Mea maxima culpa

I’ve frittered my working life away.

I’ve spent precious years trying to convince people to do what should be as obvious as not picking your nose with a chainsaw. I have to accept that this hasn’t really worked. 

I know all the hoo-ha about behaviour change. I’ve studied marketing psychology. I’ve made appeals to values. I’ve worked on ‘system change’ and dabbled in complexity theory. 

The behaviour change will be switching from whatever we’re doing to desperately trying to secure our children’s survival. Soon, many will be marketing hair trimmings and kidneys to put food on the table. The things we value will be fading memories blurring into dreams. Our systems are as broken as Donald Trump’s moral compass. 

There are a couple of ways to explain the lack of progress. 

1. What we’re suggesting isn’t the right thing

Maybe we’re wrong. I was dragged up to believe a few basic things. We should share. We should avoid harming other people. We should try and make the world a better place. 

But maybe I was sold a dud. Maybe the boys from Eton, all those rich rugby players, had it right all along. They seem to be doing okay.  

For how many centuries now has my society painstakingly constructed this empire of greed? How long have we relied on war and the degeneration of the world? We’ve expended enormous energy to create this state of affairs. We’ve literally fought to the death to keep it going. We’ve consistently rewarded those best suited to its demands. 

Could I be talking to the wrong species? Or, at the very least, the wrong people? I look now at the ruins of my 30 year experiment. Save a golden lion tamarin here. A guide to the sustainable office there. I may as well have been carefully explaining the circular economy to enraged Rottweilers. Advocating veganism to tigers. 

In desperation, we’ve tried appealing to things we were certain healthy humans care about. “Tackle climate change now and your kids won’t starve and die.” 

Nope. They’re still buying bigger cars and flying. Blank looks as they fist feed burgers into their mouths.  

Would they pay up if we kidnapped their kids and said we’d only exchange them for carbon credits? 

Lately, we in the environmental movement have all but accepted this. We’ve resigned ourselves to the idea that we’re communicating to selfish bastards. We call them “consumers”. We pander to them on their own terms. 

“Do the right thing by nature. You’ll be rich longer,” we say. Or “Look! Nature brings you pies and beer.” 

Nada. 

Chew up nature and spit it out. As long as I get the last pie and the final can of Heineken, I win. 

So, what now? Revolutionary Doctor Che Doolittle? Recruit the animals to do what needs to be done? Humans have the upper hand. But what if every remaining species fought back? Should environmentalists equip sleeper cells of sloths with grenades? Train wolverines in kung fu? Our armies already take on dogs and dolphins, so why not? 

Are there any sane people that we can appeal to, to take over? The Buddhists or Zoroastrians could work. But no, too passive, or perhaps too wise, to get the job done. We could give the Amish a go? Only if we like your daughters wearing gingham when not being sexually abused by beardie blokes in straw hats. 

I’ve started signaling aliens. Each night my neighbours complain as I bash out simplistic tunes on a Hammond organ to the sky, waving a desk lamp with a coloured bulb. 

Any day now some tentacled thugs may enslave us in a mechanical milking system. But I might attract someone with galactic wisdom and empathy. They’d help us use our planet’s plants to reprogramme our brains. Either that, or pop us in a comfy zoo-like environment. Meanwhile, they can enjoy the world we would have otherwise destroyed. 

My nights in the corn fields flashing my torch could be as useful as all the transparency reports I ever wrote. 

Option 2. I’m shit at my job.

This is how it feels.

Sometimes my job appears to be saving the entire world. Other times it seems to be just typing any old shit, reading the news, eating snacks and trying not to fall asleep.

But ChatGPT is coming to put us out of the misery, and it won’t need muesli bars.  

People tell me I write well. That I have a good grasp of the issues. In a way this blog tests that to its limits. Because it feels like people are really saying: “You’re an excellent juggler. It’s just a shame that you appear to be flinging three dog turds, so everyone’s keeping their distance.” 

I would struggle to name anyone really winning at this. Even my favourite writers and performers are pissing in a tidal wave. People listen to Rage Against the Machine and then go to a Coldplay concert. They’ve offset their carbon emissions but not their complete absence of talent. To be fair, there’s no way of mitigating that. 

You’d think my incompetence would be noticed. Say I worked in a store that relied heavily on government subsidies. Some buy the absolute minimum of what I have on offer. Some avoid it altogether. Some say they've already got it all, when they haven't. Others are convinced my shop is a conspiracy to take over the world and ruin everything. 

How long would I stay open? I doubt I would be able to save for my retirement. 

But spectacular failure has sustained my middle class lifestyle spectacularly. I live by the beach in a rented house with a pool. I have all the mod cons. Computers. A fridge full of beer. A hybrid car. 

Like so many sustainability professionals, I exist in a strange, liminal space. The establishment is happy to pay me to produce material it ignores. How can I conclude that I’m anything other than a useful idiot? How can I see my career as anything other than a safety valve for this system, myself as walking greenwash? 

If my decades of research have taught me anything (and that is arguable) then it is this. We must fundamentally challenge the current status quo. But I don’t do that. Because the status quo is what pays my wages and makes my life nice. 

So the right wing neoliberals talk of cutting the red tape and “woke” money wasting. I feel a shiver of recognition. The protagonist in 1984 earns his living producing material that goes down the ‘memory hole’. I feel that foretold my own existence. 

In fact, in some ways it’s worse. Our memory hole is social media. Rather than just disappearing, this global make-work scheme has become our culture. It is driving us mad. We all wade around in it while it sluices away to nothing as the blisters appear in our consciousness. We pump ‘content’. It earns weird techno geeks a gazillion dollars. They spend it on more underground bunkers full of computers. We call that “sustainability communications”.

I’m doing it right now. 

Perhaps the aliens have already landed. Maybe we just haven’t noticed, because they gave us Candy Crush.   

Writing, then, is a burning platform. Perhaps one day me or my descendants will scratch away in a monastic setting in a new Dark Age. Our daily toil will be to feverishly capture remnants of our culture. We'll scratch away on parchment made of skin that we hope was a tattooed deer. 

But right now I am hammering these words into the “cloud”. It could all get deleted when the ice around the data centres finally melts away. Or when someone needs the space to store more pornography. Whichever comes first.