As signalled yesterday, here's the new strand of Rarely Certain. It's the first part of an unfolding conversation with Nick Keppel-Palmer, a business consultant who is trying to redefine growth. See his website for background.

Our paths first crossed in the automotive sector, nine years ago, since when I've found his writing more honest and compelling than that of most 'experts' in the field.

I've sensed for decades that 'sustainability' was just a word, behind which lies a plethora of complex interwoven factors beyond my ken.

This nagging sense of something being off began long ago when a friend in academia mentioned the energy and chemicals required to make the recycled toilet paper I dutifully paid 25% extra for look and feel nice enough to use.

And that those nasty polystyrene egg boxes were potentially 'better' overall for the environment than traditional ones, if you factored in their weight for transportation.

Feeling hoodwinked I still allowed the marketing to addle my brain. Because I want this. I want to be causing less harm. It makes me feel good to think I'm doing less harm.

With all that dopamine involved, I currently see 'sustainable' products as a branch of limbic capitalism.

So I keep falling for it. I bought expensive jeans made with recycled cotton, which came with a free lifetime repair guarantee. The worst jeans I've ever had. After several repairs within six months, due to zero durability, I realised I'd suckered for a gimmick.

Losing the will to keep requesting repairs I'm currently wearing a nice new pair of Levi 501s that doubtless came at a heavier price to the earth than they cost to buy.

Last year I was swayed into investing in a 'sustainable' deodorant, instead of the usual plastic-based copy of Dove I normally use.

Several chunks of pleasant vanilla and coconut infused blocks of deodorant and an elegant, infinitely re-usable metal container. The deodorant has now ruined the armpits of two tee-shirts. I've gone back to my supermarket-brand version of Dove.

Fuck this shit.

I don't even know where to begin with it. Which is where the conversation with Nick comes in.

No idea where this will end up going, but here's the beginning. If you relate, learn something or have further suggestions for the Green Dreams series, I'd love to hear from you in the comments (or the chat, if you use that).

RC

All the talk about sustainability is doing my head in because the language has obviously been appropriated by all the usual suspects (politicians, business leaders, marketers,  activists etc) and I don’t just not know what to think. I don’t even know how to think about it. Or even how to approach how to think about it.

I want it to be:

Let science measure things then tell us what to do.

Then get politicians and everyone else to do it.

While, in the meantime, I make ‘sustainable’ consumer choices.

But there are all these stories of measuring the wrong things and businesses straight up lying.

Help!

NKP

The power of language to shape and misshape how we think is amazing. I have no idea what people mean by ‘sustainability’ anymore and it’s kind of my job to know.  The word’s been twisted and applied to all sorts of stuff that really, really *isn’t* sustainable, but it makes us all feel a bit more comfy whenever we hear it.

I really worry that this means we’re kidding ourselves on a grand scale. 

How to approach it?

I think it is more helpful to think of a spectrum - where “do less harm” is at one end, “do no harm” is in the middle, and “make things better” is at the other end. 

Most of the stuff that we call sustainable today is in the “do less harm” bit. The bad thing is we are calling that “sustainable” when what we *really* mean is “not as bad as before (but still bad)”. So we apply a “sustainable” label to stuff that isn’t. (e.g. Sustainable Airline Fuel. What the heck can that be?)

It’s perfectly OK to do lots of “less harm” stuff but only if we collectively recognise that it’s only a step on a longer journey. I’m not sure we’re going to consume our way to saving the planet - hybrid cars are still heavy, battery electric cars depend on extraction of precious metals, wind turbines need massive balsa wood forests to be planted and logged, organic cotton is still monocultural and problematic for biodiversity, Euro 6 diesel buses are still diesel, and “offsetting” is a joke.

When “less harm” gets dangerous is when we think it’s the answer. “Net Zero” is a step - not the end point but we seem to have chalked it up as the sunny uplands.

I think we have to avoid compromise, there’s just no time for comforting bullshit. So nothing counts as “good” unless it’s at the “no harm” or “make things better” bit of the spectrum. Which then begs the question - what do we mean by ‘no harm’ or ‘better’?….that is a question maybe beyond science and politics….

RC

This may turn into a series, not just a piece, because you’re opening up thought paths that go somewhere interesting, but not necessarily in parallel.

Here are the ones that leap out from your intro.

1. Language is a problem.

2. Flattening things to the binary ‘damaging’ or ‘sustainable’ gets in the way.

3. ‘Consuming our way to saving the planet’ does seem ridiculous.

4. If ‘net zero’ isn’t going to do it, what will? And what does a desirable end state even look like?

5. Does ‘4’ suggest that even if we do leave it to all the usual expert types and they get to make the technical changes they think people and planet need, some really important problem still won’t have been solved? Because it isn’t just a political and scientific problem anyway?

It’s refreshing to hear from someone immersed in the environmental harm-reduction field acknowledging that the most perfect political and scientific moves might still leave something important out.

I was originally going to dive straight into chatting about examples of ‘sustainable’ practices that do immense harm, but that suddenly seems to be jumping the gun.

The fact seems to be that most of us can’t even describe the problem we’re supposed to be addressing.

