Embedding and Encouraging Activists

Big businesses are now teeming with "corporate sustainability professionals", but does that make them good ethical businesses on a pro-planet trajectory? Are they the ones moving the internal needle? Or do they merely kowtow to the corporate mantra of sell more, sell faster?

To my great pleasure in 2021 I'm discovering activists within businesses, who are educating their colleagues and spurring the whole company into action.

Often these activists sit far away from the traditional sustainability échelons. They are committed campaigners who spend their weekends and evenings defending the environment, and then take this fervour into the workplace. They inspire and encourage others around them to build this into the work culture. Some are leading beach cleans, others are knee deep in mud and nettles improving the environment for local wildlife. Others still are keyboard activists, educating across webinars and social media. Each and everyone of them takes their environmental self into the workplace (physically and virtually).

They are not hired on fancy salaries to compile metrics on minimal improvement to share with press and stakeholders. They don't get to dictate the grandiloquent pledges and pacts. They do the do, they don't talk the talk.

I don't buy the cynical corporate activism of many "sustainability-trained" execs. Too busy measuring negligible progress and calculating carbon to actually do anything about the climate crisis and the biodiversity calamity - because that's what big business dictates -measure the good, bury the bad. Have you ever been to a webinar where one of them suggests the company slow down, and forget about bombarding their shoppers with daily emails asking them to buy more, more, more?

So let's celebrate the real activists in business, those who campaign internally, who hold the C-Suite to account, who rally and inspire their colleagues and the outside world, to get real about the crisis upon us.

We need more of these, and this is the culture a business needs to encourage. How many businesses reward external activism instead of just tolerating it. How many business encourage their employees to be greener than Greenpeace, to be more rebellious than Extinction Rebellion?

When you are THE activist in your company, no matter how steep the slope, never dismount. Stay in the saddle and keep riding like the wind. If your business doesn't like it, then keep pedalling.

If businesses don't embrace people like you, they are doomed, along with their polluting linear business model and their fixation with overconsumption.