Introducing Antithesis: Challenging existing corporate sustainability

Co-authors of the Enough report, Adam Carrel and Tanya McKenna, explore why they wrote it, what they've learnt from the global response, and what's next for Antithesis.

Adam Carrel

Adam Carrel is a partner in the EY Climate Change and Sustainability Services team, based in Perth, Western Australia. He has been with the organisation for more than 10 years and has worked across many countries and sectors. The common theme of all his work is helping businesses to better align their business models to global, environmental and social imperatives. He holds a Master of International Development from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Political Science from University of Melbourne.

Tanya McKenna

Tanya McKenna is a senior manager in Climate Change and Sustainability Services at Ernst & Young in Perth, Western Australia. She has more than a decade of experience working as an environmental and sustainability consultant across the government and private sectors, including at the Western Australian Department of State Development and South32. McKenna is also a board member at Open House Perth and, with a strong interest in biophilic urban design, she has been a lead collaborator on a number of high-profile restoration and renovation pro jects of inner-city sustainable homes.

Intro: You are listening to Antithesis Talks, a series of conversations about the state of corporate sustainability in a world running out of time. Antithesis Talks is brought to you by EY Climate Change and Sustainability Services (CCaSS) teams, and is driven by contribution from across the corporate sector, science, philosophy and the wider community.

Adam: I'm Adam Carrel, Climate Change & Sustainability Services Partner at Ernst & Young, Australia and host of "Antithesis Talks.

Look, I get the fact that sustainability can be kind of infected by a lot of “gumph” and “corporate-ese” and all that kind of stuff, but behind it sits the most consequential question of all of human civilization. And I know that sounds grand, but the question it seeks to answer is, can we as a planet live within our means or will the global economy cannibalize the bounty upon which it is based? And that’s the question we’re trying to solve for here.

Tanya: I’m Tanya McKenna and I’m here with Adam Carrel and together, we’re speaking today from Whadjak Noongar country in Australia. Respectfully, I’ll start by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land where we’re meeting on today, and acknowledge the continuing contribution that they make to our city of Perth and the beautiful surrounds within which we live. Last year, Adam and I, with the help of many others, released the Enough report. Ultimately, this Enough report was a critical review of the state of corporate sustainability in a world that is ultimately running out of time to act on the environmental and social crisis before us. What we sought to do with this report was bring attention to the fact that, today, the way we see it, corporate sustainability is really not living up to its promise, and recognizing that, as sustainability consultants ourselves, we’ve been trying for too long to make sustainability work for business, when really what we should be doing is make business work for sustainability. And also, we really thought that perhaps there were people out there that, should we start this crucial conversation, would be really willing to share their ideas and get involved in thinking about what corporate sustainability reimagined would and should look like. When the report went out in June 2022, we had little to no expectation of what would happen when it was released, but the response was almost immediate, somewhat overwhelming and completely remarkable. If you haven’t already read the Enough Report, we encourage you to do so before listening to this conversation. So Adam, I joined you in our profession in 2021 and for a while, there you’d been gnawing over the idea of writing about corporate sustainability. And I think, to me, this came from this sheer desire of critiquing where it had come from with the belief that something really need to change in this space. What was it about this specific issue that you wanted to shed light on and why now?

Adam: It was a couple of things, Tanya. But fundamentally, I think the issue is that I’ve been in this game for 20 years. It’s 2023 and yet there is not a single sustainable corporation on the planet, which is a crazy thing to say out loud and a huge existential problem. And that’s the first reason why I wrote the report, right? There might be small, artisanal companies that are sustainable, but there is no major corporation on the planet that is sustainable and we are racing toward, as you pointed out, an environmental and social crisis. So, everyone needs to know about that problem, right? But there’s a second thing, which is that I think it’s best summed up by a quote we used in the report, which is that the only thing worse than the absence of progress is the illusion of progress. And that really sums it all up. We in the corporate sustainability world make a promise to the world, which is that, hey, you all don’t need to worry about reimagining the global economy because we’re doing it, we’re self-regulating, we’ve got this. And if we haven’t got it, which — and there’s very little evidence that we do — the world needs to know about that, because the world needs to find other ways to solve these major problems that sustainability tries to solve. But I just want to say from the outset, by the way, that we are not saying that sustainability is fundamentally broken. We’re not saying we’ve got to throw the baby out with the bath water. But we’re saying that we have to liberate sustainability from some distinctly unhelpful ideas and legacies that we will become appended to. And that’s the underlying reason why we wrote the report.

“Can we as a planet live within our means or will the global economy cannibalize the bounty upon which it is based?”

