She always fancied herself a bit of a philosopher. A free spirit with an environmental degree and lofty plans. If she could just secure a role at a respected engineering consulting firm in Europe — ensuring infrastructure projects did not damage ecosystems beyond repair — and perhaps live just off Rue Saint Paul in Le Marais, life would feel aligned.

It did not quite unfold that way.

The job in Europe never materialised. She built her career through environmental impact assessments at a small consultancy instead. She celebrated her first job at major mining client with a bottle of good French red, half amused at the irony.

Children arrived. Promotions followed. Somewhere between school runs and site visits she became a Chief Sustainability Officer — around the same time her teenagers were learning about climate anxiety in class.

She has spoken on panels in Bogotá, Madrid and Copenhagen. At each airport she buys something small and trivial — a magnet, a figurine, a token. She knows most of it is mass produced. She knows the carbon footprint of her hidden collection would not withstand scrutiny. Still, she arranges and rearranges the objects in her home office cupboard from time to time, remembering the younger version of herself who believed she could reshape the trajectory of how humans treat the planet.

Her days now are less about vision and more about containment.

Operational impacts. Social tensions. Environmental exceedances. Investor calls. Media queries. Incident briefings that stretch the boundaries of responsible conduct. Damage control has become a skill set.

None of her peers left university dreaming of this role. Neither did she. Over the years they taught themselves carbon accounting, net zero target setting, responsible sourcing, human rights due diligence, reporting frameworks, grievance mechanisms, crisis communication and the legal language of age-old challenges — all while producing annual sustainability reports and managing consultants sometimes younger than their own children.

Few functions inside large corporations are so integrated across business streams — and so persistently misunderstood. Fewer still are as thinly resourced relative to their mandate.

Yet she continues.

Partly from habit. Partly from adrenaline. Partly because averting a crisis still delivers a sharp surge of relief.

But also because somewhere beneath the compliance matrices and investor decks, she still cares.

She may not live in Le Marais. She may not spend her days protecting pristine ecosystems from afar. Instead she works in the imperfect middle — where industry, expectation and reality collide.

Not the romance of saving the planet.

But the daily decision to stay in the room and try to bend the trajectory — even slightly — toward something better.

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