Chapter 12. Save the Earth, It’s the Only Planet with Chocolate: Can a Chocolate Business Escape the Commodity Trap and Participate in Restoring Grace, Justice and Beauty to the World?

By Philipp Kauffmann

Summary

CACAO IS LIKE money. In fact, cacao was used as a currency by the Olmecs, the inventors of chocolate. Today, cacao moves as a global commodity with little or no relation to places, people, and products. Thus objectified, the industry finds it hard to transform crude, unsustainable realities: deforestation, slavery and obesity.

Certifiers have sprung up to help the commodifiers upgrade to certain minimum standards using ambitious marketing claims which themselves threaten to become commodified (fairness would be such a claim).

Can cacao, and money for that matter, escape the commodity trap? What model of commerce remains conscious of places, people and products? What does such a consciousness entail and what is its commercial practice?

As a trendsetting chocolate company, Original Beans has set out to grow a business from conscious, anti-commodity logic, offering customers to “taste the Earth’s rarest places and preserve them”. Along our company’s journey we have joined the largest movement in history and a people who act as guardians of the heart of the world. But whether commerce can be fully conscious of its actions in the world remains a daily business and very personal challenge.

Journey to the heart of the world

Cocooned by the vast wilderness of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia, the Arhuaco tribe is hard to get to. Their land reaches from coral reefs to rainforests to snow-clad mountains. Thirty-five river basins emerge from steep mountain ranges, running into more than 700 rivers and gulches that provide clean water to millions of people in the lowlands. An extraordinary number of migrating birds make temporary stopovers in the forests which are the world’s last place to encounter cotton-top tamarins and sapphire-bellied hummingbirds. In the heart of the Arhuacos’ territory lies the ocean shore of La Lengüete where endangered green turtles come to lay their eggs. Nearby is one of the tribe’s preferred settlement sites.

It takes several rough days of travel – on motorcycle over winding dirt roads, down muddy paths, crossing rivers in wooden rafts – to get to what the Arhuaco call the “heart of the world”. Here we buy our cacao to make what is likely the most exclusive chocolate in the world: the Arhuaco Businchari 82% dark chocolate, release date in autumn 2017. “Heights of sweet spice, liquorice and sesame”, read the accompanying tasting notes, “rise gently in this ultra-rare chocolate made according to ancient Arhuaco tribal traditions that are designed to maintain the world’s natural harmony.”

Maintaining the world’s harmony

Maintaining the world’s harmony – what a purpose! The Arhuaco have been carrying it since the beginning. To them, the Sierra Nevada is the fragile, beating heart of the world, since it bestows the Earth with fresh water from its enormous rivers and fresh air from its vast rainforest. Viewing themselves as “the older brothers of the world”, the Arhuaco wholeheartedly believe that it is their responsibility to nourish the heart and thereby sustain the Earth’s balance. Dressed in woven white clothing, always with their charismatic conical hats and beautifully woven mochilas, they gather for days to contemplate the well-being of their land and the world beyond. What an unbelievably challenging and complex burden they have chosen to carry.

Blessed unrest

The Arhuaco are tribal frontrunners with an ancient awareness of natural relations and a pre-modern conscience of the land. In the responsibility to preserve the world and keep it alive, fortunately, they don’t stand alone. Peacefully, they share the guardianship of the Sierra Nevada with two other tribes, the Kogi and the Wiwa, all of which are descendants of the great Tairona civilisation. Says an elder:

“Our guardianship means that we on our part – and the Kogi and the Wiwa on their part – have to protect the environment and recuperate it where it has been destroyed. The mamos (shamans) meet regularly to review what is happening and recommend adjustments to our lifestyle, so we maintain the world’s harmony.”

Ultimately, the guardian peoples all are part of what the author Paul Hawken describes as the single largest social movement in human history: the environmental and human rights movement. “A movement that no one has noticed, not even the people involved,” writes Hawken in Blessed Unrest (2007). In detail, he chronicles the history of a global grassroots movement that is defending nature, other species, communities, and traditions against an ongoing tide of extinction through modern commodity capitalism. Hawken implies that the movement – which he estimates at perhaps two million organisations strong – can be viewed like an auto-immune response of the planet itself to heal what’s broken, like a deeper current of planetary consciousness that runs through humans.