Tanya: Absolutely. And when you talk to some of those underlying legacies, I think this is what really framed the report. And if we look back at those key themes that came to the Enough Report, there are a number of things which we’ll dive into more in this conversation, but the crux of it really comes down to the fact that there’s this sheer volume of corporate promise, yet then what we see is perhaps not enough impact or outcome from all of that activity. So, one of those was about the corporate model itself. We also explored this flawed idea, or flawed mechanism, of sustainability and ESG disclosure. And I’ve been in this space for a long time. So many of us resonate over this issue. We talked to that in detail, but we’ll unpack that later. We also really kind of explored that notion of incrementalism and the fact that in corporate sustainability, particularly, we see really accepting of small measures of success and we pat ourselves on the back with that. The sustainability is a journey narrative, something that really resonated with many, something that we have to overcome. But that piece around fundamentally nobody knows really how sustainable they need to be and by when and that, to your point earlier, no corporation in the world can really convince anyone of how sustainable they actually are. The last piece was around that kind of people piece and the construct of cooperation in a business context and barriers to that in that kind of business environment. Let’s start, though, by talking about the corporate model. When we talk about the corporate model, what is it? Like, this corporate machine, how would you describe that and what are some of the implications of the corporate machine when it comes to trying to really drive sustainable development?

Adam: Absolutely. And when you talk to some of those underlying legacies, I think this is what really framed the report. And if we look back at those key themes that came to the Enough Report, there are a number of things which we’ll dive into more in this conversation, but the crux of it really comes down to the fact that there’s this sheer volume of corporate promise, yet then what we see is perhaps not enough impact or outcome from all of that activity. So, one of those was about the corporate model itself. We also explored this flawed idea, or flawed mechanism, of sustainability and ESG disclosure. And I’ve been in this space for a long time. So many of us resonate over this issue. We talked to that in detail, but we’ll unpack that later. We also really kind of explored that notion of incrementalism and the fact that in corporate sustainability, particularly, we see really accepting of small measures of success and we pat ourselves on the back with that. The sustainability is a journey narrative, something that really resonated with many, something that we have to overcome. But that piece around fundamentally nobody knows really how sustainable they need to be and by when and that, to your point earlier, no corporation in the world can really convince anyone of how sustainable they actually are. The last piece was around that kind of people piece and the construct of cooperation in a business context and barriers to that in that kind of business environment. Let’s start, though, by talking about the corporate model. When we talk about the corporate model, what is it? Like, this corporate machine, how would you describe that and what are some of the implications of the corporate machine when it comes to trying to really drive sustainable development?

Tanya: And I think one of the questions that we put to readers when the Enough Report was released was trying to find a better way to design a better corporate model. We didn’t really hear back from readers on that, and perhaps there isn’t one. Have you given this any further thought about how you think the corporate model could or should be to properly be driving the sustainable development that we need to see?

“We have to liberate sustainability from some distinctly unhelpful ideas and legacies that we will become appended to”

Adam: I’m not surprised people didn’t come back with perfect answers, because it’s a really hard question and I don’t have a perfect answer myself. But one thing that’s really clear to me is that we have to stop seeing corporations as individual, isolated verticals of operation or control, and start to see them as a horizontal landscape full of well-educated, compassionate and empathic people that really want to do the right thing in their life and contribute to the realization of sustainable development. Now, in saying that, I’m not saying that we have to throw out the rulebook of capitalism. Competition is crucial. All corporations can’t collaborate at the same time, but we still need to break down these arbitrary barriers between induvial corporations and work laterally to realize sustainable development, because that’s the only way it’ll work. It’s the hardest thing we will ever have to do since the industrial revolution and it’s not going to work in silo after silo after silo. We need to mobilize a vast, horizontal band of smart people to fix this at the same time.

Tanya: I think through the way that we been exploring this, and certainly what’s come out is that really it’s about people. And I think we’ll get to that more sort of later in the conversation. But I also want to talk to you about this specific notion of sustainability being a journey. If we talk back to the Enough Report and some of those key things that were in there and particularly what came back when people were writing to us and saying, wow, you know, I’m so sick of hearing that sustainability is a journey, because it’s not. And when we think about the discipline of sustainability it is a large area of expertise that is underpinned by science. We’ve got a lot of people out there working in this space. But for some reason, we’ve been allowing and perpetuating this message around sustainability being a journey. Can you reflect on that and tell us why is it that we’ve been letting people get away with that?

