Hello Reader,
We had a few folks ask us what we "did" for Earth Day... and we had to admit we'd completely missed it.
As it came and went with notably less fanfare this year (just us?), we had to ponder why. Did it mean a lack of care or consciousness or was it something more nuanced?
There's a lot going on right now, so yeah, it could be a reflection of fatigue around climate messages. It could be a symptom of greenhushing!
But maybe - maybe - there's a more optimistic view...
Rather than dressing up sustainability efforts in a 'Black Friday" style event, has it become standard business practice?
If Earth-conscious thinking is embedded in the everyday, what is the need for 'Earth day' other than a show (and potentially a slippery slope into greenwashing)?
Too Pollyanna?
In our case, we think it comes back to the way we choose to view sustainability: as core, not a bolt-on. It wasn't top of mind for us because we don't see it in this separatist view.
Did we miss an opportunity to build more awareness among business leaders? Perhaps.
The lesson for us is to reflect on where we are expected to be seen - and to create intention behind every channel with our message.
We've popped it on the calendar for next year, either way π
What do you think? Does Earth Day serve a purpose, 50 years after its inception? Does it meet its objectives?
For you to noodle on.
Melissa
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Business Reimagined
The Circular Design Collective in Melbourne's Fishermans Bend brings together businesses focused on sustainable practices to collaborate, share resources, and reduce waste. The initiative helps businesses extend product lifecycles, reduce dependence on virgin materials, and develop partnerships for innovative solutions to circularity challenges.
It's an amazing initiative demonstrating how collaboration can help small businesses access funding opportunities, find compatible partners, and connect with industry networks while improving sustainability.
π ROI & Impact:
All of the start-ups involved are diverting waste from landfill and giving it a new function. This functionality is creating value that would have once been cost.
π Transferrable Ideas:
Funding and resources are out there for sustainable and circular business models. Go looking for them. Find opportunities for collaboration between businesses in adjacent categories, or to bridge academia and industry, to amplify and commercialise meaningful innovation.
π Minimum Viable Adaptation:
This is a literal example of 'minimum viable' many of the start-ups are using this a space to take their idea in it's current state and validate and scale it. It's a reminder not to sit on your good ideas. Getting the idea out there at 'good enough' rather than perfect is an opportunity not to be missed. You can't validate a great idea if you don't show anybody.
π€ The Cynical Questions:
- Start-ups are great at this stuff. How do we shift larger industry to start this kind of circular action? Their impacts are at scale and so accordingly their circular initiatives would be too.
- Is circularity fixing a problem? If waste is excessive aren't we better served understanding why and fixing that?
How we can work together
Signals & Noise
Author Rutger Bregman has been Down Under promoting his new book, Moral Ambition, and has called out the soul-sapping reality of βbullshit jobsβ (h/t David Graeber) that leave people feeling unfulfilled, anxious, and strangely empty - even when the pay and perks look good on paper. His take is that weβre overdue for a mass realignment. Not just with different roles, but with different values.
That idea also echoes powerfully in this Resilience.org piece, which argues that most businesses today are wildly out of sync with both ecological limits and human well-being. Weβve contorted our systems around efficiency, growth, and extraction... but forgot to ask if they were worth growing in the first place.
Signal Strength: π²π²π²π²π³ (4.5/5)
Why it's a Signal:
- The conversations are hitting mainstream business circles (it surprised us to see this covered in AFR! Kudos to Bregman's PR team)
- There's an increasing body of evidence that employees are seeking greater purpose, values alignment and meaningful corporate action on key social and environmental problems
- When systems collapse (like when the energy grid went down in Spain recently), people slowed down. They rested. Talked. Connected. Spent time outside. The absence of artificial productivity revealed something more human underneath - we anticipate we'll see more like that.
The Insight: We've been forming somewhat of a hypothesis - that business leaders wrestle with their 'home self' and 'work self' (which folks tell us is partly the premise of the show Severance - any fans? We haven't seen it yet) - and that the realignment of these two selves is a big part of addressing our current predicaments.
Questions for Leaders:
- What would our business look like if it centred human and ecological wellbeing?
- How can we support more of what matters by design, not a result of disaster?
- If we had to rebuild our business from scratch to serve life* - not just profit - what would we keep, drop, or reinvent?
*Spoiler alert - this is very likely what strategic work needs to be done - at the very least, the questions need to be asked.
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You can travel "guilt free" now thanks to this BBC piece (extreme Adam sarcasm). Firstly, we should recognise that this article does bring up some points to be mindful of. It even raises the huge impact of air travel. But that's where it falls short.
Signal Strength: π²π² (2/5)
Why it's Noise:
- The BBC, presumably pitching to a UK audience, calls out air travel as being a poor choice, then suggests flying across the planet to then catch a train.
- The article calls out greenwashing but also offers solutions that could be greenwashing.
- It recognises air travel as the biggest issue, but fails suggest travelling closer to home??
Watch Out For:
- Band-aid fixes like tracking apps and offsets.
- Action that focuses on individuals as consumers over citizens
- Individual action over systemic action
The Real Signal to Watch:
- Consider your own travel habits and requirements. Think it through before you travel for business. The days of looking busy and important by taking calls in the airport lounge are over.
- Could a meeting be a video call?
- Can you line things up so that the travel is used for multiple business purposes?
You can feel the frustration oozing out of this brief analysis - that's part of the point. Lots of what we see, especially targeting individual / 'consumer' action is saturated in paradox and contradiction.
What We're Reading
Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto by KΕhei SaitΕ. A long-awaited English translation of SaitΕ's 2020 breakdown of an alternative to growth-obsessed capitalism, it's proving to live up to its provocative reputation. SaitΕ challenges Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics for not challenging capitalism hard enough, and I'm appreciating the prompt to think a little harder about an economic model that supports life.
Have you read it? Let me know what you took away from it. -M
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