For the entrepreneur and investor Hawken, it must have been a tough choice to exclude business and the investment community. But as he observes, the blessed movement connects organisations who put aside immediate material interests, if just for a second. And that means putting the integrity of the world before the integrity of private capital. Which of course runs counter to the main legal, psychological and material realities of business as we know it. Can commerce ever participate in “sustainability, the endless expression of generosity on behalf of all,” as the author puts it?

To me, an entrepreneur by passion, committing to such conscious sustainability while maintaining the integrity of a growing business has become a daily and very personal challenge. In my personal journey, I remain undecided in how far business can put the world first and participate in “restoring grace, justice and beauty” to it (Hawken 2007). That is what keeps me awake at night, when I think about our business with the Arhuaco.

Original Beans

Our current business is buying cacao and making chocolate. The company Original Beans launched its products in 2010 and is currently considered one of the best chocolate makers in the world. Among the world’s ten best chefs we supply four with our products. Over eight years, we have become a trendsetting luxury foods company that supplies products to top-tier restaurants and hotels, and serves end-consumers through a strongly growing fine food and organic retail brand. We pride ourselves to work with eco-industry leaders like Virgin Airlines, Aida Cruises, and Fairmont Hotels, and to sell to consumers who are prepared to pay four euros and more for a bar of chocolate.

We are a small company by many standards, but through our restorative business model and practices we can show impacts that are larger, wider and deeper than most companies. The table opposite shows our 2016 impact numbers.

What makes Original Beans unique more than anything is our work on the ground. We are a supply chain company as much as a brand. What we preach in our mission, namely to “taste the Earth’s rarest places and preserve them”, is in fact what we do. We go there, live there, invest there, and grow from there – whether it is eastern Congo, the Bolivian Amazon, or Tanah Papua, Indonesia.

Much like a top winemaker, we develop micro cacao regions, cacao appellations so to speak. By nature and the history of cacao’s geographic dispersal, our appellations happen to be next to Virunga National Park, Udzungwa Mountains National Park, Mache-Chindul Ecological Reserve, or the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. You can taste each and every of them as distinctly as you can taste a wine. And in bringing business to remote biodiversity hotspots, nature conservation meets the market and may contribute to preserving the last specimens of their kind.

We find that the discipline of business helps develop local solutions in the most effective way. The act of commerce, if conducted in an ethical manner, helps to level the field between a wealthy, privileged buyer and a poor, marginalised farmer. Finally, our sense of purpose and adventure makes us look beyond the factual supply chain, which ends where the cacao fields end, to play a role in the conservation and restoration of a society, culture, or ecosystem.

My journey to the heart of the world

Contributing to the wider purpose of healing the Earth and our consumptive relations with it, is certainly mine, the founder’s, personal mission. It manifested in the late 1990s, after I had started-up an early internet company. In the midst of investment rounds and tech talks I felt a growing emptiness in my heart. What I missed, I came to understand, was a deeper purpose of relating to the world beyond money and speed, then already the tech world’s primary currencies.

To find my mission, I travelled to meet individuals whom I considered leaders on the path of healing the world – Jane Goodall, Joanna Macy, Paul Hawken to name a few – who became personal guides, friends and living examples. I also met my family: seven generations of natural scientists, explorers, and environmentalists. With profound amazement I read Georg Ludwig Hartig, a direct ancestor and head of Prussia’s forestry services in the late 1700s. Hartig’s book on the taxation of forests is considered an early classic in the forest management literature. As one of the first authors to use the term sustainability (in German: Nachhaltigkeit) he writes that wise management should use nature’s resources in such a way that future generations experience the same benefit and joy from it as the currently living generation has. Here it was: my personal, if ancestral, mission. I changed careers to become a conservationist, working for the traditional institutions in this sector, first the WWF, then the UN. It is conscious commerce, however, that I find most challenging and rewarding.

Replenish what you consume

The company Original Beans was born, as we put it, from the simple idea that we must replenish what we consume. Simple the idea may be, but thoroughly challenging for us all, whether in business or our private lives. Can there be a business model whereby commercial growth directly and automatically restores nature, cultures, and customers? As a profitable model, it would not primarily rely on donating x% of profits at end-of-pipe, or by receiving public funds to keep the sustainability going. We are looking for sustainability in Hartig’s wise management terms: a working business that internalises true costs and establishes the resulting price in the market. In the case of chocolate this would be a fast-moving consumer goods market based on one of the most cost-externalising commodity industries in the world.

