People know that my day-to-day job is, and has always been about tackling climate change and advancing ecological sustainability. And if that’s not their job, they sometimes ask me, with a look of agonising hope, “But there is hope, right?”
The question is asked as if, were I to say “No,” then I would be failing in some moral way; not them, nor anyone else. The question always feels loaded, as if I am responsible for their sense of hope.
Whether we succeed or not in preventing the climate and nature crisis from deepening and causing even greater catastrophes, is that my personal moral failure? Reasonable people could differ on whether or not I’ve led a moral life, but I think I’ve done okay in that respect.
By contrast, I agree that the deepening crisis is symbolic of my personal professional failure.
Everyone who works on sustainability is, ultimately, a failure if the climate and nature crisis leads to much deeper human and biodiversity collapse. To use a high profile example: I have the deepest respect and admiration for Jane Goodall, her life’s work and her immense capabilities. Ultimately, however, biodiversity declined throughout her career and, like the rest of us sustainability professionals, she too failed in her endeavour to stop that decline.
What I would argue, though, is that we sustainability professionals bare only the tiniest responsibility.
Our main failure has been that we did not develop and socialise a series of pragmatic policy proposals to tackle the root cause of non-sustainability, which is the rapacious extractive economic system that is embedded so completely into our collective psychology and political cultures that living sustainably is virtually impossible.
Since that rapacious economic system still flourishes, that brings me back to the question, Is there hope?
Even without the moral overtones, it is still a complicated question. It’s presented as a closed, yes or no question, when the climate and nature crisis is nowhere near that simple.
There are reasons for genuine anxiety. Most sustainability professionals I know lose sleep, literally, because of the stress caused by having expert knowledge and, therefore, being a voyeur on the end of the world as we know it. Terrible things are now locked in and unpreventable. And it would be morally questionable if all we did was say, “I told you so” (even though we feel it).
An important part of why this is so stressful is that sustainability professionals also know that the climate and nature crisis was entirely preventable; that we could stop the harmful things humanity is doing; that we could turn the ship around; but also that the extractive economic system is too big and too powerful, and it is bolstered by people, values and cultures that do not, or refuse to understand, or simply don’t care about the calamities being created by the system they support.
The public is increasingly aware that the rapacious economic system is failing them, but more and more people are – instead of looking for real solutions – they’re going down the rabbit hole of populists. When it comes to scientific literacy, those populists are, at best, ignorant and, at worst, environmental despots, making our futures less safe and less prosperous.
And so, with growing support for populists who want to dump the Paris Agreement and ‘net zero’ (which is a piss-weak target, far short of what’s needed for public safety), we sustainability professionals see our communities sliding further away from solving the climate and nature crisis.
The economic, technological, policy and behavioural solutions all exist.
Read that again. The economic, technological, policy and behavioural solutions all exist.
The fundamental problem is that there is still a social licence for environmental bads, like fossil fuels, and insufficient social licence and, indeed, demand for true and ambitious environmental and economic reform.
There is only hope if we can turn that equation around; if there is a sufficient number of us demanding that ambitious environmental and economic reform.
If your approach to sustainability is ‘hope’, then you’re leaving it to others when there just isn’t enough of us to create the necessary momentum for change.
If, on the other hand, you’re prepared to act, then there is hope that things will be less bad.
