Can The UK ever be Sustainable?

On Wednesday 1st December 2010 I attended the 15th lecture of the 21st Century Challenges series at the Royal Geographical Society in South Kensington entitled ‘Can the UK Ever Be Sustainable?’ After an introductory speech from Rita Gardner, Director of RGS, who stated that geography lies at the heart of all these challenges, Jo Confino, The Guardian Executive Editor and Chairman of Guardian Sustainable Business chaired the discussion.

The panellists were three and represented business, political and individual responses to the sustainability issue, respectively: Rt Hon Hilary Benn MP, Shadow Leader of House of Commons and former Secretary of State for DEFRA; Sir Stuart Rose, Executive Chairman of Marks and Spencer; Andy Hobsbawm Founding Director of Do The Green Thing.

Sir Stuart Rose

First up was Sir Stuart Rose, who told us about what Marks and Spencer is doing at Plan A. I have blogged about this quite recently so will not go into the full detail. It was all fairly fresh in my mind, but I felt sorry for those trying to listen to this for the first time as he spoke very fast and it appeared as though he had done this speech a million times before, although he also spoke quickly during the discussion so perhaps his mind works at a very high speed in general!
He started off by saying that what we need is positive action from business as 63/100 of the world’s largest organisations are corporations, not countries. Getting to grips with this goes far beyond ‘CSR’ and Stuart believes that this decade will represent a paradigm shift in moving towards sustainability in business. The Patagonia (ethical fashion and outdoor wear) founder said ‘every time we do the right thing, we make money’ and Al Gore also said that sustainability can be profitable. This is part of a new wave of business thought. Stuart feels that they have only done about 10% of what they intend to do at M and S and in order to do this, “the one thing we’re going to have to do is we’re going to have to collaborate”.

Hilary Benn MP

Next up was Hilary Benn, who had a slower-paced, but more creative style to his presentation, illustrating his points with examples and acting out the stories with flailing limbs. Apologies for the subsequent disjointed description of his presentation but that was what it was like! He spoke of many of the sustainability challenges that we face today. He started by saying that we have shown an astonishing capacity to use the earth’s resources and if our ancestors were to walk into this high-tech and modern lecture theatre now, they would be amazed at what these resources can make. He used the cautionary tale of Easter Island as an example of how we can get the balance wrong- they used all of the trees on the island for logs to roll very large face statues onto the coast and then had to leave the island shortly after that due to the lack of trees for living requirements.

Apparently, 1 billion of us on the planet are over weight, whilst 1 billion of us are going to bed hungry and malnourished. This is just one of the fundamental injustices in the world. He also quoted Mark Twain to illustrate the shortage of land for food growth, who said ‘my advice is to buy land because they’ve stopped making it’.

Martin Luther King did not begin his speech ‘I had a nightmare...’; with all of these issues, Hilary has found that scaring people does not work, for example the first anti-HIV adverts in the 80s had great blocks of concrete slamming down saying ‘ignorance kills’, but did not actually give practical advice on how to protect oneself.

So what do we need to get out of this hole that we have dug for ourselves? The economics of climate change means that it is more expensive to do nothing than to do something. We already have the means and the minds to get out of this mess and all we need is sheer determination.
Jo Confino asked what exactly labour did to act against anthropogenic climate change as he felt that they didn’t do much at all, but Hilary came back saying that actually the Climate Change Act of 2008 was due to pretty profound leadership.

Andy Hobsbawm

Andy took a different approach altogether to offer potential solutions to the sustainability problem. He showed several videos of ‘Green Thing’, the green coloured, multi-limbed monster and mascot for his non-profit organisation, illustrating, in a fun and sometimes controversial way, why it is beneficial to live sustainably. He claims that creativity is a critical ingredient in the future of sustainability and ‘Do The Green Thing’ aims to turn green living from something one ‘ought to do’ to something one ‘wants to do’.

Ironically the creative industries of marketing and advertising are mostly trying to make us buy things, but they can also be used to promote and sharpen important issues, helping to engage people by giving them something they can relate to, which comes back to Hilary’s point of not making the issue a scary one.

It can often feel like the choice is between a (non-sustainable) rich, high-tech, modern life that is fast-paced where everyone is busy and therefore important and successful vs. The (sustainable) life of less, a life of without, where everything slows down and we all have to live in caves. Creativity can be used advantageously to tell the other side of this story- to help people connect with the climate change issue and make them want to act, realising that it is a positive thing and they will not have to give up everything they are used to. Just one example of this is the anti-nuclear symbol used in the 1970s, which became ubiquitous over badges, sunglasses, t-shirts and bumper stickers and helped spread knowledge about the issue.

Discussion

The discussion that ensued afterwards was interesting and sometimes heated. Hilary thanked Stuart for being the only retailer to lead on the plastic bag issue, whilst Stuart asked ‘well why didn’t the government put a levy on plastic bags? We could’ve transformed the problem over night!’ Andy spoke of there being a ‘dance’ between individuals and businesses waiting for the government to make regulations, the government looking to business to take action and to people for signs that they will support this with their voting. Stuart agreed that politicians need public encouragement too (who would vote for a party proposing petrol prices be increased four-fold?) and that we have a shared responsibility, but we do need to break this ‘dance’. Hilary concurred that we need to change and we need three main things: example, encouragement and incentive. Andy felt that it will take an extreme external event to shock people into change.

Overall it was a lively and thought-provoking evening, the presentations of which can now be watched on the RGS website.