Adam: Yeah. I mean, the underlying point in what you say is that sustainability means something. You so often hear it said that sustainability is subjective, or as you say, it’s a journey and we’ve allowed it to become this amorphous, continuum of best efforts, right? But when The Earth Summit really codified what we meant by sustainable development, it had a distinct meaning, which was that we could pursue economic growth only to the extent that it didn’t prevent future generations enjoying equal to or greater than economic growth. It was simple. That’s what it stood for. And behind that, therefore, is the point that a sustainable economy is one that operates within planetary boundaries. That it doesn’t undermine the biosphere and undermine the capacity of future generations to enjoy quality of life from the biosphere. Which means, then, that a business needs to have a neutral or restorative relationship with the biosphere to be sustainable. And that’s a very simple thing to say, but we let that go for a number of reasons that I’m sure you want to talk about. But the key point is that sustainable development was born into the world with a very clear connotation of what it meant. But then as an industry, we went through a couple of near-death experiences that meant that we had to really retreat from that clear, assertive original position and walk our way back into subjectivity to make ourselves a smaller target in a landscape that, at a couple of key points, really wanted to knock us off.

Tanya: Can you elaborate more on what some of those key points were?

Adam: So the first one — now, we talk about this in the report, and it kind of surprises people that we associate this event with corporate sustainability, but it’s actually September 11. And why that was so consequential to our industry is because that was the point at which all of the kind of globalist bonhomie that concluded the 90s period, you know, this period of time where — and it seems kind of corny or, indeed, kind of “god-like” from a distance — this idea that we thought that this sort of third way politics of government and corporatism could unite to change the world, but we felt that way at the time. And it gave sustainable development a real momentum that it was carrying forward until, on September 11, a lot of the globalism, a lot of that globalist bonhomie was sucked out of the system. We went back to a period of realpolitik. We went back to a period of sort of “hunting tonight” politics, where it was about the so-called clash of civilizations. And globalism didn’t enjoy the same kind of support from major institutions at that time. And, indeed, at that time, if you weren’t seen as someone that was a nationalist first, and focused upon sort of protection first and homeland security first, then you were a kind of enemy of the state, to be slightly grand in that statement. So, that was the first key event. And that was when we stopped talking about globalism. We stopped talking out loud about changing the world. We became much more kind of benign and neutral in our language. Then the second one was the global financial crisis. So following shortly on the heels of that is, here was this sudden moment at which, following a period of heady and extensive economic growth, the world found itself in a moment of deep economic crisis and it should have been the moment at which the world said, right, we’ve obviously got something wrong in capitalism here. Neo-liberalism out of control, we have to get back into the guts of the system and change it so that we don’t lurch from one crisis to another, but we went the other way. We were so terrified of making the situation worse that governments, corporations and even individual citizens ran from structural reform and just tried as desperately hard as possible to try and get things back to normal. And in that moment then, sustainability was really in a fight for its survival. We had to move away from the idea that we’re going to force through anything that seems hard or expensive, and we converted ourselves into a business optimization function that made things cheaper, or generated better trust for your consumers or a better relationship for the regulators. It was all about upside. We walked away from the hard part of it and that’s when we really let go of that true definition of sustainable development. And it became this, yes, this amorphous, plodding journey that we’ve been on in that period since.

Tanya: And maybe that takes us then to this emphasis that has been for so long and there remains on reporting. And, you know, I’ve been in a role or multiple roles where reporting has been a majority of my function and I know what it’s like to sit in a business and spend six to eight months of a year focused on an external disclosure of telling the story, of making the story up as we go along, of scrambling across an organization to find metrics to report on so that someone can see that we’ve made some kind of progress throughout the year. But at the same time, we both value the fact that disclosure is important and the market does need to see what companies are doing in sustainability. From your perspective, why are organizations so focused on disclosure?

“Competition is crucial. All corporations can’t collaborate at the same time, but we still need to break down these arbitrary barriers between induvial corporations and work laterally to realize sustainable development, because that’s the only way it’ll work”

Adam: Look, first thing I want to say it that, look, reports are important and stories are important. And indeed, we’re here today talking about a report. I keep learning that we have to be careful in talking about the themes of our report, because I really don’t want people thinking that we’re sinking the boot into the modern sustainability professional and to the entirety of the system. These are wonderful people that work desperately hard that are having great pockets of cut-through across the system. And the same extends to reporting, that sustainability reporting achieved a huge amount. But our point in the report is that it is absorbing 99% of the emotional energy and physical energy of the sustainability community. And it gets back to that point that was made in “The Golden Passport,” the book I was referring to earlier, which is that we have created this mythology of the corporation as a machine, that if you just pump in data at one end, solutions pump out the other side. And that’s a completely artificial construct, but that’s why we keep thinking that we have to produce more reports and historical data. The other thing is it just, it feels constructive to produce a report. You’ve got an artefact that you can point to. And that’s why, you know, at every major kind of international coming together of corporate minds around sustainability, people will walk out hands in the air, saying, I’ve got it. You know, you can’t manage what you can’t measure, so we have to go into a process of baseline measurement and once everyone’s measured, you know, sustainability and their actions to death, then suddenly this solution will materialize out of that data. And we’ve been reproducing that kind of story for years after years after years. And so, we keep thinking that if we just nail reporting, we’ll nail sustainable development. But there’s no causal association there. Historic data, as grand as it might be, is not going to catalyze suddenly into wholesale systems change. And so, that’s why we are a little bit dubious of the remarkable focus our industry has on the generation of reports of historic information, as much as we, coming from a major public accounting firm organization, know that that can play a crucial role in many economies at certain times.

