Environmentalists should give up on sustainability

A version of this article was first published: ethics.org.au - December 2011

John Bevins

At the Festival of Dangerous Ideas John Bevins attended Richard Denniss’ talk about why sustainability isn’t sustainable and came away thinking. But he admits he needs to do more than that.

A lecture on Not Being Wasteful from someone whose surname comprises 50 percent more letters than is necessary is a bit rich.
Look, that flippant assertion is false. On two counts.

Richard Denniss is well qualified to lecture on the topic, being the co-author of Affluenza and a man who cares and thinks deeply about the consumption disease that’s killing the planet for our grandchildren like the other consumption disease—tuberculosis—killed so many of our grandparents (and still is a global epidemic).

It’s false too because the 50 percent is really 40 percent.

This attendee feels a compulsion to draw attention, first up, to the pesky practice of rounding up. Richard Denniss is not alone in rounding up figures, but when they get rounded up to the point of even inadvertent exaggeration they do a disservice. You wonder if that’s what’s happening here.

We're often told that tackling climate change is such a unique challenge for a democracy, that a group of good people like yourselves would never possibly support a large expenditure of money up front for a problem which is in the future and uncertain. Except of course, as I'm sure you all know, we are about to spend 50 billion (Denniss’ emphasis) dollars in Australia building 12 new submarines to replace the six we haven't used yet.

While the essential truth—money is very hard to come by and yet we have no trouble finding it for unspecified threats that are less certain than global warming—is not damaged directly by exaggeration its molester, cynicism, is given a leg up.

In the preceding minutes, Dennis had emphasised that we Australians spend around 10 billion dollars a year buying things we throw out without ever using; that we buy five billion dollars worth of food which we throw out without eating; and that after greenhouse gases fell in 2008, the world's governments quickly spent more than one trillion dollars getting them to rise again.

When billions and trillions get sprinkled like hundreds and thousands, you wonder is this just decoration to make the unpalatable palatable? See … cynicism.

An ally, I found myself acting afterwards like a foe. Perhaps it’s the guilt. No-one likes being reminded of their shameful wastefulness. The surely-that-can’t-be-right reaction kicked in and got me Googling “cost of new submarines”.

Well, Wikipedia says it's $25 billion. Even that sounds pat (is pat short for patronising?), too pat to be right. Just the other day a scientist had said on the radio that the earth—or was it the solar system?—is a hundred trillion years old. How do people know these things? Why are they so often such neat numbers?

Perfectly rounded figures (and again everyone does it) risk obscuring the very facts they are trying to expose; especially if they are inflated. Worse, they can be used to discredit a valid argument that’s as clear as a sonar ping. Richard Denniss’ impassioned assertion that there is in fact plenty of money, otherwise wasted, available for environmental imperatives deserves to resonate.

A plea, then. Let’s protect the inconvenient truth from convenient half truths. Science, under savage attack, is too easily shot down by even an incidental, unintended inaccuracy.

A sequel please, Mr Dennis, one as eloquent and relevant as ‘Environmentalists should give up on sustainability’, namely ‘Environmentalists should give up on rounding and exaggeration’.

The Denniss Premise is that the pursuit of sustainability is destroying the planet. This presumably puts him on a collision course with tie-dyed-in-the-wool greenies, professional environmentalists and the rest of us. Here’s hoping enough who care hear his argument and step out of the way so that he can crash through and stop the chase. Or at least stop us blindly endorsing the word, because we are playing naïvely into the hands of those who have trashed the word.

Perhaps a literal trashing is to be found in Copenhagen. Certainly, the inspirationally incredulous Denniss, speaking of Europe’s most sustainable power station, thinks so. Now being built in Copenhagen, it will convert waste to energy. The new Amagerforbrænding will be Copenhagen’s tallest building and will have a ski slope on its roof. Breathtaking, it’s breath giving too in its quirky way. Not bad for an incinerator which will exhale a 30 metre smoke ring each time a tonne of CO2 gets released. The architect’s creativity and understanding of human nature—he is a champion of ‘hedonistic sustainability’—is spirit lifting. Until, that is, you remember The Denniss Premise and start thinking of Amagerforbrænding as a cenotaph to the success of excess, a greater monument to consumption than the most sacred of mega shopping malls. Suddenly waste is a resource. Will we soon have an obligation as the new alchemists to create more and more of it from whatever we buy?

We are all consumers and consumers consume. It’s what we do and it’s fun to do. We used to crave just the pecuniary means to do it, but now that squandering’s so affordable we crave just the permission. And surprise, surprise, corporations are quick to give it to us. It’s called sustainability.

A Denniss alert, drolly delivered, is that Ford is describing its Explorer as the first sustainable SUV. On its website Ford assures us we can “help the environment and appreciate it at the same time”. All it takes is to drive one of its cars. Ford, you see, is “dedicated to developing fuel efficient Cars, Trucks, CUVs and SUVs that are environmentally sustainable”.

Denniss draws our attention to sustainable mining. Mmmm … what a foxy oxymoron that is. It’s foxy as in sexy as well as in sly. Last year, The Minerals Institute held a conference entitled Sustainable Mining 2010–The business case. Sustainable mining, when you think about it, is as silly as safe drowning. Reinforcing the silliness is an ad in the program of the Sustainable Mining 2010 conference. It’s headlined “Ore-some mining solutions? We've got truck loads …”. How iron-ical. Truck loads of “innovative and sustainable mining solutions”.

Sustainability is now sustainabullity, with the emphasis on the fourth syllable.

The happy hijackers are in control. Just about every unsustainable industry has hopped onto the sustainability bandwagon, now supercharged, and taken it where it suits them: pedal to the metal. The ACCC, bless its cold heart, tries. It tries to rein in corporate enthusiasm for all those seductive ‘save the world’ promises. ‘Environmentally safe’ at times attracts the regulator’s attention and wrists get slapped. But the Internet ensures their dissemination and insemination. New generations of digital natives get born pre-programmed with permission (or an Amagerforbrænding obligation?) to Think Sustainably, Act Unsustainably. It might be a clumsier credo than Think Global, Act Local, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to practise.

Sustainabullity is working a dream. It’s working our dream to consume more and more responsibily. Sorry, missed the comma: to consume more and more, responsibly. Sustainabullity defuses that contradiction most skilfully.

And while the regulator forbids environmentally safe, there’s always environmentally sexy. Greenwashing may be a no no, but wishywashing is okay. Sustainability has become the most wonderfully wishywashy word of all. It makes all our wishes come true.

Denniss warns environmentalists that they are paralysed by narrative, whereas those whose actions they seek to change are action driven. Environmentalists demanded these action men act sustainably, and they embraced the idea so hard it’s now a limp cadaver. We haven’t noticed it’s dead. How could sustainability be dead with all those sustainability officers, sustainability reports, sustainability conferences?

Denniss warns that industry uses words as tools whereas environmentalists see words as words. Not just words, glorious combinations of letters worthy of endless discussion and debate as to their meaning.

Meanwhile industry mines their meaning out of them, and the rest of us gratefully—and gracefully—accept them back not noticing they are hollow.
Sustainability is one such empty word. Listen to it. It no long rings true, it just rings.

One hundred percent bravo, Richard Denniss, and those pebbles hurled earlier by this glass-house dweller were tossed constructively, without malice.

John Bevins is a former Director of St James Ethics Centre. He was an advertising copywriter for 40 odd years, 28 of them at his own eponymous agency. He is now a pro surfer (well, he’s pro surfing).