Far from replenishing, the chocolate industry structurally exploits the following: marginalised subsistence farmers, including child slave workers; tropical landscapes through deforestation and topsoil degradation; and consumers who get a product made from unripe, badly fermented, moulded cacao beans, cheap sugars and even cheaper fats. The money saved by externalising costs gets spent in marketing that should make us all forget the vicious realities. Vicious even more so, since cacao, the tree, its ecosystem, its traditions, and its nutritional and cultural values are exceptionally virtuous by nature.

Chocolate is heavenly food

Real chocolate is a heavenly food. Break off a piece. Close your eyes and slowly let it melt on the tongue to taste a rainbow of aromas. Please don’t just chew it. Real chocolate is made from a hyper-nutritious seed, roasted to bring out its flavours, ground to a fine paste, and finally sweetened with sugars, preferably those that are unrefined from the juice of sugar cane, or the nectar from the coconut flower. The cacao seed is said to contain the secret to longevity, happiness and good sex. It is a veritable super seed.

A short history of chocolate

In fact, when the father of modern plant taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus, searched for a botanical name to describe the fruit tree from which chocolate is derived, he found that only a superlative would suffice: food of the gods, “theobroma cacao”. The ancient Mayas called the shade-grown rainforest tree “kakaw” and arguably developed the first-ever recipe to make chocolate. They discovered how to soften the bitterness of the cacao seed (or bean, by its shape) through fermentation and drying. However, they still preferred to drink chocolate rather than eat it, since water would filter the heavier particles in the stone-ground paste and dilute the remaining astringencies of the seed; flavours that are there to defend it against being eaten.

It was not until the middle of the 19th century that machines could be built powerful enough to mechanically crush cacao seeds. Within such presses, cacao particles and cacao butter, contained in the seed in equal measures, could be refined and emulsified to a degree that was palatable and chewy. In this way, the finest and purest of chocolates could and can be made, and this nearly two-hundred-year-old process is now exciting a new generation of real chocolate makers and consumers.

From confectionery…

However, this is not how most chocolate is made. The fast growing chocolate industry of the 20th century settled for a more profitable, predictable and homogenous technique in which the fat is extracted from the seed to separate the cacao butter and cacao powder. Once broken down into its components, chocolate can be reconstituted by mixing the cacao powder with beet sugar to create a cheap, replicable taste profile. To reduce costs, the precious cacao butter is often partially or wholly replaced with milk fat, other plant fats, and fillers like caramel. This chocolate-making process and its industry have occupied a powerful position in our imagination, largely associated with happiness, generosity and luxury.

But in spite of the myths and marketing, chocolate’s magic as delicious, nutritious and potent food got lost along the way. Our mothers were right to diligently lock away as rare treats those super sweet snacks containing chocolate, rather than treating them as food. And of course we now know that the story does not end with the base nature of the chocolate, as behind the scenes there lies a complex and unsustainable mix of social exploitation, degradation of tropical ecosystems, and unhealthy confectionery.

…to chocolate

Given the complete under-appreciation of an amazing natural product and food, it was but a matter of time for passionate producers to make the obvious: chocolate rather than confectionery. Over the course of only a few years, a new culture of real chocolate has sprung up which traces its roots back to the heavenly rainforest tree and the simple, pure traditions of the ancient cacao cultures. The best of these chocolate makers know the terroir of their cacaos as intimately as a top winemaker would, and are able to create a food that is pure and yet sparkles in texture and flavours more complex than wine. Since land and farming are once again the main criteria for the quality and taste of chocolate, respect for origins and direct purchase have become currencies in the new real chocolate trade. For the planet, palate and body, the new craft chocolate culture promotes a more meaningful and pleasurable way of enjoying chocolate; less really is more.

Commodified, certified, conscious

In 2017, Original Beans purchased cacao beans at the value of $60,000 from the Arhuaco – a tiny amount by all business measures. But don’t underestimate the measures. The chocolate market value at final consumer price of this cacao is about $1 million. Retail is earning half of that, 30% goes to making and packaging chocolate, and 20% is split between trade and farming. Prior to Original Beans, the commodity market value for the Arhuaco farmers of their cacao would have been below $30,000. Of this – given the highly indirect trade structures with remote subsistence farmers – a farmer would in the best case get 25% in revenues. Researchers have well documented the cacao farmers’ loss-leading, back-breaking work. Similarly, we know much about the costs of chocolate confectionery to nature.