Tanya: Yeah. So true. Going back to the play about planetary boundaries and that whole theory, the corporation needing to be a lot more horizontal, I think something that we’ve also been looking at, through a lot of the projects and clients we’ve been working with in the last 12 to 18 months is the planetary boundaries framework. And for those that don’t know about the planetary boundaries framework, it’s been developed by the Stockholm Resilience Centre and it’s ultimately a scientifically underpinned model that tells us what the carrying capacity of the planet is, based on a number of different ecological systems. And I want to kind of unpack this a little bit with you, because this whole concept of sustainability being a journey, where we are going with that journey, perhaps in pursuit of more of a definitive end goal, where we’re wanting to align value chain and corporate kind of operational models to the planetary boundaries model in a way to understand that whole premise around how sustainable does a business need to be and by when. Can you unpack this for me in the sense of how might we better do this for business when it comes to planetary boundaries and actually trying to find an endpoint for sustainability so that companies can properly articulate that and we see better progress?

Adam: So, the concept of planetary boundaries has been really constructive in dragging attention back to what sustainable development is supposed to be about. A lot of the responses to the report has been about what we haven’t spoken about as much as what we have spoken about. And one of the things we don’t speak that much about in the report is climate change. We refer to it obviously. Everyone kind of gets the fact that climate change is one of the underlying issues that motivated the report. The attention on climate change has almost come at the expense of the consideration of the biosphere more broadly. That a lot of people can be inclined to think that if we just solve the climate crisis, that we’ve somehow solved sustainability at the same time. But that’s far from the case. And actually, climate change has drawn attention away from actually more immediate environmental challenges. Now they’re all related, of course, but as you know sort of species extinction and biosphere decline, the kind of riverine ecosystems, desertification around the world, lots of different issues are deteriorating at the same time. And so, we have to get back to a biosphere-orientated connotation of sustainable development. That’s the first thing that boundary process has done. The second thing is it builds on this idea of science-based targets, which is that in a finite planet, which is potentially the only — as Elon Musk  likes to talk about, you know, and likes to remind people, that the earth might be the only domain of consciousness in the universe — that when it comes to preserving the biosphere near enough isn’t good enough. We actually have to get to a point at which we’re able to preserve life on this planet, consciousness on this planet, for as long as possible. There are trillions of lives to come, and we need to think about sustainability in terms of preserving those trillions of conscious lives as long as possible so that we really can be a kind of earthing point for consciousness into the universe. So, it doesn’t matter if we get better than last year at reducing carbon, or if we reduce desertification a little bit. The planet is indifferent to that. We actually have to nail it at a scientific level and arrive at this point of meaningful equilibrium between the economy and the biosphere upon which it’s based.

Tanya: But if we haven’t done that by now, and we’ve been writing reports and setting targets and seeing progress and signing up to memberships and all of those things, and, you know, the report obviously outlined exactly what you said around decline of the health of the planet, but an absolute explosion in corporate activity and sustainability, what do we do? How do we try and push this agenda to make more transformative or to drive more transformative actions so that we don’t keep seeing that incremental year-on-year progress?

Adam: So, residing in your question is an important point, which is that for one thing we don’t need to worry if we have enough money. We have plenty of money. And in 2023, if, in fighting inflation, the world tilts into a recessionary environment, we still have plenty of money. There is more than twice the GDP of the United States right now invested in ESG-aligned funds. Tens of trillions of US dollars, right? So, we’ve got plenty of money. And at the same time, we also have the intellect. So, there’s actually nothing stopping us. And we think about this a lot in terms of OK, why on earth is that not happening yet? I think the underlying thing is fear. The economic status quo has been very good at cultivating a sense of fear that the world can’t sustain any more change. It pedals this notion that we’re so persistently being disrupted by innovators all the time, that the global economy is saturated with change and any more little atom of change is going to just make the whole edifice fall apart. So many of us are really susceptible to that fear, that we don’t have the ability to be able to force through this change in our lifetime. But absolutely of course we do. And there are so many historical examples. And people, we always talk about the kind of war effort and we shouldn’t in these circumstances. But it’s a useful way to think that on a dime, for example, the United States in particular, turned itself within two years into a major industrial powerhouse through a public-private partnership that changed the course of the world and, along with its allies, kind of won a war. If we go on to a war footing, we can actually achieve anything. And I like the fact that in our space, we can pick upon the old economy. We can pick upon the fossil fuel industry for obvious reasons, right? But if you look at what they do, for example, if you look at the fact that engineers can find a way to send a drill to the bottom of the ocean and successfully monetize a reservoir of oil and gas through an aperture the size of a television and then ship it up to the ocean’s surface and send it around the world and pump it into powerplants, that is remarkable. We have all the genius we need. We just have to orientate it in the right direction. So, I’m actually deeply optimistic about our capacity to change. We just have to stop being so afraid of embracing change in the here and now.

