Photo credit: Andri Priyadi from Getty Images.
Earthly Insight joins our Global Rewilding Champions, supporting the foundational work of the Global Rewilding Alliance and our worldwide team.
“We are delighted that Earthly Insight have not only decided to support our work at the Alliance as our first Private-sector Champion, but were set up with the commitment to support rewilding at the very core of their mission. As their subscription base grows, more rewilding funds will flow” says Alister Scott, GRA’s Executive Director.
Earthly Insight is providing eco-friendly alternatives to conversational AI. “This partnership with the Global Rewilding Alliance is a milestone for Earthly Insight. It means our community is now directly empowering rewilders worldwide through supporting GRA’s mission. We’re proud to be their first Private-Sector Champion and to show how tech can actively contribute to a healthier planet.” – Matthew Plotkin, Founding Member at Earthly Insight.
We delve into some frequently asked questions to explain our new partnership with the innovative tech company, Earthly Insight. We are aware that AI looms large on people’s minds, and so we welcome you to this ongoing, evolving conversation.
Photo credits: Nphu from pixabay.
About the Partnership
1. Who is Earthly Insight and why is the Global Rewilding Alliance (GRA) partnering with them?
Earthly Insight is a technology company that has developed an AI chat platform, similar to tools like ChatGPT or Gemini. What makes them unique is their foundational commitment to environmental responsibility. We have partnered with Earthly Insight because they have built their business model around providing direct, consistent financial support for ecological restoration. This partnership provides a new and innovative funding stream that supports our operations and the broader global rewilding movement.
2. What is the nature of this partnership?
Our partnership with Earthly Insight is direct and financial. The company has committed to donating 33% of its subscription revenue to organizations that support rewilding, and the Global Rewilding Alliance is a recipient of these funds. This model ensures that as their user base grows, so does their ability to contribute to our mission of mainstreaming rewilding in science, policy, and practice worldwide.
3. How does this funding support GRA’s work?
The funds we receive from Earthly Insight provide crucial support for our core operations. This includes expanding our global network of rewilding practitioners, influencing international policy, and promoting the science and practice of rewilding to achieve the global goal of protecting at least 30% of the planet’s land and seas by 2030. This consistent funding helps us build and support the global rewilding movement more effectively.
About Earthly Insight
4. What does Earthly Insight do?
Earthly Insight offers a conversational AI chat platform that helps users with tasks like writing, brainstorming, and research. Their platform integrates several leading AI models into one interface. However, their core mission is to provide an eco-conscious alternative in the AI space by embedding a tangible, positive environmental impact into their product.
5. What does Earthly Insight mean by “eco-conscious AI”?
Earthly Insight’s approach to being “eco-conscious” is twofold:
- Doing Good: Their primary impact comes from their commitment to donate 33% of revenue to rewilding. This directly links their business success to ecological restoration.
- Doing Less Harm: They have intentionally designed their platform for a lighter environmental footprint. For example, they have focused on text-based AI and avoided extremely energy-intensive features like image and video generation, which can consume significantly more power.
Photo credits: Kalawin from Getty Images.
Addressing AI and the Environment
6. Isn’t AI technology bad for the environment?
This is an important and valid concern. The rapid growth of AI has led to a significant increase in energy and water consumption at data centers globally. Training large AI models and processing user queries requires substantial electricity, which contributes to carbon emissions, and vast amounts of water for cooling hardware. For instance, a single AI query can use significantly more electricity than a standard web search.
We believe it’s essential to acknowledge this reality. Pretending that any tech product has zero impact is unhelpful.
7. Why would an environmental organization partner with an AI company?
This is a question we considered carefully. Our decision is based on a pragmatic and forward-thinking approach:
- AI is here to stay. The technology is becoming deeply integrated into our daily lives. Our choice is not if AI will be used, but how it will be developed and deployed.
- Supporting better alternatives is crucial. Earthly Insight represents a new, more responsible approach. By designing for a lighter footprint and, most importantly, creating a direct link between AI usage and funding for nature, they are pioneering a more conscious model for the tech industry.
- Engagement over avoidance. We believe that partnering with companies actively trying to address their environmental impact is more constructive than disengaging from the technology sector entirely. This allows us to benefit from innovative funding models while being part of a crucial conversation about sustainable technology.
8. How does Earthly Insight’s model address the environmental impact of AI?
Earthly Insight addresses its impact through a deliberate strategy of reduction and restoration:
- Reduction: By focusing on text-based interactions and avoiding more energy-intensive AI functions, they consciously reduce the platform’s potential energy and resource demand.
