When Sustainability Goes Nowhere: The 2016 Ethos 360 Degrees Conference - A Poor Session of Self-Praise

Hugo Penteado

I did not even wanted to participate in 2017. I do not know who chose the unfortunate 360-degree term for the conference, but it's perfect, the conference made it clear that we spin, spin, spin and never advance. In fact, we are much worse than when this whole movement began 20 years ago.

Sustainability that does not change anything is worse than not doing any sustainability, just because it creates a sense that something is being done. It is not. The sustainability trophies continue to be sewage in cities, dumps, Vale disaster in Minas, Gulf of Mexico disaster, Alberta, deforestation for monoculture, large-scale agrochemicals decimating biodiversity and insects indispensable to life, accelerated climate change, extreme concentration and uncontrolled income and wealth, uninterrupted pollution, extinction of accelerated life, etc. There is not a single good indication in all this, despite so much conference and beliefs.

In general, the lectures were empty, without informative content, with no room for criticism, without any evaluation of problems that we have today and without debate, despite the openness to questions.

Very focused on sustainability lectures for sustainability that still speaks alone and clearly to extol the achievements of benign companies. To make matters worse, all the spokespeople are very well paid, unlike most of the employees of these companies who earn very little and who have now been even weighed down by a labor reform approved only by entrepreneurs.

But what deeds do they have to show? Nothing can be more detached from reality than when we talk about sustainability. It became clear that the speakers were only focused on the merits of the companies and not on a real paradigm shift and a careful evaluation of this process that has lasted for two decades. This is devastating, mainly because of the lack of tangible results. Although it has been 20 years, it is shocking to see that the theme of the lectures is still just a set of speculative ideas or of the type "this has not yet been done, it is not possible that we are still talking about slave labor!". The changes did not happen and after all this time it was already to be in the evaluation phase of the results, it was to see a new and absolutely new business world. None of this happened. On the contrary, the worst happened.

Denial and fraud have gained tremendous strength to keep the interest of the few.

The farce can be easily dismantled. Well paid director of big business talks about social projects nothing related to the core of your business, something that has been excommunicated for a long time, but that is practiced freely as if there was no intelligent life on the face of the Earth. I ask her, to that director, in what she chokes, showing that the king is naked: "Perhaps institutes trying to support society do not represent the failure of the business model itself? If the core activity of the business promoted social outcomes favorable to all - and not just shareholders - would social institutes be unnecessary?”

Votorantim, Monsanto, Shell, Natura, banks, choose anyone, here and there, no relevant company in the world has changed their core business and abandoned its selfish goal focused only on concentrated profits in the hands of few - and that is why that the remuneration is so pyramidal, we are still in the system of the slaves of Egypt. They created farces and whoever is part of it bought a one-way ticket to Hades. I hope they never come back.

There has to be a criticism of what has already been done, what the results were, if we are on the right track and if this is really a movement for real change and not just a self-praise, in the vain hope that no one notices the farce. What we have may be just a few good initiatives, not much more than that, but still totally removed from the core of companies and far short of the giant challenge we face in order to survive as an animal species.

The climate discussion part was a blatant and unjustifiable optimism, all still within a huge letter of intent, while in August [2016] was heralded as a new record monthly record of high temperature and emissions.
But we are optimistic that we will stop the climate problem that is completely out of control, a clear sign of cognitive dissonance of all. The only useful part was the discussion of racism and sexism in companies but by a group of local leaders outside companies. Surreal. The only good thing was not from corporations.

Problems, lack of advances and even setbacks are not discussed. Famous giant banks, bastions of sustainability, in the past had areas of sustainability with dozens of people and with executive board status. Today it has groups of a maximum of six people or fewer and downgraded the sustainability board to a management linked to the Communication and Marketing Board, something strongly excommunicated and criticized at the beginning of this process 20 years ago. This is an example of how the movement has lost strength. Nobody commented on this.

