The pomace-based biomaterials she develops in the vineyards of Provence carry the provenance of the land they came from, visible in the fibre, legible in the texture, present in the weight of the thing itself. And from her story, a question surfaced that returned, in different forms, across every story we worked on this week.
Where does this come from?
To ask it seriously, about a material, a financial flow, a journey, a decision, is to resist the comfortable distance that contemporary life so readily offers. It is to insist on following the thread back to its source, and to take responsibility for what you find there. Most of the systems we inhabit have been designed, consciously or otherwise, to make that question difficult to answer. Supply chains are long. Accounting is selective. Itineraries are designed to conceal as much as they reveal. This issue is, in different ways, an attempt to answer it anyway.
Samantha Mureau spent twenty-five years inside the fashion industry before the industry she had loved became something she no longer recognised. The late nineties and early 2000s were, she tells us, a genuinely creative time, driven by instinct, by expressive energy, by the pleasure of making work that still meant something. Then 2008 arrived, and everything that followed felt like aftermath. Design gave way to price point. The stores started looking like one another. The copying became systematic. And when the documentary True Cost was released in 2015, and one of the brands she had spent years building her career inside appeared on screen as a supplier to the Rana Plaza factory whose collapse had killed over a thousand garment workers, Mureau knew she could not go back. She was living in Aix-en-Provence by then, away from the industry, surrounded by the vineyards of the South of France, and it was there that the research began.
What followed was a return to the land, to the organic vineyards surrounding her home, and to the question of what the pressing season leaves behind. From the pomace and fibres discarded at the edge of each vintage, she developed circular biomaterials that carry the provenance of the land they came from. Surfaces that hold terroir the way a fine wine does, visible in the fibre, legible in the texture, entirely honest about their origin. What the wine industry discards, she has reframed as a beginning.
Her story is this issue’s opening, and its anchor. Everything else in these pages is, in some sense, a variation on the same theme.
Blaine Tesfay and Irène Touahria ask the same question of capital in their essay on Scope 3. The largest emissions of most companies do not appear in their direct operations. They live upstream, in the supply chain, in choices no balance sheet was ever designed to capture. To engage seriously with Scope 3 is, above all, an act of willingness, a readiness to look further than is comfortable, and to name what you find. The financial industry has been extraordinarily skilled at making this particular question hard to ask. The essay argues that this is no longer tenable, and explores what it would mean to account for the full origin of impact.
Regenerative travel is built on a deceptively simple inversion of that question. The traveller who asks what a place can offer has been the default of the tourism industry for a century. The traveller who asks what they leave behind is something newer, and considerably more interesting. Places that are richer for your presence than before it. Landscapes that improve under attentive, considered human contact. It sounds idealistic until you encounter the practitioners, and then it sounds like the only version of travel worth taking seriously.
Finally, there is the conversation I had with Martin Studer, a man who has spent thirty years in global advisory and governance, watching organisations from the inside, and who now devotes his work to the question of what it means to lead with genuine conviction when the familiar no longer holds.
Martin speaks about EcoAgency as a discipline. Over decades of work, he has watched the gap widen between what organisations say about responsibility and what they actually do, between signalling and embodiment, between declared values and structural behaviour. His work at Mundekulla in southern Sweden offers a living prototype for regenerative enterprise, where economic logic and natural systems are held together, where nature is treated as operating infrastructure, and where the health of the surrounding land is understood as inseparable from the health of the venture itself.
What stayed with me from our conversation was his sense that conviction is becoming one of the rarest and most valuable qualities in leadership. The ability to act in alignment with what you actually believe, to build things that are honest about where they come from, and to hold that alignment steady under pressure. That conviction, he suggested, is what EcoAgency looks like in practice. It is also, I think, what all the stories in this issue are circling around.
Roots & Routes. The title carries both directions of the inquiry, the roots that anchor things to their origin, and the routes that lead them forward. They are one question, asked from either end of the same thread. Origin is where responsibility lives. And responsibility, taken seriously, is where the most interesting work is happening.
I hope this issue gives you something worth following.