This is why I think there are many people who default to saying there isn’t a problem anyway and that all the measurable and fully-evidenced Bads we see emerging are just ‘normal’ in the grander scheme of time.

NKP

Oh wow - I think 1, 2 and 3 are broadly related. 4 and 5 maybe shouldn’t be about destinations but pathways - discussion for another day. 

Just on language, it makes me think a lot - on one side because we use language to obfuscate and on another because it reveals some very deep seated assumptions that we make that I’m not sure we should be making.

Obfuscation: I had to do a talk at the school this week with a bunch of 11 year olds and there was no room for any flowery language - it had to be simple. What strikes me is that issues that are self evidently ‘bad’ don’t get enough airtime or get shunted away under layers of language.

The example here is that there are way too many goats in Mongolia, in total maybe 50 million too many. There is a max carrying capacity in the country of around 20 million, at a push 30 million, animals but as of today there are 71 million and rising. The increase is driven by cheap fashion.

 Nobody is tackling this issue because it’s hard and “reducing livestock” sounds a lot like “reducing income” to a farmer. Instead there is “not enough grazing”. Rather than “way too many animals”. 

There’s an echo of this “not enough of x” in a kerfuffle in the UK over EVs. Over the past week there has been a spate of news items saying that EVs are problematic for long journeys because a) cold reduces range and b) “not enough charging points”. I find this fascinating because this seems to be a symptom of success - more people have bought EVs so there’s more demand for charging and infrastructure hasn’t caught up yet. In most other areas “loads of demand” would be something people celebrate (tickets selling out, get it while it’s hot) but in this instance it’s all doom and gloom.

I think the moaning about the charge points is symptomatic of a deeper issue which is that we don’t want to be inconvenienced in any way in transitioning to a lower impact life.

The assumptions issue bothers me much more though. On the livestock reduction issue Una from Sustainable Fibre Alliance says: “It’s immoral to tell people you have to bring your number of goats down because the land is degraded. This is their livelihood. And we can’t tell a commercial company that they should downgrade their profit.” i.e. profit > nature. That’s a heck of a moral assumption. 

I am reading a fairly miserable book called ‘What we owe the future’ which looks at various ‘end of the world’ scenarios and what might happen. In pretty much every scenario where a few humans survive (say 99.9% are wiped out by a (manmade) virus - there would still be 800k people left) the pathway to survival is deemed to be OK because we’ll have a) enough people who can do/know agriculture and b) we can “reindustrialise” because we’ll have the know how. 

I am really struggling with the idea that “reindustrialisation” is a non negotiable foundation stone in any future civilisation. It doesn’t seem (to me) to be an assumption that should go unchallenged, but it does. See our fetishisation of ‘growth’. 

I wonder if the most fertile territory to explore (beyond language which is probably a topic in its own right) might the non-binary stuff, because it entails us learning how to weigh up and trade off issues that aren’t b&w, so things we can’t be certain about…..

…will we regret mining rare metals to enable the battery industry (often from tricky places)?. …wind sails made from Balsa wood requiring a lot of new balsa forest? 

One last point for now - I am convinced we need to shift the tone in ‘sustainability’ from negative to positive. It always seems to be about giving something up, losing something, as opposed to gaining something.

RC

Goodness me, where to start with all of this.

This is the line that leaps out for me

“we don’t want to be inconvenienced in any way in transitioning to a lower impact life”

My personal theory is that - mostly - all that any of us really wants is to feel good and right.

This is what ‘sustainable’ products are entirely predicated on.

Literally buy this to be good and right. Where buying this NECESSARILY ENTAILS FURTHER RESOURCE DEPLETION.

This kind of marketing, were it honest, would say buy this to potentially cause slightly less harm in this specific context.

I’m intensely sceptical that consuming anything can ever be considered ‘sustainable’. So sustainability is kind of a big lie and everyone tends to know at some level that they are being lied to.

Don’t get me started on EVs. The way these cars in particular are flattened in the discourse as either ‘green’ or ‘even worse than ICE cars’ reeks of ignorance on all sides.

Before we go any further, though, can we define whatever this ‘hyper object’ actually is?

How much of it is sinking cities and Earth on fire and how much of it is the wipeout of species that were doing fine until industrialisation?

I have to confess here that it’s the latter that bothers me most. 

NKP

On that point take a look at this:

I like this a lot.

RC

That’s one of the approaches that I have misgivings about. It’s like saying to a smoker ‘your lungs aren’t in danger; you are in danger’.

And if that doesn’t really work for me, with all my concerns about resource depletion the destruction of once pristine areas and sadness about mass extinctions of beings that have no political clout, who does it work for? Apart from activist types.

The other thing about it is that invoking the very survival of humans is just flat out incorrect anyway. 

Then I have an unsettling sense that once someone has found the right way to get most people to tell surveys that they are worried about this thing (that still isn’t that easily framable) it’ll be like the dog that caught the car. What do we then do? Who is we? Consumers? Corporations? Governments?

Let’s go back to ‘sustainable’ consumption.

Because we know that it’s something that people think they can do.

Can you explain what you think the perfect ‘sustainable’ product would look like?

