Jon's Story- The inspiration behind Envest
From Field Biology to International Finance –
A Personal Journey - Jon Bishop, Founder of Envest, Inc.
The Beginnings...
My life-long love of the natural world led me to declare my major in biology at the age of 10. As an avid hiker and backpacker, I found endless fascination in the plant communities through which the trails passed. I got a BA in Ecology and Evolution at UC Santa Barbara and an MS in Ecology from University of Alaska Fairbanks. Studying the thermoregulation capabilities of bees in interior Alaska and how that influenced vegetation distribution was exhilarating. I was certainly aware of the myriad environmental problems facing the earth, and I was dismayed by the irresponsible reproductive habits of people in so many parts of the world. Yet I accepted the academic party line that the primary need was for more information about natural systems.
The call to action came in May of 1994 when Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, gave a series of graduate seminars where I was studying in Alaska. In his first seminar, Ehrlich said that all biologists are morally obliged to spend at least 10% of their efforts on preserving the environments they study. After hearing him, I concluded that knowledge of an extinct community is useless. My professional emphasis changed right there in the seventh row of that lecture hall.
Discovering the link between poverty and deforestation
In 1995, I moved to Panama to get married to my fiancé Itzy and start a sustainable agriculture project on a piece of degraded land. We lived in a rural area, and I saw poverty close up. Paul Ehrlich’s description of the young woman in Guatemala described perfectly what I was seeing in rural Panama. As an avid birder, I read John Terborgh’s classic book Where Have All the Birds Gone? The penultimate chapter of the book is entitled “The Whys and Wherefores of Deforestation”. It was an extremely insightful discussion of the plight of the rural poor. He pointed out that the people who are cutting down the rainforest are doing it out of economic desperation. They need to feed their family, and they have no way of making a living in the city. Terborgh asserted that most of the rural poor would prefer to live in a comfortable apartment in the city rather than cut down rainforest to scratch out a living. That squared perfectly with what I was seeing in Panama. He argued that urban migration to humane conditions, rather than to the horrid shantytowns that surround big cities in developing countries, would have a positive impact on the rainforest. It is about “jobs and people, more of the former and fewer of the latter,” he wrote. This dove-tailed with Ehrlich’s message and my own experience. Two biologists convinced me that the solutions to our environmental problems were to be found in economics and finance.
More reading and thinking led me to the conclusion that I could have the most impact by getting an MBA. While I was applying to business schools, my cousin Anita visited me in Panama and brought me a copy of A Banker to the Poor by Muhammad Yunus. That sealed the deal; microfinance was where I was headed.
Trading the khakis for the suit...
In 1999, I started business school at the Thunderbird School of Global Business. I went to business school with virtually no knowledge of business, and I fully expected to have very little in common with my fellow students. I was stunned and delighted when I arrived at Thunderbird and found that many of my fellow students were also interested in social and environmental issues. I was very encouraged that at least some of our future business leaders are environmentalists. The business education and international perspective at Thunderbird was ideal preparation for a career in microfinance.
After receiving my MBA, I worked at two nonprofit poverty alleviation loan funds and gained invaluable experience and insight in the microfinance sector. It became clear to me that microfinance needs access to formal financial markets if it is to satisfy the demand for credit by the world’s poor. It is also clear that, as people become more affluent, they put more demands on the earth’s resources. Thus, there is a need for more attention to environmental sustainability with in the microfinance sector. With the goal of combining concerns for the environment with strong investments, I founded Envest.