Cheerleading for “sustainable” companies won’t save the planet
We need to stop tiptoeing around destructive corporations and speak the truth
There’s nothing intrinsic about capitalism. It’s not part of human evolution, it’s not embedded in our DNA and it’s not a law of nature. It’s just an economic system that was invented to exchange goods and services.
But there’s a problem.
The rules of the game encourage unethical behaviour that rewards those who are most efficient at exploiting people, animals and the planet…and it’s leaving an ugly trail. The climate is becoming more unstable, wealth is concentrating into the hands of oligarchs and our political system is becoming increasingly unresponsive…which is leading to a worrisome rise in authoritarianism.
Corporate Sustainability to the Rescue?
Corporate sustainability is not a friend of business. Sustainability asks corporations to take responsibility for the environmental and social harm that they currently off-load onto society. Suddenly what used to be free has a cost. It’s hard to imagine anything that could be more disruptive to a corporation’s goal of profit maximization. So it should come as no surprise that for decades the corporate world has fiercely resisted any attempts to regulate “meaningful” change.
And just so we’re clear on definitions:
A positive result is one that no matter the degree, environmental harm is reduced. A giant clothing company that switches to organic thread would be considered to have made a positive change. Proponents of this approach will praise the incremental effort and assert how every little bit helps or at least that it’s a positive step that can be built on.
A meaningful result could be described as a dramatic reduction or the complete elimination of harm being unleashed on an ecosystem; and transferring harm from one place to another that is slightly less harmful is not a win and certainly not meaningful.
(I explore the difference between positive and meaningful change more thoroughly in the article, “Sucking Up to Business is a Certain Path to Ecological Collapse”.)
The Sustainability Professional
So what does business do? They hire a well meaning sustainability professional and drop them right into the middle of this ideological fight of profits vs. the environment.
At first the company tells you that they’re committed to reducing environmental and social harm and that they want to hear all of your ideas. But that honeymoon ends quickly and the real (and often unspoken) message soon becomes clear:
“This is the real world and we have a business to run. Ideas that impact our ability to increase profits and grow, are fundamentally in opposition to our purpose and if you promote those ideas around here you’ll find that your influence and usefulness within this company will diminish…quickly.”
What’s a committed sustainability professional supposed to do?
A Fork in the Road
If you decide to leave then it likely means that you can’t suppress, even for a much needed paycheck, your convictions and knowledge about the climate crisis. You likely recognize that positive incremental change is just a slower but still an inevitable path to a climate catastrophe.
If you decide to stay you’re probably telling yourself that while you’d like to do more, you’re still excited to help the company reduce its impacts and for now, that’ll have to be good enough. Some change is better than no change and if you stay you can likely do more good from within.
Are We Contributing to the Charade?
It’s time to look in the mirror and ask; Is this what I signed up for? Have I become part of the status quo defending machine? Can we say that we didn’t realize what was being asked of us? Will we be able to look into the eyes of our children and honestly say, “we didn’t know”. The fact is that we do know.
The sustainability business strategy goes like this:
A new idea emerges to make corporations pay for their harm. An army of political puppets and marketing professionals spring into action to unleash a relentless campaign of confusion. Like a boxer’s one-two punch, first they challenge the timeline of the science (denial is no longer in vogue) and then they threaten us with massive job losses. And once they’ve softened us up, they start with the psychological attacks.
They blame lazy and selfish consumers for not recycling. They blame us for not supporting their new line of so-called “sustainable” products. Then they dig into their bag of tricks with capitalism’s answer to climate change. They substitute one harmful option for a supposedly less harmful option or they showcase an initiative that sounds impressive but lacks the scale to achieve any meaningful change. Introducing Starbucks’ new sippy cup for adults or Coca Cola’s new paperboard packaging solution that reduces its use of plastic by .0006%
Business can’t do all this alone — there are millions of people scattered around the world who contribute to this charade and rationalize their behaviour. It’s time for each of us who works with business to ask ourselves a very specific question:
Are we inadvertently running interference for greedy corporations so that the capitalist machine can continue to trample over people and the environment?
It’s Business AND it’s Personal
The phrase “It’s not personal — it’s just business.” was made famous by Al Pacino in The Godfather and it’s become ubiquitous in our culture. But that phrase no longer makes any sense. Everything business does today is personal.
We need to stop tiptoeing around corporations. We can no longer afford to coax, flatter and ingratiate ourselves to a bunch of willfully misinformed and greedy corporations who blatantly disregard the scientific truth of climate change. We tried that and it failed miserably.
Every single one of us — whether we work in sustainability, marketing, PR, it doesn’t matter where. Each one of us needs to call out deceptive and destructive corporate behaviour. And if you can’t do that for business reasons, then certainly don’t praise it!
They Need to Change — Not Us!
We need to be focused and relentless — and demand that corporations pay for the environmental and social harm that they unleash onto society. No more half measures, no more incremental gains and not in 10, 20 or 30 years — we need action now.
We need to change the metrics and the reward system of capitalism and make it next to impossible to profit on the backs of exploitation and destruction. We need to change the ‘pathway to profits’ so that the creation of wellbeing, and not exploitation, is what delivers the greatest reward to business.
We can’t take on the climate emergency by letting business dictate what’s important. Clearly any entity that regularly destroys our environment has a warped sense of purpose. We can no longer be their cheerleaders or worse, their tools of destruction. We have to stand firm and change them and the system that is destroying us.
Now that’s something to cheer about!
Thanks for reading! Feel free to follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter where I am quite active.
Brad
May 2021