Tanya: And perhaps there’s something about those people that are working in corporate sustainability, or anywhere for that matter, we have this immense responsibility on us and, you know, what this report demonstrated was that so many people, both within our discipline and in civil society, care deeply about this. And we’ve seen that over the years. We’re seeing that happen everywhere. Is it fear in us that we’re sort of a little bit too afraid to kind of say what we really mean? Or is it that we need more strength in numbers to try and make positive change here?

Adam: I definitely think so. And I think that’s so much more important than I anticipated. 

Tanya: Yep.

Adam: Because a lot of us, when we got into sustainability 20 years ago, we had this mindset that we were like Spartans climbing into the Trojan Horse. We were pretending to fit into the corporate molds, that we could be sort of snuck into the kingdom, we’d burst out at night and we’d change everything. And we spent so long inside that horse, however, that we’ve forgotten that we’re Spartans. We’ve sort of become Trojans. To use the phrase, we’ve kind of adopted the language of the oppressor to a degree, without going too far. And that we speak in the corporate vocabulary, and we’ve been speaking in it for so long that we’re starting to think in terms of the corporate vocabulary and we kind of have forgotten whom we are. We’re a hyper-expedient, polite people who don’t like to pick fights and so we have suppressed a lot of our motivations behind the language of pragmatism, and we’ve got to burst out of that. And in a very small way, this report was an exercise in that. And low and behold, no one got us into trouble. No one’s been particularly upset by anything we’ve said, because we are just speaking the truth in our own way. And so, you do have to wonder if our own self-censorship is a large part of why we have kind of kept a lid upon all the change that we want to visit upon the world.

Tanya: Yep. I completely agree.

“We actually have to get to a point at which we’re able to preserve life on this planet, consciousness on this planet, for as long as possible”

Tanya: I want to slightly change the conversation toward the topic of degrowth. And it’s not unrelated to anything we’ve just been talking about, but there are a lot of thinkers out there, and particularly, people that I follow, who are talking about degrowth as being the only way forward. Yet other people think it’s absurd. I think they’re fearful of the word degrowth and what it actually means. But then we have people writing to us, and responses as late as two weeks ago, written to say thank you for writing this, this deeply resonates with me, but I also want to talk about development and growth on a finite planet. And so, to me, I feel like this concept of degrowth — maybe it’s not a concept, maybe it is the direction we need to go down, but it seems controversial, it sort of relates to what we spoke about in the report: when is enough enough? When do we, as society, have enough that we don’t need to keep growing?

Adam: It gets to the point we were just discussing before, which is that this kind of real expediency and minding our Ps and Qs that we’ve adopted in this space that we’ve accepted all these taboos — these ideas that we don’t talk about. And one of those is degrowth. We just don’t talk about it, because we are so concerned as sustainability professionals as seeming like that we don’t fit in, that we don’t get the system, that we’re radicals that want to tear the whole place apart — that might be true sometimes — but, you know, we tend to avoid talking about these issues lest we sort of, you know, shine a light on ourselves as being a little bit too out there. But of course, we have to talk about degrowth. This is something that kids get intuitively. Children seem to immediately understand as soon as they think about the world that it's finite and therefore the concept of infinite growth on a finite planet is patently absurd. But you have all of these kind of dour-faced corporate types whom claim that they’re so fact-based that they ignore that point, which is equivalent as being like a flat-earthist as far as I’m concerned, this idea that permanent growth can continue forever. So, we have to explore these ideas. We can’t observe these taboos because we’re going to avoid staring into some terrifying problems that we have as a planet. Now, I’m not a degrowth expert, but it reassured me because you hear the idea “degrowth” and you think well, that’ll never fly. No one’s ever going to go for that. You know, it’s far too out there. They’ll say it’s socialist and Marxist, they’ll write it off, no serious person will take it seriously. And the agenda cops a lot of that. But degrowth is not about some kind of top-down Stalinist intervention to absolutely dictate what everyone does in their life and you can have that much of this and that much of that. It’s really about reducing the amount of through-put in the economy for a given quantity of output. So, we don’t have to reduce our standard of living. And, crucially, people in the developing world don’t have to accept lower standards of living. It’s all premised upon the idea that everyone should enjoy an equal to a greater standard of living than previous generations to a degree. But it just tries to suck all the absurdity out it — the rampant consumerism out of it. It accepts the fact that, hey, obviously we’re all have to going to get to a point where we’ve had enough of things that have to be extracted from the planet. And Keynes, in his famous essay, the famous economist Keynes, not considered a Socialist or radical by any means, wrote this beautiful essay called “A letter to my grandchildren.”  And in that essay he sort of contemplated what he saw as the inevitable point at which civilization would get to a point where we kind of have a sufficient standard of living. Economic growth had got us to a point at which we had gone through the hard-gestation period of economic growth and we got to a point where life would be less about accumulation and consumption and become more about meaning. What do we do with our time here and how do we indeed occupy ourselves when we don’t need to work, we have access to enough. And I think that idea of degrowth lies at the very core of the genuine realization of sustainable development.

