Black Friday: I wash my hands clean.

To be an environmental activist is to reject the system. To be one is to say no to the way we make and sell and consume stuff in the entirely unsustainable way we do right now.

I admire these people. They have inspired my dreams for 30 years. Visionaries like Jane Goodall and Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough are nature’s most vital allies.

Then there are people like me; who share all of the same values but chose to work with big business. The future doesn’t seem to be without it, so we accept our place within it.

We are the people big business fear. An activist is up for a fight and that alone isn’t going to change the world. A sustainability team is needed within business to make it all happen.

It is a largely thankless job. Businesses might say they want change but when it comes to actually wanting TO change it’s a very different story.

No matter how unarguable the truth is regarding the ecological consequences of a business decision, human ability to practice cognitive dissonance takes over most days. 

Within a few weeks of working with Vivobarefoot, I was told we are doing Black Friday. A major shift in business meant if we didn’t, we would be at risk of losing our independence. 

Vivobarefoot absolutely planned not to do it. These were extenuating circumstances.

Most people do not realise many of the brands that ‘don’t do’ Black Friday do massive sales either side. This is green washing of the worst kind. Vivo preferred to face it all head on.

Authenticity, not pretence. Reality, not theory. Progress, not perfection.

Personally, I maintain there is no commercial reason good enough to condone such a purely consumerist occasion so totally unaligned to our values and ethics on health and nature.

But the truth is, no business is sustainable. It is not possible to complete sustainability (yet) and the journey to becoming truly regenerative and restorative relies on system change.

The balance between taking a staunch stance on environmentalism and going bankrupt is precarious and what use is an eco-business-change-agent without a business to do it in?

It is an unarguable truth that we are in an ecological crisis. That the debt we owe to the natural world is truly unaffordable and absent from most business accounts. 

So, do you stay and fight for a business that is ultimately pushing the boundaries in every other way to show how business can be a regenerative force for our health and nature? Or do you believe the mass-sale of sustainable shoes is nothing but greenwashing and leave?

There is no right answer. There is no hope. There is only action. I chose action.