Three ways you can stop corporate climate insanity

You see the madness, you’re not buying the endless growth narrative, and you want to help. Now what?

Passenger or protagonist, it’s going to be a wild ride. A good time to recognize, vocalize and transform.

This is no time for recycling and double-sided printing

If you read another sustainability report touting 25% emissions reductions by 2025 when you know what is needed was more than 100%, decades ago, along with a complete rethink of business’ relationship with the rest of the natural world that isn’t hyper-focused on carbon and is hyper-focused on supporting life, you will… [insert exploding head emoji here]. And let’s not even talk about waste reduction in the company’s operations. We can’t even.

I’m with you. I feel you. I feel your mind exploding at the realization that the corporate climate ambitions — maybe even the ones we’ve helped design — are a mystic paraphrasing of a mass suicide chant. It is existentially painful, and often paralyzing.

I can’t fix it. But I can offer three things any of us — all of us — can do to make it better. I’m not saying they’re easy, but they’re available.

First, a quick bit of context.

Sustainability agrees that sustainability is unsustainable

Normally I am an afternoon napper. My regular 15 minute snoozes energize me, help me shift gears, or simply give me fresh eyes for a piece of work that’s puzzling me.

But the other day, fighting a bit of a cold, my nap was not happening (na’appening?). The world was kind of vibrating all around me. Everything felt peculiar. I shifted to meditation. Still, a kind of mental jitteriness persisted.

So I wrote instead, setting aside my ambition to focus on the latest Matereality assessment and letting flow what was pushing up against my mind. What came out was this piece, “Why I Wish I’d Followed My Instincts As a Climate Denier”, which I wrote and published in under two hours, something I literally never do (I am nothing if not an over-egger — it’s taken me days to finalize this).

And then what followed was an unprecedented amount of traffic on my usually rather sleepy LinkedIn page and on the Medium…