Tanya: I think that takes me through to the role of the sustainability professional. And in thinking about, when is enough enough? Who are we to be speaking out on this? How do we embody this premise of slowing down, of wanting less, of trying to tie corporate sustainability strategy to the consumer? And how the sustainability strategy or a business’ strategy should also be talking to how people consume goods and its role in society and not it’s just role to grow for the very benefit of the shareholder? Where do you sort of see our role in the sustainability profession going? And I guess I want your view on how we become better at this and whether or not there is an aspect here that might move toward activism in the sustainability profession.

Adam: Yeah. There’s so much I want to say here and I’m conscious of not monologuing at you in this forum, but I think there’s a bunch of things. So, the first one is, to that last point you made about activism, certainly if anyone in the economy had a responsibility to kind of practice what they preach and take a few risks, it’s a sustainability professional. We put ourselves out there as saying the world needs to change, we put ourselves out there saying that we can’t be, as Jonathon Porritt recalls, sort of “handmaidens for pathological delays,”  as he so eloquently puts it. So, we have to put ourselves out there. We’ve got a responsibility to do that, but it doesn’t mean we have to kind of flame out in some mass act of activism. We are here because we exist within the system to catalyze change. So, we have to be pragmatic to a degree. We have to be smart. It doesn’t mean we have to sacrifice our philosophies and instincts and passions, but there’s no point in just a grand pyrrhic victory where we kind of call BS on it all and then retreat into our own private lives. That’s not acceptable. We’re in the system now and we have to make the most of our position in the system to affect change. So, that’s the first thing. The second thing is that we’re having a massive “careful what you wish for” moment in our industry, because the world is now coming to the ESG and sustainability sector to say, OK, OK, we’re kind of on board now, we realize that we have to deal with this now before say 2030, for example, so what do you want us to do? And we have to step up and be practitioners for genuine transformation. We have to have the confidence now and the intellect to be able to say, this is how you transform an enterprise. Not a sustainability function, not a department, but a pilot project but the whole edifice. OK, is the other thing we have to do in this moment. Another one, though, and I know that you’re passionate about this, is that we have to stop being so puritanical about not wanting to be in the business of marketing or advertising or PR. So, sustainability people thought that we were too kind of high-minded for that and so we’ve ignored — a lot of us have ignored the consumer side of the equation. But really, we have to get in the business of massive hearts and minds campaigns that — we can’t wait for corporations to get to a point where their consumers are begging for them to provide more sustainable products and services to the market. We have to make that market at the same time. So, sustainability people have to get much better at — dare I say it? — kind of advertising and consumer campaigns and consumer activism to kind of forge these markets that will support corporations to actually invest in sustainable transformation.

“We have to get in the business of massive hearts and minds campaigns that — we can’t wait for corporations to get to a point where their consumers are begging for them to provide more sustainable products and services to the market. We have to make that market at the same time”

Tanya: Adam, I want to talk about the response to the report. What we did do that was unique with this piece was ask questions of the audience. And I guess what I said before was that we didn’t really have an expectation of what would happen. This could have just been another report that was put out by a big accounting firm, but it sat with people and it had an almost immediate response. We used social media platforms to, I guess, engage with people, particularly in the corporate space, and that’s probably where that immediate kind of response came from. But we had an inbox that we set up where people were able to write to us because we asked them to. And what we saw was almost overnight emails starting to come into that inbox to the point where we were like wow, OK, this is getting into the 10s, the 20s, we’re at a 100. Like, we’re getting a lot of responses. And that was just in email, let alone your personal networks, social media threads and all of those sorts of things. And it really did hit a mark that I don’t know we expected to, but we were very obviously happy about that. Why did this report resonate with so many people?