Commodified

But transforming the industry with these insights is harder than grinding a cacao bean. The confectionery industry is caught in the commodity trap: according to a recognised industry study, producers would need to earn 150% more of what the market is willing to pay to reach the absolute poverty minimum, and another 200% on top of that to move beyond poverty – which is defined at a household income of $2 per day (Cocoabarometer 2015).

Thus, to pay for restoring fairness and agricultural productivity, costs and benefits would either need to be redistributed along the supply chain, or prices for the final product would need to rise, or both.

It is a situation which resembles that in many commodified industries. That’s the downside of the efficiencies of commodification by which goods, services, and people are so efficiently objectified to be fungible that the awareness of their actual realities gets lost along the way.

Certified

A first step to de-commodify trade is introducing certifications of all kinds. Certifying NGOs offer ethical proxy services between companies and consumers. For these services they receive payments and brand-recognition. Fairtrade brands, for instance, have steered the imagination of consumers to an impressive degree. They have moved farmer incomes up some 5–10%, but had little success in redistributing share of total revenues. As we see certificate labels appear on every and any product, it becomes clear that certifiers find it hard to resist the gravity of commodification.

Conscious

Can commerce grow while maintaining relations and accountabilities vis-à-vis land, people, and products? How much efficiency is lost? Can that be offset by a higher degree of trust, the most efficient of all currencies?

One bar: one tree

In part, I think the Arhuaco and Original Beans company met over trees – in the belief that trees matter.

To the Arhuaco, the world is inhabited by spirits and natural balance is achieved by respecting the guardian spirits through ritual offerings, songs, meditations and everyday deeds. Each tree, for example, embodies a spirit – something to respect, something sacred, something to take from and give back to, a mother or father, a guardian. To the Arhuaco, every act – such as to cut or plant a tree – affects the health of their world and all that flows from it. If they ever have to cut a tree, the Arhuaco plant a new one – and they never cut a tree near to a spring.

Original Beans has been planting and preserving trees from day one. We think it is one of the most direct restorative practices in our supply chain, since our product grows from trees. Restoring rare cacaos by replanting them makes business sense and we have costed the practice into our product price. We tell customers that they contribute to reforestation and can use a tracking number to follow online where and how.

When we told the Arhuacos about Original Beans’ ‘one bar, one tree’ program, we encountered deep recognition. We have sold millions of chocolate bars, but rarely have we received a response as profound and real as the Arhuaco provided. I sense a good bit of relief on their side that there are companies and people in the ‘modern world’ that find the way back into a wider conscience. When we showed them that we had even found a way to package our chocolates into a foil made from trees that naturally composts within weeks, it made all the more sense.

Extracting or restoring?

We were first invited by the Arhuaco to visit their villages and meet their spiritual leaders in 2015, and again in 2016. As such, this was and is a great honour which we aim to live up to every step of the journey. The Arhuaco are genuinely protective of their ways of life, their land and their communities. This includes keeping outsiders at a distance. Over the centuries more than once this has meant fleeing into the inaccessible mountains. Like other indigenous peoples, the Arhuacos’ is a history of repetitive onslaught by outsiders coming to extract what seemed for the taking: conquistadors, settlers, guerrilla groups, paramilitary forces and, most recently, grave robbers and tourists who are in for the gold of the Tairona civilization from which the Sierra Nevada tribes are descended. For the Arhuaco, there is not much difference between grave robbers and tourists. When we discussed the outlook of tourism for the tribe, one of their leaders summed up the local view quite surprisingly: “There is illegal mining and legal mining, but at the end it is mining – extracting from the earth, destroying our land and our traditions.” Discussion finished.

Is he right, I wonder? Is all outside business extractive by definition? And where does that leave our cacao enterprise with the Arhuaco?

