Our Blindspot

Most of us have a serious blindspot, and on Friday students across the country and around the world called it out. Business strategists would do well to pay attention: there are opportunities in getting on the right side of what’s coming.

The blindspot: we enjoy the fruits of material progress, and ignore the deep costs of those fruits. Worse, we don’t see what we don’t see – that’s the blindspot.

The poster boy for this blindness to the costs of our progress might be Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist and author of Enlightenment Now, a carefully researched argument that our world and lives have been steadily improving for centuries. True when it comes to areas like health, education, and the material world.

But along with such progress has come a steady deterioration of the global systems that support life. That’s data Pinker did not cite – and that today’s adults, including most business leaders, fail to recognize or act on.

This missing data reveals a more ominous shadow to Pinker’s optimistic charts. Take research reviewed by Diane Livermore, a geoscientist at Oxford University and the University of Arizona, in the new book I co-edited, Ecology, Ethics, and Interdependence. While Pinker hails the European “enlightenment” and rise of science, Livermore traces the roots of the human assault on global life-support systems to the very same era and the Industrial Revolution.

Some of the data:

• Nitrogen pollution of the oceans and waterways, which kills sea life by depleting oxygen in the water (“acidifying” it), has risen to levels about 5 times greater than those in the 1950s.
• The extinction of entire species of animals and insects has risen from almost none around 1900 to almost 30,000 yearly today.
• Carbon dioxide, the notorious greenhouse gas, has rocketed from almost none in 1750 to a level steadily warming our planet.

And all these trends have greatly accelerated since the post-war economic boom of the 1950s. We have been addicted to the material benefits – plane travel, smartphones, and all the other goods we market to each other. But, like addicts, we have been oblivious to the hidden costs of our habit.

That’s why far-seeing business strategists might do well to consider the implications of Friday’s school strike. Our children and grandchildren see more clearly the cost of our economic habits and are telling us they are disappointed, even frightened, by the consequences of our past choices for their future.

In this generational gap older people may understand the crisis intellectually, while younger people also feel it emotionally. As a 16-year-old put it to the New York Times, “My generation is the first that will be significantly affected.”

Today’s younger generations include tomorrow’s most talented workers and business leaders – and customers. That augurs a sea change in how smart business will operate in the future.

For one, Millennials and following generations are particularly attuned to environmental impacts, for better or worse. Every business that wants to stay on their good side will find a mission in keeping with those values – ideally one that also works toward slowing or undoing this planetary damage. That can mean everything from transparency about the ecological damage of supply chains and other operations, to seizing the innovative opportunity by reinventing industrial processes and products so they are not just sustainable, but perhaps even replenish.