Adam: Well, look, I mean like a kind of neurotic writer, I convinced myself that no one would read it and, you know, we’d look like a fool. You know, we were naïve and we’d torpedoed our career in one fell swoop. And then you’re right, people started responding immediately. And I’m so grateful for that and blown away by that. And, to your point, people were writing us essays. Like, they sat down in the middle of their days to pen essays. These are learned people some of whom were CEOs of corporations, major international corporations whom we can’t name to respect their privacy — but this didn’t just land with the kind of the old crowd. It somehow, who knows how because as you know I’m a complete social media Luddite, found its way to people quite quickly. And they really poured their heart out to us, and I am so appreciative of that. I still don’t quite know why, right? I don’t know why it struck a nerve, but I think we were trying to be antithetical with this. There was kind of in the title, you know, the corporate language, which I know we kind of unconsciously adopt, doesn’t really allow the writer to express much of themselves to the kind of surgically selected words of the corporate lexicon. And so we were, credit to my boss and my boss’ boss and all the way up the chain, given a fair degree of leash to be able to express ourselves somewhat more candidly. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, that did kind of cut through. So, I think that is a part of it. And maybe there was just some kind of lucky timing with it, where it did sort of reach our industry at a point at which we really felt compelled to kind of blurt out a lot of what we are feeling, because at one moment, you see the evidence of the planetary crisis deteriorating in real time, the other moment, you see this kind of wave of buzz around ESG and sustainability and this re-emergence of this idea that the private sector will self-regulate itself to success. And so, in the midsy of those two paradoxes, we just really wanted to blurt this out. And I think we just sort of blurted out at the right time and we found our community, which people need to know that our industry is alive and well — is brimming with people that are very happy to devote themselves to new ideas. I’m so restored and enthusiastic about our industry on the back of the response we got.

Tanya: I feel that one of the most resonant responses that we had was about this guild concept. People literally saying how do I be a part of this guild, what is this thing, where are you going to next? What’s your vision for this guild concept and how do you see that working?

Adam: Well, you know, we’re still building it on the back of these people we’re speaking to. But I think we were so institutionalized as having been in the corporate sustainability game for so long that we kind of thought that the world would want us to write a methodology, or some new response — some new framework that could be adopted that could be kind of put out there as sustainability 2.0. But we didn’t hear that at all, and we immediately had people tell us to say — and point us to organizations that even we didn’t know about that are doing that hard work. Organizations that we want to profile in due course that had built some of those frameworks, but they really, as you say, struck on this idea of the guild. By which we meant a kind of network of people operating a bit like a kind of guild or an organization that sheers toward principles of action that meets and that acts as a kind of strong collective. And I think why that cut through is that one of the things that we stumbled upon through the responses is what appears to be an astonishing gap in modern philosophy, which is that there is no ethic out there that exists to guide the actions of someone that really wants to pursue change within a system that is reluctant to that change. So much of the world’s philosophy is still grounded in the idea of the individual relative to the world and mortality and the kind of craziness of existence. And indeed, there’s this bizarre kind of resurgence of stoicism in the current moment, which is odd to me, because much of us enjoy a greater standard of living and a greater access to resources than any generation in history and yet a lot of relatively empowered people are drawing on stoicism. And stoic philosophy is great, but it’s premised upon the idea of how does an individual finds a sense of dignity and meaning in a life where we are exposed to the kind of vagaries of gods. Well, without sounding too grand, we are the gods now. You know, the point of the Anthropocene is that humanity have risen to a point at which we are actually able to change the earth so much that we’ve created our own geological age, so stoicism is not the right philosophy for our time. We need a new philosophy that actually guides people that are empowered and enriched and educated to take responsibility for their capacity to change the world. And it doesn’t really exist out there – or, at least, it might but we haven’t found it yet. And we keep speaking to philosophers and academics, trying to point us in that direction and nothing’s coming out. And so that’s why we think we need to play a role in clarifying a kind of ethic or set of principles that guide individuals within the system to understand the right kind of tradeoffs between their duties to their dependents and people in their life to be able to not just, as I say, flame out in some grand act of rebellion, but at the same time, take more risks in their life and actively be a genuine agent for change for insisting that the world changes on their watch. And that’s what the guild is trying to pursue and that, to our great surprise, is the thing that seems to have stuck with people that they want us to focus on next.

