who holds the power to make this happen? Cindy Gallup's work with MakeLoveNotPorn has been building a healthier model for sex than the current one.

Cindy's main roadblock is around money in our eleventh episode of The More The Brainier, her burning question will take us in search of it, looking at who has it and how she can get it. Join us next week!

This podcast was brought to you by Braindate, the world's leading technology that turns your event into a knowledge sharing feast, leaving your participants transformed:- by each other.