With the COP 26 conference being hosted in Glasgow in November, we have a real opportunity to place the country in a true position of influence in the world agenda on climate change.
I believe a real challenge exists to overcome the immediate financial imperatives around Covid and balance these against a bigger, more all-pervasive agenda that is far closer than anyone would care to think about.
As we get things back to normal and the wonders of our technologies deliver vaccines and other interventions in unprecedentedly quick ways, the same is not true of the planet. Indeed, perversely the very speed of our societal process that facilitates such progress can have a negative impact across the planet. Covid will come and go, ultimately becoming endemic in the population and managed a bit like flu and we will have our radar out for the new ‘nasties’ coming up the timeline. However, the emissions from a car exhaust this very day, a coal-fired power station or even a wood-burning stove in trendy suburbia, may be circulating around the planet for centuries contributing to climate impact.
The transition to a cleaner, safer planet where the environment is protected and species thrive rather than face extinction, is not as expensive as doing nothing ultimately and there are real benefits for business thoroughly engaging with this agenda.
Certainly, all businesses of the future will need to be imbued with a level of ethic where competitiveness involves something other than a race to the bottom in terms of the exploitation of people and natural resources to concentrate the wealth in the hands of a few. These perspectives are rapidly becoming as distasteful as notions of past imperialism anyway.
Psychologically as well, each of us will have to develop a better relationship with the planet that we have. We can no longer love its beauty, visit it, exploit it for our leisure and yet not understand the responsibility and cost of its maintenance. Our arrogance as a species, that sense of entitlement that we never really question, simply by virtue of our sentience and an opposable thumb, cannot persist. Wholesale social change is required, at a speed that will feel almost traumatic to the world.
It’s not that there aren’t measures and technologies in place and indeed, we see rewilding projects, for example Storks being reintroduced to the UK after 40 years of extinction here. The will, the humanity and the abilities exist to make a huge difference. The issue is, as with any business, scaling this up and ensuring the price of scaling does not adversely disadvantage organisations who will accept the social and environmental costs into their operations as part of their contribution while others simply attend the bottom line.
And yet this must be for all, there has to be an end to virtue signalling where, for example, companies encourage purchase through minor donations per unit of sale to Third World countries or carbon offsets that are a fraction of the true pollution, being presented as conscience solving duplicity to consumers. Or just sticking ‘eco’ in front of something seems to make things more appealing when in fact it just pollutes a bit less. Well done, truly ecological business takes effort and those businesses who get there have real social, economic and environmental value.
A new school of psychology is emerging, that of ecopsychology. It is a broad church spanning everything from those who seek to exploit natural energies, reconnecting with nature et cetera to those who understand that the human ego’s relationship with the Earth must fundamentally change at a time when the free market enables human experience in particularly self-centred ways. This is not just about how we treat the planet, but people. We are increasingly working with leaders of care and conscience who wrestle with these challenges.
I could have droned on here about how great Gedanken services are and the reader might prefer to move their attention to another page, to someone who is smiling in front of their office and talking about investment, it’s an easier read. But this is a much more important agenda, and it is now incumbent on every individual and business to start embracing it.
We need to become more aware; we need to lobby leaders, and we need to show preparedness to change, not in a tokenistic, virtue signalling way, but ways that achieve elements of none exploitative reward with true sustainability. Would your company like a free corporate membership of the Shark Trust, dedicated to protecting endangered shark species around UK waters and globally? Try it for a year on Gedanken – contact me direct for details via david@gedanken.co.uk
