Tender before the facts: Brontie Ansell's episode

by Sandy Glanfield

I've recently been advised by a friend to eat pineapple every morning. Apparently, it's good for my gut. Pineapple, it turns out, is a natural meat tenderiser. It contains an enzyme that breaks down proteins, changing their structure and making them softer.

Which got me thinking about tenderness.

We tend to associate tenderness with gentleness, affection and care. Something soft, perhaps even fragile. But what if tenderness is also about being willing to break things down, to loosen what has become rigid, and to make room for something different?

This week, I had the pleasure of speaking with Brontie Ansell, Founder and Managing Director of Lawyers for Nature, for Let's Reboot the Future.

Brontie is a fascinating combination of qualities. She speaks with extraordinary clarity and conviction. There's no hesitation when she says that kindness should be at the foundation of our laws. She means it. And you can hear the courage behind those words.

Yet what struck me was how open and imaginative she is within a profession so often associated with rules, precedent and certainty.

She knows the law. She understands its structures and limitations. But rather than accepting those structures as the boundaries of what's possible, she's asking what else they might allow us to create.

One example she shared was the idea of ecological attribution rights, exploring how nature might be recognised and rewarded for its contribution to the things we create and profit from. It's a remarkable shift in perspective, using familiar legal ideas to imagine an entirely different relationship with the natural world.

I was reminded of something I heard recently on the On Being podcast. A guest, Azita Ardakani Walton, said:

“Children still understand a creation story is not a primitive explanation of what adults know better. It's a way of staying tender before the facts.”

Tender before the facts.

What a beautiful idea.

And perhaps that's what Brontie does so brilliantly. She has the facts at her fingertips, yet she remains tender towards them. Curious about what they might mean, who they might serve and whether they could be arranged differently.

It's a little like breaking up a Lego structure. The pieces haven't changed, but suddenly the possibilities seem endless. We can build what we've always built, or we can try something entirely new.

Perhaps that's the courage we need more of. Not necessarily to throw away everything we know, but to hold it a little more lightly. To question who made the rules, whose voices they include and whose they leave out.

Because when we remain tender enough to notice the lives affected by our decisions, perhaps we begin to imagine a world in which care isn't an afterthought.

It's part of what we build from the beginning.