- Restoration: Their primary contribution is funding the restoration of natural ecosystems through our work. Rewilding is one of the most powerful tools we have to sequester carbon, restore biodiversity, and improve climate resilience.
While this does not erase the footprint of their operations, it creates a powerful positive externality that other AI platforms do not offer. Their model ensures that the value generated by their technology is shared directly with the planet.
Questions Answered by Earthly Insight
9. So if I understand you correctly, Earthly Insight piggybacks on other AI platforms… Is that right, and does this mean that you have no direct influence over the environmental impact of the underlying tech? Do you engage with the platforms that you integrate, or have any way or plan to do so?
That’s correct. We use a multi-model approach, integrating with leading LLMs like those from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Building and training a proprietary model is not only cost-prohibitive but would also create a significant, redundant environmental footprint.
While we don’t control the data centers of our partners, our influence comes from a twofold strategy:
- Direct Reduction: We consciously design our platform to be lighter-weight by excluding the most energy-intensive features, like image and video generation. This is a direct architectural choice we make to reduce the load we place on the underlying tech.
- Advocacy and Choice: As the ‘conscious AI’ space grows, we are in a position to advocate for greater transparency from our providers. Our long-term plan is to prioritize partners who provide clear data on their energy and water use and who are committed to renewable energy. We believe that creating market demand for sustainable AI is a powerful way to influence the industry.
Photo credits: StockSnap from pixabay.
10. An early strategy draft mentioning that you plan to donate 80% of profits to nature recovery. Is this still your plan?
That’s a great memory from our earliest conceptual stages. As we formalized our business model, we made a crucial decision to shift from donating profits to donating revenue. We committed to 33% of all subscription revenue for two key reasons:
- Immediate Impact: Profitability can take years to achieve. By donating from revenue, we ensure that our support for rewilding begins with our very first subscriber and grows transparently from day one.
- Greater Accountability: Revenue is a simple, verifiable number. It makes our commitment clear and straightforward for our users and partners, removing the complexity of ‘creative accounting’ that can obscure profit-based donations.
Our commitment to maximizing our positive impact remains the same, and this model ensures we do so from the very beginning.
11. What is your ownership structure? Are you owned by the employees, investors, banks? Do you plan to float on the stock exchange or take money from VCs?
Earthly Insight is founder and employee-owned. We have intentionally chosen to avoid Venture Capital (VC) funding.
This structure is a strategic decision to protect our mission for the long term. The VC model often prioritizes rapid, exit-driven growth, which can create pressure to compromise on core values—like donating a third of our revenue. By remaining independent, we ensure that our commitment to ecological restoration will always be a non-negotiable part of our business, not a line item that can be cut in a boardroom.
12. What do you say to people thinking “You have no idea about the environmental impact of your service, or you’d be publishing it.”
That’s a fair and critical point. The tech industry has a history of greenwashing, and we take the responsibility to be genuinely transparent very seriously.
Calculating the precise, real-time environmental impact of every AI query is an incredibly complex, industry-wide challenge, especially when using third-party models. That data is not yet readily available. However, our approach is built on tangible action, not just claims:
- We Actively Reduce Impact: We’ve made concrete design choices to lower our footprint, like excluding energy-intensive features such as image generation.
- We Provide Tangible Give-Back: Our 33% revenue donation is a direct, measurable contribution to ecological restoration that occurs regardless of our footprint. It is a real and positive action, not a marketing claim.
- We Are Building for Transparency: We are developing an in-app impact tracker for our users. This feature will estimate the carbon and water footprint of their usage and connect it to the restoration work they are funding. We are committed to surfacing this data as it becomes available and empowering our users with that knowledge.
13. Why don’t you discuss the detailed impacts of AI, such as water use?
You’re right to point out water use; it’s a significant and often overlooked impact of data centers. We aren’t concealing this information—the challenge is that precise, per-query water and energy data is not yet made available by the large-scale AI providers. This is an industry-wide transparency problem.
This is exactly what we are working to address. Our planned in-app impact tracker is designed to estimate these figures for our users as accurately as possible. We are committed to being open about these impacts and are actively building the tools to do so.
A Final Word:
Our team is grateful to have Earthly Insight join our Global Rewilding Champions, who support our core operations at the Global Rewilding Alliance.
“AI certainly has environmental impacts, so it’s good to see Earthly Insight addressing this from the outset. We need more commercial organisations like this, holding themselves to high standards and generously committing a large proportion of revenues to nature’s recovery.” – Alister Scott
A warm welcome to you all in this ongoing conversation!