Living planet down 50%, Nasdaq up

Certainly the state of the world seems to underpin his conclusions. According to the Living Planet Index, a must-read international long-term index that compares the vitality of nature with human consumption footprint data, life as we know and refer to it has decreased in substance and health by 50% over the past 40 years. To repeat that again, for short contemplation: the amount of species, specimen per species and productivity of ecosystems of the planet have been halved during the past generation.

While the ecology is contracting, the economy is expanding. In particular, the accumulation, concentration and velocity of financial capital is at an all-time high. The world’s top 200 companies have twice the assets of 80% of the world’s people, and that asset base is growing 50 times faster than the income of the world’s majority. Given the shrinkage of natural and social capital to an all-time low, does that suggest a correlation or even causality, whereby financial capital extracts volume and value from nature and societies to grow?

Rangers for the heart of the world

Protecting the ‘heart of the world’ is increasingly turning into a harsh political struggle for the Arhuaco tribe. Funded by foreign finance institutions, several planned hydroelectric dams in the region threaten to interfere with the water cycles of the mountains. Illegal settlers are encroaching on ancestral land, some of which has been contaminated by the herbicide use of government forces during the drug wars. The tribe has formed a political movement with an ambitious vision to protect and reforest their land. They call it “rangers for the heart of the world”. Following their masterplan, the Arhuaco intend to let nature rule on 70% of their land, while growing sustainable cacao and subsistence crops on the remaining land. They plan to re-invest their income from the cash crops into the community and their autonomy as a tribe. Says an Arhuaco leader:

“We are not growing our crops to get rich, and we should never start thinking like this – it would be the end for the Sierra Nevada. We see what is happening to other indigenous peoples – they lose their language, their clothing, their traditions. We need to open up to the world, to learn and educate ourselves. It will be hard to preserve our culture in its entirety. The capitalistic world view might be the greatest risk for us. All around us people are thinking about earning more, but that’s not the way we want to live. There is no action without reaction, and somebody getting rich includes also people getting poor. We have to look at our individual activities as a society and review the effect of individual actions on our society as a whole and not just on our own.”

Restoring the earth by living in it. The same site before and after the Arhuaco have established their new settlement.

Arhuaco Businchari 82%

After careful considerations and the time and gestures it takes for trust to build, the Arhuaco see the project to make an Original Beans Arhuaco Businchari 82% dark chocolate as an opening worth undertaking. And our company sees a cacao worth sourcing. What our Bean team found in the coastal hills of the Sierra Nevada is an exceptionally rare cacao variety. The Arhuaco call it bunsi. Spanish settlers mistakenly took its unusual white seeds, i.e. cacao beans, and the highly furrowed cacao fruits for a disease and cut the old cacao trees. Fortunately for food and chocolate lovers, the bunsi persisted. They call the cacao they sell to us businchari, which means sunrise or new beginning, referring to the revival of their cacao culture and heritage.

That is where nostalgia stops and back-breaking work begins. Thousands of young cacao trees, propagated from the favoured and most vigorous mother trees, have been nursed and planted. At harvest, it takes up to ten hours on horseback for the farmers to carry the cacao from the depths of the forest to the agreed roadside pick-up location. From here, the beans are brought to a state-of-the-art fermentation and drying facility. Here the cacao gently ferments, emitting sweet sour aromas for five to seven days in wooden boxes, depending on the season.

Those are the aromas we want to capture in the final chocolate, gently roasting, grinding, conching, tempering this delicious food of the gods. If we succeed, you will be able to taste one of the Earth’s rarest places. And preserve it.

Consciously chocolate

As you savour one of the most exclusive chocolates in the world, the world savours with you. In partnership with the Arhuaco tribal council, Cocoa de Colombia and the Sierra Nevada Forest Agency, Original Beans participates in safeguarding 10,000 hectares of coastal rain and dry forest, raising 30,000 seedlings, preserving 160 hectares of old grown cacao forest, establishing two nurseries and eight hectares of clonal cacao gardens, training 81 cacao growers in forest friendly and organic cacao production, building a fermentation and drying centre, and in all, tries as best as we know to practice sustainability as “the endless expression of generosity on behalf of all”. As they say: “Save the Earth, it’s the only planet with chocolate”.