Cosmetics companies, famous for sustainability, have ecological lines that must account for less than 2% of the total production and this line is not paid, it is not financially viable, it is just a marketing strategy and the company remains focused on externalities and short-term profit, that is, in business as usual. Even so, they try to sell a sustainability image. Many have stopped testing animals recently, or have not stopped; many buy palm oil raw material from Asia, source of one of the largest tropical rainforest destruction on the planet.

All this analysis of socio-environmental credit that is sold as a sustainability action of the banks, bar virtually no credit operation of the banks. It is very strange, with so much environmental and social problem around us, that this social-environmental credit assessment is able to say that everything is perfect. In short, it's all a farce or marketing strategy or pretending to do something without doing anything to change that system or the core of your business. Of the two one: either the socioenvironmental evaluation of credit - and also of investments - is very weak or not even done, it serves to appear only in activity table.

No company has changed, or been intimidated by such reviews or proposals. They had their questionable actions of sustainability only ratified by means of constant self-praise without any meaning. We have signs of weak or nonexistent sustainability, and all very focused on the self-promotion of their companies. If we were a tribe of Indians, we would be easily dominated by the enemy tribes. Thank goodness we are not, poor of the Indians for having us as neighbors. They know how to organize a society, we only know how to destroy it.

At the conference I spoke here and there with some people and I saw that there is a lot of frustration among those who want to truly fight for sustainability. The whole smart and important group of people who acted in this area debated and whoever said that doing it for sustainability is solving all the problems that threaten the future of life on Earth. The systemic issue is still and will always be the most important and can no longer be ignored. The choice is not ours, we do not make a choice when it comes to the planet.

What we can do is act to repair the damage of the economic system and make it follow the rules of the Earth, for it is but a fragile subsystem that will disappear with life on Earth if it continues acting as if nature were inexhaustible or irrelevant .

Also has not dropped the plug that our technology is irrelevant and will not save us. The anthropocentric view of the problem has to be replaced by the scientific view, and if that system does not change, it will result in our extinction within a maximum of 40 years (this is the scientists' current warning).

We have decimated half the life on Earth in the last 40 years, terrestrial, aquatic, animal and plant life, we have not yet 40 years to decimate the rest. Scientists say that it would have to immediately stop this extinction on a planetary scale to prevent it from turning against the causers, that is, us. The only way to stagnate this extinction is to stem the destruction and continuous pressure on ecosystems.

The only way to stop this is to radically change the economic model, the maniacal obsession with GDP growth based on unconscious consumption, whose benefits only privilege the rich. Our current system has generated and continues to generate extreme inequality that few people care about, especially those who control this system or who still manage to maintain their good lives, precisely because they benefit from this corrupt inequality.

How to change a system in which the boss is the one who most benefits from it? One interesting comment in one of the lectures was this:

"We are blasted because the lectures seem to believe that we have all the time in the world. Concrete actions to stop the pressure on ecosystems and restore what is possible will not happen, not I can see that possibility. "

Ours was a single lucid voice in the midst of contumacious deceivers.

The whole movement of sustainability is self-indulgent, has no critical evaluation, has no concern for evaluation of results, we have in some cases private assessment as forest companies, but yet it ignores systemic risks.

The environment is one, it's no use having a super good venture and the rest will not be. It's no use having a better country ecologically and the rest of the world not being. From the point of view of biology and Earth, we are all one. No one and nothing will be safe while the system is degrading around us.

Our system requires a radical paradigm shift and needs to be global; the size of the challenge is immense and it frightens us when we see the companies' phony and counterfeit activities in this area. And more importantly, there is no point in having a sustainability that does not involve everyone, where is the speech of the employees of the various sectors of the companies in relation to this? Why do they only interview and give voice to well-paid employees of the companies and who are the minority of them? I think the answer is clear.

Sustainable business is that our children could work in any position and have a decent life, they do not have to be executives, directors or children of business owners. Everyone would have a healthy, viable, just, happy and able to help their families, starting with having a home of their own. No. Companies pay employees misery and these companies themselves say they are sustainable. Another example of cognitive dissonance.

