Sustainability congress

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Published on Friday, 09 September 2011 12:42

Written by Bram Meulenbeld

I was shocked the other day when I received an invitation for the Dutch sustainability congress 2011. I was shocked because of several reasons:

First of all I saw that the entry price is €345 which seems to me an awfull high amount to listen to a few people, have some lunch and a few drinks.

Secondly because I saw that one of the sponsors is Shell. I think people in e.g. the Niger delta would be laughing there ass off if they heard that Shell is sponsoring and participating in a sustainable event. Shell for christ sake. The company that invented dis-sustainability. They live of it. It's there businessmodel for crying out loud. Now, I have learned over the years that you shouldn't blame people. Everyone is victim of the systems we have created ourselves. But that does mean you have to fight the systems. Shell is such a system. It's a big multinational, spending millions in marketing greenwashing their image and there is no single sustainable argument to keep this system alive.

Thirdly because by now there are dozens of these types of events, and everywhere you see the same people that are hosting, speaking, panel members, etcetera. Like they are the only ones who know what sustainability is? Because they have all the answers? Nobody knows all the answers. Knowing how to achieve a fair and just world, which in my opinion is still the ultimate goal for us human beings and certainly the goal of the whole sustainability movement, is already extremely difficult, but knowing how to create one is impossible. All we human beings can do is change ourselves. Our own behaviour. And discuss it with others to create awareness.

Than I realized the problem. The website of the sustainability congress claims this event will bring a paradigm shift. And that's exactly what we do not need. We don't need to change one factor in our society and keeping everything else constant. This idea that still everything we do (produce, consume, waste) is possible, only in a sustainable matter is wrong. Yes there are initiatives that come close to full C2C, like they are doing at the Blue economy. They can make pearls out of rice waste. But we have 2 billion people in extreme poverty. Who needs freaking pearls? If people want to do something 'sustainable' outside of there own lives they have to do something about the basic necessities of life: Food, water, housing and clothing. That in itself will take tremendous amounts of energy, material, time and money if we want that for 7 billion people. To put it differently, it will take a huge part of our global footprint to achieve these basic necessities to which we all agreed in the universal decleration of human rights. And if we want that, we need complete societal change. Breaking down systems and human concepts and building up new ones. Not a paradigm shift.

 I don't think they will miss me at the sustainable event of the year in the Netherlands...