Our systems need to be fully reimagined and rebuilt.
Sustainability isn’t just what I do, it’s how I think.
I was lucky enough to grow up internationally thanks to my father’s work. I was keenly aware of my privileges at a young age. It was doing activist work that drove me towards corporate social responsibility and sustainability. My goal was to push from the inside…
My experience has been broad – covering business processes and management systems, internal and external communications, stakeholder and indigenous engagement and just about every aspect of sustainability. I’ve worked through just about every iteration of the sustainability alphabet from CSR to ESG.
A few years ago I began to wonder why it was that after about 40 years of sustainability having been coined in the Brundtland report, a host of reporting frameworks and regulations it seemed we were getting worse, not better sustainability results. Perhaps we needed to move back to a more regulated version of capitalism? Maybe we needed a global movement in the same mold as the Marshall Plan?
There were plenty of people writing about this. Lots of lists of the 20 things, 10 things, 5 things, 1 thing we need to make our world (company, country, city, neighbourhood, family…) more sustainable. The more I thought about how to achieve better results, the more I realized that the main driver of our predicament wasn’t included in any analysis. That we don’t look at the economic drivers of our system when we discuss sustainability: consumer/GDP growth is the elephant in the room.
This has led me to my most recent interests: degrowth, post-growth, well-being and doughnut economics. Our systems need to be fully reimagined and rebuilt. This is my latest mission!
