Ophelia, by Sir John Everett Millais
Towards the end of last year I had an epiphany moment while scrolling LinkedIn.
Anyone who maintains a regular LinkedIn presence knows that epiphany moments are rare on LinkedIn. For the most part, it’s unbearable fake stories from finance bros and AI-generated posts complaining about people who use AI to generate posts, or Meg and I relentlessly promoting our latest report.
But sometimes you stumble across something that makes it worth it.
My diamond was a line in a post by Bill Hinchen about the website pages companies can do without.
I was briefly shocked to see the ‘sustainability’ page on this list, until I kept reading. (There’s an idea — keep reading.) Here’s Bill’s explanation:
“Before you hurl your flaming organic eco pitchforks at me, I’m all for companies being sustainable. But if your business is sustainable, you’ll be showing it in everything you do, not tucking it away on a “Sustainability” page nobody clicks. If that sustainability page has a stock photo of a leaf and a paragraph about how you “offset carbon” via a vague partnership with a reforestation startup in Luxembourg planting non-native saplings in random places every time you fire up the private jet, you’re just greenwashing. And everyone knows it. “
What a concept.
And it fits perfectly with what I’ve been harping on about in this newsletter for what feels like an eternity now.
Putting aside the fact that Sustainability pages are often the first page I go for easy access to a company’s climate targets and downloadable reports, the philosophy behind devoting a separate webpage to sustainability efforts is one that treats climate action, energy efficiency, and human rights as an extracurricular. Something to be celebrated for; something to experiment with when they have the time and money.
Of course, the risk (and opportunity) that sustainability topics present is far too important to be relegated to the sidelines.
This conversation is about far more than website design, and it reflects a broader theme we’re seeing in the world of corporate sustainability: the slow migration of sustainability concerns from the periphery to core business discussions.
Like Sustainability webpages, the sustainability report is — hopefully — a temporary phenomenon. The ultimate end state for sustainability data is full integration with annual reports (which many companies already do). Although all company reports are designed to put a positive spin on underwhelming results, fully integrated reporting will mean sustainability is treated less as a last-minute PR exercise (”quick, what can we say about plastic?”) and more like an essential element of doing business.
Despite the greenhushing that is absolutely going on right now, we know that serious discussions of sustainability topics — efficiency, risk, resilience — are taking place in boardrooms and Zoom meetings across the world.
Heather Clancy recently wrote about Patagonia not having a CSO. Really, why should they? Is sustainability not inherent to every problem and every decision made in every department? Why tack it on after the fact?
Perhaps sustainability is finally being recognised for what it always was: a design problem; a fundamental conflict between business models and stakeholder interests. If so, this calls for a lot more honesty. Corporate sustainability has long been used for ethics-washing — as a PR tactic designed to distract attention from the harms inherent to products and business models, or the simple fact that most large companies pay hardly any tax. It has been the awkward and often unethical job of sustainability professionals to talk a good game about resource recovery and clean energy PPAs, all while a company’s core products cause cancer or wipe out jobs or drive teens to suicide. I’ve previously called this the elephant in the room. It’s getting harder and harder to ignore.
If companies can actually start to address the elephant in the room (and there is always one), then we might finally get somewhere. Ultimately, only regulation will curb the truly harmful excesses of certain products and business models, but a more centralized approach to sustainability could still be a step in the right direction.
The early days of corporate sustainability were about calling attention to previously ignored externalities. This was a necessary step, but that attention was a double-edged sword. Companies weren’t really drawing attention to their harms for the sake of doing better. Ultimately, they simply wanted to be seen to be doing better.
So if the early days were about drawing public attention to sustainability as a separate discipline, perhaps this next era will be a kind of reversal: drawing internal attention to sustainability as a core business decision, while downplaying the PR and marketing side of it.
I mean, a girl can dream.
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What we’re curious about this week
I read this book in the cool dark mornings and eternally bright evenings of the New Zealand summer while on a three-day hike with my family. I put this book in the category of a number of books, namely On Freedom (Timothy Snyder) and Abundance (Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson) that attempt to offer a vision of what a post-neoliberal world could look like. This book is closely aligned with Snyder’s understanding of freedom, and begins with the premise that the enhancement of one person’s freedom often comes at the expense of another’s. The Left, Stiglitz argues, needs to reclaim freedom from the Right. Before they do, they’ll need to be able to define it.
🎙️ Podcast: Two podcasts about the ‘Melania’ documentary
I have little interest in the lives, activities, or — God forbid — outfits of First Ladies, particularly those married to would-be autocrats, but this documentary and the bigger story around it has become a bit of a pet obsession for me. I haven’t seen it, and I don’t think I could sit through it, but the commentary around it has been fascinating.
If you’re interested in going down the rabbit hole, this podcast was a hilarious play-by-play with some insightful commentary. This podcast was less funny and more analytical, but completely fascinating.