Individual efforts and corporate response
Researching, writing, and editing articles centred on the environment has a tendency to change the conversations you have with the people around you. In the last two years of doing so, I have found similar responses from others on sustainable living and its attainability for them personally. Even living in Vancouver, on what is known to be the ‘hippy-dippy’ West Coast, it can be difficult to convince people that some positive change is better than none.
When talking about environmental realities or accessible sustainability with other people, I have come across two distinct responses: either “this is too depressing to talk/think about” or “you can’t just give up straws; you must live a zero-waste life to consider yourself environmentally friendly.” In an ideal world, we would all just stop in our tracks and do everything in our power to reverse the damage we’ve done on our environment. But if you’ve ever set up a budget that relies on saying “no” to all fun experiences, you know that this all or nothing approach usually ends in failure.
While this isn’t news to me, a recent personal purchase of a DivaCup (a sustainable menstrual cup that is an alternative to pads and tampons) led me to realize that an environmentally-friendly product can actually provide a much more pleasant experience than less sustainable but more popular options. Sustainability, therefore, doesn’t always have to take away from our lives, as people tend to believe. Yet this line of thinking seems to be a rare approach to sustainability in the media, which is instead focused on the more depressing realities and unattainable goals within the climate crisis.
For instance, an article published in The Conversation highlights three factors regarding why we are globally failing to be sustainable. While the article touches on the economic failure of financially rewarding environmentally poor practices and the political failure of refusing to implement policy changes, it also highlights the issue of communication. According to the article, “Communication failures centre on poor consultation or community involvement in the policy process. Opposition then flourishes, sometimes based on a misunderstanding of the severity of the issue.”
But if it’s all about the discourse, how can we change the dialogue to encourage rather than discourage sustainable living? Economics truly is at the heart of this issue. While you personally may not be invested in learning the intricacies of this topic, there is one concept that is easy to digest: our current economic climate is driven by capitalism and capitalism, by nature, requires a consumer.
According to one article in The Guardian, since 1988, “a hundred companies alone are responsible for an astonishing 71% [of carbon emissions].” The article further expresses that this statistic renders individual efforts practically useless in the fight to save our planet’s rapidly declining state.
Nevertheless, while an individual isn’t necessarily capable of single-handedly repairing all the environmental damage made by these huge corporations, the companies themselves still rely on all the individuals that create their market — the market that supports the continuation of their businesses. Forbes highlighted just last year that as customers take stances against corporate practices, those same corporations are being forced to actually focus on consumer demands.
As more and more people veer towards companies that show some level of corporate social responsibility (the practice of building business models around sustainable development), so too does the market. In turn, this makes that decision to buy a DivaCup rather than forty years’ worth of tampons a decision that has a much more perceptible impact on sustainability.
Now that there is evidence to back the benefits of corporate social responsibility, more and more companies are doing just as was suggested years ago (focusing on consumer demands). As Forbes stated in 2018, “Recent high-profile examples, such as the reaction to racial discrimination by Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and the public rebuttal of ethnic chauvinism by Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser, show the way ahead.” In these cases, the companies were forced to acknowledge the concerns brought up by customers and show that they are working to eradicate them. Where in the past, similar issues would have likely been ignored, consumers can now demand that they be publicly resolved.
Evidently, as a consumer, you do have power. The increasingly mainstream emergence of sustainable brands over the past decade only lends more credence to this idea. Every movement starts somewhere, with changes taking time to develop. Look at any one of the social movements that have flourished in the last half century (women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, the civil rights movement); changes may not have been established overnight, and although some issues may not have been completely eradicated, they have certainly progressed significantly for the better.
At the same time, you personally can’t be expected to change overnight either. If the idea of living an entirely ‘zero-waste’ lifestyle is off-putting or unattainable for you, you can still start the chain of change. If you, like me, don’t like to make your life harder than necessary, stepping stones are helpful. The articles out there that cover the idea of making sustainable changes might not focus on things that are important for you. As a starting point, you might find more success in looking for options that make your life easier and move forward from there.
While media outlets like The Guardian may have you believing otherwise, the evidence of our changing market shows that individuals shifting consumption — and the community growing around those individual changes — can and will have an impact on our environment. Sustainable living still has a potential to create serious change, and a more positive outlook on the matter at hand could make a huge difference for both individual and corporate actions. So, if you’ve previously been wary of living sustainably, try to support more responsible brands where you can and make small changes that don’t hinder your way of living. It may still lead somewhere.
By Annalisse Crosswell
Please note that opinions expressed are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views and values of The Blank Page.