About Philipp Kauffmann

As founder and chief grower of the award-winning chocolate and conservation company, Original Beans, Philipp Kauffmann is fulfilling his mission that we must replenish what we consume. Business Week lauds the company as “mak[ing] the world better through chocolate” and the world’s best chef, Massimo Bottura, credits it for rekindling his passion for chocolate. Under Kauffmann’s leadership, Original Beans is a pioneer in the luxury food market, taking a holistic approach to quality, which fuses unparalleled pleasure, health and sustainability.

Prior to founding Original Beans, Kauffmann was an internet entrepreneur and UN expert. Today, he meets with indigenous leaders and celebrities, and combines the worlds in order to protect the most important rainforest areas in the world with an innovatively viable business model. In search of the world’s rarest cacaos, he and his co-workers travel into the most remote rainforest regions to supply pure, additive-free chocolates to gourmets, conscious consumers and leading chefs. The deliciously sustainable chocolate restores the species-rich forests in origin instead of harming them. Through Original Beans, Kauffmann is continuing the legacy of his family, which has influenced the theory and practice of environmental protection in Germany for seven generations.

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the enthusiasm, drive and openness of the co-authors since I first approached them with the idea. It is our common work and the product of many hands. In that regard, my heartfelt and deepest thanks go to all co-authors equally; they have all devoted their precious time and vast know-how to make this project happen. Kate Poole, Ditte Lysgaard Vind, John Fullerton, Joseph T. Oliver, Peter Scheuch and Julia Oestreich, Adam Seitchik, Peter Wuffli and Andreas Kirchschlaeger, Thomas Goldfuss, Philipp Kaufmann, Luke Gillott and Charly Kleissner. Also my sincere and deep thanks to Uli Grabenwarter for his time and for sharing his thoughts and personal experience on conscious investing in the foreword.

In particular, I want to express my deep gratitude to my dear friend Charly, whom I approached first with the rough idea for this book in late summer 2016. He replied to my email on the same day and encouraged me right away to “pull this project off”. He told me that he would love to participate as he had been “thinking a lot about consciousness, wealth and investing”. Charly’s words motivated me to go ahead and reach out to the other co-authors, and to find a publishing house. The feedback was only positive and within a few weeks, I was exchanging ideas with an amazing crowd of the most inspiring and remarkable people. I also want to express my heartfelt thanks to Kate Poole, who devoted her immense creativity and time to fit-up the book with unique and absolutely cool comics.

I am also most grateful for the inspiring discussions that I had with my long-time friend Christian Krueger on the deep questions of consciousness, contemplation, investing and planetary stewardship over the last years. I am also honestly thankful for the eye-opening discussions with my friend Francesco Rossi on the re-use of plastic waste and on mycorrhizal networks. I also want to share warm thanks to my friend Betina Thorball, for an inspiring sharing of the idea that everything relies on everything else in nature. She awakened my interest in the Aquaponics tank, which she has in her garage. Also warm thanks to my friend Milti Chryssavgis for an enlightening and provocative sharing of thoughts of pension plans’ fiduciary duties vis-à-vis millenials. My deep and heartfelt thanks also go my longest friend Elisabeth, who, in 2008 connected me with Julia and Sarah, with whom I have co-founded BRAVEAURORA on the ground in Northern Ghana. The engagement in BRAVEAURORA has inspired me to do what I am doing today. Also, I owe my friend Taj Jure from Kauai my deep thanks for motivating me to follow my passions. I am also incredibly thankful for the ever-open support of my great agent Craig Pearce at Harriman House, who since the very beginning believed in this book. Thank you Craig for your willingness to see and think this project through.

The project has accompanied me also to my home and I owe my wonderful husband Eric my warmest gratitude for not getting tired of endless and lively discussions, as well as long evenings, on conscious investing. Even though I did not like it at the time when I was a little girl – cleaning up dirty plastic bags from river banks and nearby fields – I want to express to my father my honest thankfulness. On our fly-fishing excursions back then, he not only taught me how to ‘catch-and-release’, but also why it makes sense to keep the rivers clean.

On a personal note, I would like to dedicate this book to all children of the world. May they be able to grow up and live on a beautiful and healthy planet. Looking at my own amazing children every day makes me so aware that there is something higher in nature that is our utmost teacher and that we all only share one planet, which we have to take care of.

Once in India, I had the very good fortune to hear and learn the following words from his holiness the Dalai Lama: “Oneness is the source to all happiness”. These words broke down my inner silos of thinking and acting. Forever.