Convenience FOUR, Ethics ONE
In the face of overwhelming global problems and individual apathy, perhaps only a shift in consumers’ attitudes can help save the planet. Paul Gibbons, founder of Future Considerations, explains why it’s time to leverage the secret power of the latte.
I’m writing this at Starbucks – which just about says it all. The coffee-drink behemoth that crunches local coffee shops, doesn’t recycle, and only offers Fairtrade coffee as an afterthought. My coffee habit is filling more wallets in Seattle and Wall Street, than the local ones.
And yet, for my hard-earned, Starbucks has the best coffee and food. It has the most comfortable seats. It’s smoke-free and only half a kilometre away. Holed up in a corner with my over-priced Americano and laptop, the world disappears while my productivity soars.
The drawbacks of modern living
I hate having a conscience. Life was easier when I could fly without thinking about the emissions, and buy fruit without studying where it came from. All rubbish went into one bin; I threw fresh paper in the printer set to ‘single-sided’, and jumped in a big, gas-guzzling car to run local errands.
A few years ago, that’s exactly the way it was. I lived in a state of ignorance and indifference. Living the egocentric life of a London consultant meant jumping into taxi after taxi, conveniently myopic when it came to urban issues such as homelessness, poverty and overcrowded transportation. And global issues? – these were hardly on the radar.
Then, life changed. While a visiting scholar on academic leave at a US college town in Madison, Wisconsin, I was having a writing session at – you guessed it – Starbucks, when a newly acquired lefty friend caught sight of me through the window. He could hardly conceal his disgust. He frogmarched me to the organic, Fairtrade, coffee co-operative down the street, where I listened to local folk singers wailing, inhaled smoke of both a legal and illegal type, waited 15 minutes for my coffee, and shared a table with a woman in a floor-length print dress who smoked roll-ups. Even someone with my London-hardened, urban thick skin couldn’t have countenanced getting out the laptop.
The wake-up call
Despite my continued reliance on Starbucks, this sojourn in the US altered my politics, my values and career. I was struck by how much my progressive friends in the US cared where they spent their money, at least when compared to the London yuppie crowd. I was inspired by their passion for the plight of the poor and the planet. These were people who thought globally and acted locally; people who felt connected to and cared about global issues.
The seeds of change had been sown, but leopards don’t change their spots quickly. For any personal change to take place, it must involve the head, the heart, the soul and the body. In isolation, information and thought itself are not enough. A warmer planet in 2050, with 20% less liveable land-mass and two billion people dislocated as a result, is an abstraction.
Abstractions do not produce change. Human beings agonise over the unjust death of a single child, but multiply that by millions and our psychological system overloads; denial kicks in to shut out the horror. To break through denial, people need to care, the problem has to get under their emotional skin.
This is a lesson learnt individually. In the past, I respected environmental scholarship, knew the facts better than most. I felt I should do something, but I didn’t connect with the issues emotionally. But change came – albeit slowly. A ‘green’ friend pointed out that bottled mineral water had to be bottled and transported. When a New Scientist article then revealed that most of it was less healthy than tap water, and a quick tot-up revealed what three quid a day on the fizzy stuff was costing over time, that issue was settled.
I left big corporate-consulting to form a progressive consultancy that is dedicated to ‘good’ (sustainable) business. We emphasise making workplaces more humane and ethical as well as efficient and profitable. Future Considerations specialises in implementing change, but change that is driven by diversity, sustainability, environment, human rights and education – not finance.
Walking the walk
None of this would make sense if we didn’t apply the same principles to our own business. We are currently undergoing a green transformation. Kate, my green-zealot sales manager, has converted the office to renewable electricity and produced a rubbish-bin labelling system that requires a PhD to understand. We are switching to O2 because its Corporate Social Responsibiliy (CSR) policy seems ahead of the competition. We have just liquidated our non-SRI screened pension funds and are looking for a place to put money that doesn’t finance big defence projects. We are investigating a carbon-replacement scheme to compensate for our air travel.
Despite the progress we’ve made, I still have to wrestle with myself every step of the way. There are some changes I’m not yet ready to make. Do I know about the environmental and labour policies of the shops I use? Do I know about human rights abuses in their supply chains? Is that table we are thinking of buying made from Sarawak rainforest or does it come from a sustainable source?
My greatest sin
One of my most significant expenditures every year: books, newspapers, magazines. I am to books what Imelda Marcos was to shoes. Yet it is extremely hard to buy books with sustainability in mind.
In my favourite US book shop, there is a magazine rack full of handgun magazines. Around 40 or 50 of these sitting next to Yoga Life, PC Magazine, the Economist and Cosmo, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. When I noticed this, a young teenager was browsing the rack. The US has 70 times more murders per capita than the UK, and you don’t have to be a genius to make the link between this and handgun ownership – or its advertising and promotion in my favourite shop.
By shopping in book shops that are indifferent to the content of their wares, I believe I am tacitly giving approval to that content. But both in the UK and the US, choice is limited. Strangely the American right have made more ‘progress’ on this issue than the left. A ‘neo-con’ American pressure group has successfully removed material offensive to it from Walmart – Eminem, for example. As usual in American politics, the right is more organised and effective than the left when forwarding its agenda.
What’s the score?
Meanwhile, back at Starbucks, where I’m writing this piece, convenience is triumphing over ethics. And when you scale my behaviour up by a factor of a billion Western consumers, you have a planetary problem. Ultimately if we are going to re-order the world, and produce a more just society, we will have to tap into the huge power of consumer activism – and combat consumer laziness and indifference. If consumers began to exercise greater consciousness and choice in just small ways, their sheer numbers can make a great difference.
But to provoke individual change we also need a three-pronged attack. First, in the spiritual arena, a shift in consciousness is required. We need to view ourselves increasingly as connected to and part of a whole social, global system so that when there is privation in Africa, it becomes our privation.
Second, we need emotional activation to break through the denial that abstraction allows. Somehow we need to tap into that well of care and compassion evidenced in projects such as Live-Aid. Finally, on a cognitive level, we need information. There is a dearth of good and well-organised information around on companies and their social, environmental, and political impact so that consumers who care can make informed choices.
To support all these individual changes, we need political organisation so that corporations feel the combined weight of our votes. Psychological theories suggest people only act when they think action makes a difference.
The half-time score, Convenience 4, Ethics 1, doesn’t look good. We may not win the game, with all the consequences that entails for our children, but it is surely a game worth playing well. I need a frequent kick to remind me what’s important – it’s only with kicks that I stand a chance of playing my part. Now for another Americano…
Paul Gibbons
Founder of progressive consultancy Future Considerations
