In this episode of Journey to Regeneration, Christopher Marquis speaks with Dr. Helen Crowley, Co-Founder and CEO of Nature Matters, a conservation biologist whose career has taken her from field-based biodiversity work with the Wildlife Conservation Society to corporate sustainability leadership at Kering and, more recently, nature-focused advisory and education. Crowley explains why addressing biodiversity loss requires companies to look beyond operational footprints and understand how decisions about materials, sourcing, and supply chains shape ecosystems far from corporate headquarters. Drawing on her work on Kering’s pioneering Environmental Profit and Loss account, she discusses how natural-capital measurement can become a tool for prioritization and change rather than simply another disclosure exercise. The conversation examines cashmere sourcing in Mongolia as a case study, where evidence of land degradation led not to abandoning the material but to work on regenerative grazing, herder livelihoods, animal husbandry, and wildlife protection. Crowley also reflects on the responsibilities and opportunities of luxury companies, the relationship between nature-positive strategies and long-term resilience, and the limits of sustainability approaches built primarily around reducing negative impacts. Through her work at Nature Matters, she argues for bringing ecological complexity, scientific understanding, and compelling storytelling back into business decision-making. The result is a broader argument for regeneration: companies need to understand where they depend on and affect nature, then move from minimizing damage toward actively improving the systems on which both business and society depend.
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