From Speaking For Nature to Standing With It
Sometime late in 2025, I walked among ancient Grass Trees in Australia and felt a quiet stirring.
I had loved Grass Trees all my life, but I had never stood anywhere like this. Hundreds of them, gathered together, some barely five years old, some closer to eight hundred. I kept reaching for the word forest, though that was never quite right. It felt older than a forest. It felt like standing inside deep time.
My friend Michael had brought me there. For two decades he has worked alongside the bees on this land, making Australia’s Manuka honey, and I think he knew what the place would do to me before I did. He didn’t explain it. He let me arrive in my own time, and then he let the silence do the rest.
What stirred in me that day wasn’t a new idea. It was something that had been quietly growing for years, finally finding its shape.
For almost a decade my work in regenerative business had been moving closer and closer to a single question: what does it mean to bring the living world into the way we lead, organise and decide? Since 2021 I had been taking leaders out of their meeting rooms and into places like this immersions I called Nature’s Boardroom, so that we might listen differently, question the assumptions of business as usual, and let Nature back into the conversation. Bringing people into Nature wasn’t new to me.
But standing among the Grass Trees, the question turned.
I had spent so long thinking about how we might speak for Nature. Now I found myself wondering what it would take to listen, to relate, to speak with Nature instead. In the heat of this polycrisis, protecting the living world no longer felt like enough. We needed to come back into relationship with it. And that small shift from for to with changed everything downstream of it.
The Grass Trees themselves seemed to be teaching me how.
They are ancient and extraordinarily resilient. They have lived through immense change, and they have made an unlikely peace with fire the very thing that looks like destruction is what stirs their seeds into life. Fire renews their flowering, sending tall, spear-like blooms toward the sky, offering food and habitat to everything that gathers around them. Endurance through drought, through fire, through regeneration. Patience measured in centuries.
And they are uniquely Australian. That mattered more than I understood at first.
Because the next question that rose in me was this: I have lived in the UK since 2019 so why did I feel, so strongly, that this work needed to happen differently in Australia?
The answer was already in the ground beneath my feet. First Nations peoples have been in deep relationship with Country for at least 65,000 years, holding relational ways of being that understand us all as kin land, waters, plants, animals, people, ancestors, and the generations not yet born. We do not need to invent a new relationship with Nature. We need to listen, learn, and perhaps remember something our dominant culture has forgotten. Not to extract that wisdom, or translate it into another Western framework, but to sit with it respectfully. If we are going to explore what it means to bring Nature into how we govern and decide, then Indigenous wisdom has to be woven through the whole of it.
Which led me, quite naturally, to a harder truth about my own role.
As a sole trader, I could so easily have built a programme around my own ideas and tried to own it. But everything the Grass Trees were showing me pointed the other way. This work needed more than one voice. It needed different knowledge systems, disciplines and lived experiences. It needed an ecosystem of relationships. My job was not to possess the seed but to become its wayfinder, the one who gathers the relationships around it and helps it find its way into the world.
So two partnerships emerged from that day.
The first was with Nature itself: noticing what it was asking of me, and responding. The second would be human. And when I asked who might walk beside me, one name arrived before the others.
In early 2026 I approached Michelle Maloney at the Australian Earth Laws Alliance. She said yes almost before I had finished asking. Her collaborations with Dr Mary Graham, with Tyson Yunkaporta, with John Seed and so many others carried exactly the deeply relational approach this work needed. Since 2012, AELA has been quietly turning governance from human-centred to Earth-centred, across law, economics, education and community. They brought the Earth-jurisprudence, the legal pathways, and the relationships to ground all of this in an Australian context.
Looking back, I can see every thread arriving at once: my years in regenerative business, my own deepening relationship with Nature, my exploration of Earth-centred law as a Dandelion Fellow, my time held by the Kincentric Leadership community and a transformative season at Findhorn and something first awakened in me at nineteen, in my earliest encounters with First Nations wisdom. All of it had been preparing me to hear what the Grass Trees had to say.
And so the seed crossed a threshold. From an idea, to a partnership, to a Fellowship.
It is no longer mine. This year, twenty-two of us have been walking this path together since June leaders from business, government, academia, community and regenerative practice, all asking what it might really mean to bring Nature into how we govern and decide. Some of them write about the journey as they go; you can follow along with them. The work is still emerging, and we will keep welcoming new voices as it grows.
I owe deep thanks to those who have made this first adventure so richly inclusive:
Delta Kay – Arakwal custodian, who took us all on an immersive experience with Country in July this year.
Dr Mary Graham – Adjunct Professor, University of Queensland
Char Love – Voice for Nature for House of Hackney.
John Seed -Deep Ecology.
Bronte Ansell – Lawyer for Nature and First Nature Voice for Faith in Nature
Michael Howes – Australia’s Manuka
Dr Dominique Hess – Regen Melbourne Voice for Nature
Dr Michelle Maloney and Sarah Bashforth from AELA
Thank You!
The seed was stirred among the Grass Trees that day. Now twenty-two of us are listening for what wants to grow next and if something in you is stirring too, you’re warmly invited to join us in 2027. You can follow The GrassTree Fellowship with me on Substack or on Linkedin here.
If you would like to join us in 2027 in The GrassTree Fellowship you can register your interest here.
Grass Trees | Australia | First Nations | Recognition and Emergence | Partnership with Nature | AELA | Fellowship.
𝐌𝐲 𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐬 𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞: 𝐒𝐭𝐞𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐛𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐚𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐧𝐨𝐫𝐦.
Through Private mentoring, Nature’s Boardroom and The Growth Experience® Experience, I support leaders running their own companies to learn and experience regeneration so they can move from overwhelm to clarity, from over-functioning to sustainable high performance and from linear problem solving to living systems intelligence.
I also steward nature into decision-making within companies for new governance as a Wayfinder and a voice for nature in business.
At my core, I am an educator who loves to mentor, teach, share and facilitate learning in ways that are regenerative, relational and rooted in nature. Not the old expert model, but learning and experiences that help people grow from the inside out.
For 30 years, I’ve run four companies with regenerative instincts and purpose. This has given me the business acumen to understand the real pressures leaders face and the regenerative frameworks to help them work in healthier, more meaningful ways. I bridge practical business design with new ways of holding purpose, impact and responsibility.
You can subscribe to Jannine’s inspiring short newsletters, event invitations, and business mentoring tips here. You can read more articles written by Jannine on Substack, or LinkedIn.