Nothing, nothing at all about systemic social and environmental risk is said. Particular actions that in addition to questionable, even if added together have not changed at all. The measurement of systemic risk depends much more on knowledge of physics, biology and paleontology. Monetary measures are a mistake, GDP is a mistake.

Nicholas Georgescu Roegen had already identified this problem. The metric is derived from a set of values ​​and as long as there is no overall change in values, the metric does not change. GDP is not accepted because GDP is a good metric, GDP and other economic statistics are accepted because they serve the particular interests of a small privileged group of society. Moreover, no metric is able to measure the needs of future generations, because they do not yet exist to claim their share on Earth; the future generations have been ignored by all the metrics, although we are no longer talking about the threat to future generations, but to the living.

Another problem identified by Georgescu is the pricing of nature, because it only has intrinsic value for the most part. This means that you cannot measure nature. Any report by physicists, biologists, climatologists, such as Antonio Donato Nobre, reveals incalculable values: a single service in the Amazon, the evaporation of 21 billion tons of water per day in the atmosphere, larger than the volume of the Amazon River, would require the energy of 50,000 Itaipu, possible to be built in the rivers of the Milky Way.

It is necessary to understand the operation of this system for its preservation, it is no use to measure because the value is so immeasurable that it is probably greater than the world GDP. Moreover, it is logical that people have already become accustomed to a price system in which social and environmental damage has zero cost - how do they force them to pay for it, and how to abandon the increasing demand for consumption by internalizing that cost? While we try to price and not preserve, we let the global economy walk as a tractor over the sustaining systems of life on Earth.

This was a huge waste of time, of work, of purpose and does not focus on the paradigm shift. There has been a very big change in the last 20 years that it seems that this movement of sustainability did not notice or follow. 

Back then we only talked about worrying about future generations, but the IPCC predicted that the Arctic would be fully open for navigation in 2100, and now it will happen in 2035. The temperature rise expected to occur only in 2100 has already been reached last year in 2015.

Concern over the huge tundras, which has a potential methane gas emission that accelerates the greenhouse effect 1000 times faster than carbon dioxide, has increased greatly. Deniers of the climate issue may continue on their key, but everything they said would happen, such as reducing temperatures in that decade, reducing emissions, none of that happened, on the contrary: what was observed was the opposite of what they said. If they were honest, they would have recognized their errors of analysis, but no, we have a system interested in financing the denial of climate change and that keeps the voice of those who should have been silent. Climate change and the extinction of life are in a much faster process than we had imagined before.

The lectures of the Ethos Conference 360 ​​degrees gave the impression that we have no problem, the results are so favorable that they do not have to be criticized, questioned or evaluated .

Although all critical planetary systems are crumbling over our heads, this conference has tried to say with no credibility whatsoever that we will quickly see a systemic and model change with innovations and technology and that all harm will vanish from our view.

According to them, companies are already and have become super magnanimous with society, although no less important official has come to give his testimony and no number of average salary or gender pay equity or the difference between higher and lower salary has been shown.

With regard to the environment, its desire for unbridled expansion over-consumption, waste and waste economics will be completely disconnected from the pressure on finite ecosystems, thanks to technologies that have not even been presented or discussed or demonstrated as having this a splendid result nowhere in the world, simply because nothing replaces the technology of life-sustaining nature.

The credit of not wanting to believe in it is entirely ours. It remains to be seen who still believes all this. The only lectures that paid off were the black movement, but incredible as it may seem, this movement had no business representatives. They were independent people.

Is this the way? Probably yes: all we have to do is get rid of all the companies, all their products and move towards a free, libertarian economy of society where goods are visible and locally produced by people we know, without brands. Nothing will be linked to the actions promoted by some multi billionaires and their companies. It is the only way, we will never be a full society with such transverse economic inequality and we will never avoid the end of life on Earth if that does not change. If by democracy we are all the same, what explains this social abyss if we are only a kleptocratic plutocracy?

Was this article interesting to you?
Please, share your experience with us bellow.