I’m going to have a rant, and end with a positive idea, but let’s start with a joke.
It’s been raining for a month and the floodwaters are rising around a man’s house. A police patrol car pulls up and says “sir, come with me, you’re gonna be flooded out.”
The man says, “I’m a man of faith, god will save me”, and he stays, putting sandbags around his door.
The floodwaters rise, lapping at his door. The fire brigade arrive and urge him to come with them to safety.
“No, I’ll be fine,” the man says, “I’m a man of faith, god will save me”, and he stays, trying to get his pump to work.
The floodwaters rise, up above the ground floor. A lifeboat arrives. “Quick, come with us, you’ve got less than an hour”
“No, I’ll be fine,” the man says, “I’m a man of faith, god will save me”,
The flood waters have risen so much that the man has to retreat to the roof. A helicopter arrives, lowering down the winchman to save him.
“No, I’m not leaving my house,” the man says, “I’m a man of faith, god will save me”.
The floodwaters take the house, and the man.
He arrives in heaven, incredulous, weeping to god “I put my faith in you, why didn’t you save me.”
God raises her eyebrow.
“I sent you a cop, a fireman, a lifeboat and a helicopter…..?!”
I doesn’t matter if you do or do not believe in an interventionist God, we have been given ever-more alarming signs for decades, and we do know the options to rescue ourselves, but we aren’t listening.
I woke up this morning to images of the ocean on fire. Read it again. The ocean on fire. Please don’t nit-pick about the water not actually burning, I can’t remember a more horrifying metaphor for our self-induced apocalypse. The way we are going about our business is killing the place we do our business.
As a Swedish teenager keeps pointing out, we’re talking a good game, and some good people are doing great work, but it’s an infinitesimally small slice of action. No government in the world, and no major corporation or bank are doing anything meaningful to radically change.
Feel free to go off elsewhere and argue about what’s causing climate change, but here and now, I want to find a way of living and doing business that doesn’t cause incendiary maelstroms. I want to find a way of living and doing business that doesn’t mean that a dip in the ocean means a dip in a sewer. I want to find a way of living and doing business that doesn’t mean that we generate millions of tonnes of un-recyclable waste that floods and poisons our landscapes, simply because of the way we eat and drink.
We are living in a system that makes hypocrites of us all. We can buy electric cars and go vegan, but those are privileges only available to the wealthy and they are not without their own climatic consequences. If we need to continue to dig up minerals and dinosaur juice that took millennia to create, and continue to spray our waste around like it’s a fertiliser, we’ll be meeting our gods far sooner than we want.
We must all make profound changes to our personal lives, but it’s our collective responsibility to change the system we live in and to change the way we go about our business. Are we actively doing things to solve the problem, or are we just keeping calm and carrying on?
Never mind the floods, the sea is on fire.
“In terms of power and influence, you can forget the church, forget politics. There is no more powerful institution in society than business, which is why I believe it is now more important than ever before for business to assume a moral leadership. The business of business should not be about money, it should be about responsibility. It should be about public good, not private greed.” Dame Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop.
Yes, it feels hopeless, and selling more stuff to each other seems counter-intuitive, but businesses created all the wonders of the modern age, and businesses can build new, planet saving wonders. Businesses created the factories, and the railways and the power stations and the fields of wheat and the chocolate bars and the burgers and the syringes and the vaccines and the phones. Businesses can create anything and everything better, in better ways, if there’s a demand.
We know how to do this. All the road-maps, economic models, and most of the technology already exists. It doesn’t take more than five minutes searching to find viable ideas of how to dig ourselves out of each and every hole we’ve dug.
So that’s actually my message I think. Not just to start a business that does the same a bit better, but to start businesses and (more importantly) to transform existing businesses, with the sole purpose of saving the planet. Anything else is just sandbags at the front door.
I’ll help anyone who wants to do that, in any way I can.
Or perhaps we need a stronger sign. Maybe the sky bursting into flames might do it. Let’s wait and see who or what God sends next.