Let’s assume the reader has retained your point about ‘sustainability’ being a pathway rather than a goal here…

NKP

I think the idea that consuming in a different way can somehow sort sustainability is very beguiling but fundamentally flawed. And it has a direct corollary in business which is that somehow just producing in a different way can somehow sort sustainability. 

Both these notions are attractive because they sort of say “you don’t have to do much, just a little tweak here and all will be fine”. 

But dig hard and “sustainable production” is a nonsense, which means “sustainable consumption”. Both seem to be oxymoronic. 

Here’s a live example from this week. A cashmere brand has asked to quantify its environmental footprint from its Mongolian supply chains. The reason they’ve been pushed into this is because they signed up to ‘Science Based Targets’ and now have been compelled along with a bunch of their peers to take the first step.

Now - most clothing companies have not the first idea of even where their stuff comes from let alone what impact it night have. 

So…what is the impact of “my” cashmere business? OK - so fact one is that there are 71 million animals in a country that can support 20 to 30 million max. This has all sorts of impacts: the animals congregate around water sources, draining them, turning previously fertile areas into desert; the plants are overgrazed leaving only unpalatable species which run rife (Artemesia); there are too many animals for the cold winter shelters so they squeeze in during the cold weather and thousands are suffocated.

Combine all this with unpredictable weather patterns that can mean lots of rain or no rain and so enough food or no food.

How to fix this? one of two things - either the available land for livestock needs to expand (in this case by 400 million hectares, which is a lot - about half the land of the US, or in arable terms all the farmland in Russia + the US + India) OR there need to be fewer animals. A lot fewer. 

Say the brand sells 80kg of cashmere (that’s not masses) - they are directly responsible for 250,000 goats or 0.5% of the desertification of Mongolia i.e. 440,000 hectares. 

Is this the discussion they are having? Nope. 

Instead they are looking to implement “sustainable quality” practices in their supply chain. What does that mean? Herders attending some training courses on the importance of looking after the environment and following some principles as follows: 

• Ensure the welfare of their goats

• Safeguard biodiversity and use land responsibly

• Promote decent work

• Preserve and enhance fibre quality, and

• Operate an effective management system”

What happens as a result? No goat reduction that’s for sure. Too many goats, even if they are well looked after are still too many goats. 

But - for the consumer - they get a product that has been “certified” as sustainable. Few (none) will ask what that really means. But for the sake of clarity here’s what it does mean. 

The herder is in the Sustainable Certification program. 

And that’s it. No outcomes. No sustainability measure.

But there’s more.

Not all herders in a place are in the Sustainable Certification program.

Oops. So if they use the same supply chain (they do) - not all the cashmere in a garment can be “SFA” approved or certified. 

So how much does need to be (and how would anyone know anyway?)

So…a product can be labelled as “sustainable” if 5% of the content somehow qualifies as coming from a herder that attended a workshop (or might attend one in the future)

This is symptomatic of a yawning gap between what is claimed as “sustainable product” and ergo “sustainable consumption” and what REAL sustainability demands. 

Interestingly moves are afoot in the EU to standardise what can and cannot be claimed within the product - which will more or less kill all of these dubious certification schemes (of which there are hundreds). 

In the meantime consumers are presented with “sustainability” claims that don’t stack. 

OK - so your question. What is a perfect sustainable product? Great question. Here’s my first pass.

1. Environmental - leaves the landscape no worse off, and preferably better off as a result of being sourced. (i.e. improves soil and biodiversity e.g. coffee grown with cover crops) (No use of synthetics, excessive water etc)

2. Production chain - leaves the landscape no worse off, and preferably better as a result of being produced (i.e. improves soil, biodiversity, and resilience for the landscape stewards e.g. use of natural dyes for animal fibre which a) provides local jobs and b) promotes plant life in the area)

3. Distribution chain - leaves the landscape no worse off, and preferably better as a result of being moved (soil, biodiversity, local incomes e.g. using camel trains to move produce out of Mongolia) Look at Xisto wine - the sail boat becomes part of the brand experience

4. Money - takes pressure off the farmer to sweat the landscape i.e. is ordered and paid for in advance. Preferably leaves the farmer better off and pricing recognises contribution to enhancing the landscape - i.e. they get paid for their impact on the landscape not by the KILO of what they produce. (Additionally - the landscape story is part of the product story, so product is sold with story of origin and farmer gets a cut of final price as the value creator)

5. Time - the stuff comes at the pace of nature so when it can be grown i.e. scarcity and natural cycles built in. 

This last one is a biggie - it means not everything will be omni-available all the time. 

That's it, for now. I’m leaving Nick’s last thought just hanging there. Not everything we currently expect to be available, everywhere, all the time actually being available everywhere, all the time.

Adjusting how we think about consuming? Imagine that.

Meanwhile, this conversation continues, behind the scenes. There’ll be more of it here in due course. And, if you made it this far, at least yesterday's reference to suffocating goats now makes sense.

The Green Dreams strand of Rarely Certain is free. If you think anyone you know (especially those who try to consume 'sustainably) might find this useful, please share it with them - or across your socials.

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