The set of principles below was compiled by a diverse group of professionals (scientists, financiers, engineers, etc.) involved in ecological benefit projects. That, in itself, is nothing remarkable. It’s fairly easy to gather a bunch of people from the same industry into a room and ask them to identify a few principles that they all agree on. The less the people in the room really care about their work, the quicker they will finish the assignment and the more generic the resulting principles will be.

In this particular exercise, however, the primary commonality among the people in the room was not the industry that they worked in, but their motivation for working in this industry. This was a group of professionals who would take any chance they could get to stand barefoot in the soil, to breathe with the forest, to listen to the birds, or to sit beside a gushing river. This was a group of people who have been moved by nature, deeply and profoundly.