Tanya: Yes. Reflecting on that, I think you’re right, in the sense that people don’t want more information, more frameworks, more data and more methods of doing things. And what they’ve really seen in this is, from my perspective, a collective movement of people who are willing to be the change. And they desperately want to be a part of it, and they’re still writing to us to say, yep, you know, these are my thoughts, I found this. Have you read this? Did you know about this? Don’t waste time doing this thing, because we’ve done this, we’ve been working on this over here. And even people have explicitly said whatever you do, do not write another report, because they want this kind of collective movement. They want the people, they want the connection and I feel like having been in this space for over 10 years, I feel like it’s actually the genuine connection between people and the strength in the movement to make people feel more comfortable, and perhaps, less fearful to stand up about what they believe is right and to take that responsibility in their own life. Herein ultimately lies the direction for Antithesis. The next few months is ultimately going to look like the creation of a platform for people to start to connect — a series of podcasts and a number of events that are coming up, where we genuinely want to get people to connect and start to, I guess, re-examine this problem, but drive it forward. And the beauty of Antithesis is that ultimately, it is driven by the people. One really key piece about this is that the conversation is not just for corporate sustainability professionals. Civil society and people in community — they care about this issue. How do we kind of broaden this conversation to include more voices?

Adam: Great question. I defer to you so much on things like that, as you know, Tanya, because to your point about people not wanting another report, that’s the world in which I’ve been living. I communicate largely through reports. You know, I’m not on social media very often and I don’t feel as connected to that world as you. But that’s why I’m excited by the latitude we’ve been given here. We just want to experiment with this, and we want to take this conversation, as you say, to a broader segment of the world’s community. We’re weirdly unallied in this space. So many of us share the same sentiments, the same underlying, I think, kind of sense of ethical urgency in life around resolving this problem, but we don’t really operate as a collective. And I think it’s funny how those of us that might be on the more kind of progressive environmentalist end of the spectrum tend to be so aggrieved by the fact that some of our adversaries are very good at establishing networks of power and influence, right? And, yes, some of those networks of power and influence are a little bit nefarious, but of course, any organization or group of people that want to change the world need to create allied networks of power and influence. And we need to do exactly the same thing. And the funny thing is that some of our opponents in this space so often accuse us of being a part of a kind of woke mafia. Well, why don’t we actually embrace the idea of being much more systematic in the pursuit of power and influence and change? Because our cause is an important one. We must leave no stone unturned in terms of realizing a sustainable biosphere for all the reasons I mentioned earlier, which extend all the way as far as to the potential preservation of consciousness in the universe. We need to be systematic about that. So, yeah, let’s build allies in different agendas. And I think one of the ways we’ve got to do that is through reports that do cut away some of the corporate vernacular that leaves people cold and experiment with being a little bit more out there in terms of declaring our sentiments and our motivations a little more clearly and see whom else we can draw into this conversation to have a more kind of broader, dare I say it, kind of army or set of allies that are aligned to our cause. Because we’ve got 10 years to get this right. And let’s not forget the fact that certain Pacific Island nations are going to be under water regardless of what we do from this point onward. And we say these things out loud, and we say it so often, that we kind of overlook the gravity of that. People get so aggrieved by people would be so bold as to glue themselves to a major arterial to try and draw attention to the climate crisis and call that an act of vandalism. The loss of entire countries and histories is the most egregious act of vandalism one could possibly imagine, and we have to be so systematic at organizing ourselves to solve this problem. Now, we are going to be a tiny part of that, right? I’m not under any illusions that whatever this thing is that we’ve generated is going to catalyze anything that might be considered a global movement per se, but if all we do is to create a greater kind of linkage between the corporate sustainability community and civil society and activists and academia and all the other people that want to solve this issue of an unsustainable global economy, then I would be proud of that. And that is why I’m appreciative of the latitude that we’ve got to keep pursuing this problem. And this question of the ethics of the Anthropocene — how do we come up with some form of ethic which clarifies in the mind of the world’s privileged people their duties to exercise their privilege within the systems that make them privileged? Then that is a sort of something that I’m really keen to explore with you to see what happens next.

Tanya: Adam, I think you’ve just answered that perfectly. I can’t wait to see where this goes, so thank you.

Adam: Me too. Thanks Tanya.

Tanya: You’ve been listening to Antithesis Talks, a series of conversations about the state of corporate sustainability in a world running out of time. Antithesis Talks is brought to you by the EY Climate Change and Sustainability Services team, and is driven by contribution from across the corporate sector, science, philosophy and the wider community. To contribute, visit our website at ey.com. Antithesis Talks is available there or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you haven’t already read the Enough Report, we encourage you to do so. You can read or listen to it on our website at ey.com.

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“We need a new philosophy that actually guides people that are empowered and enriched and educated to take responsibility for their capacity to change the world”