True sustainability demands honesty
Sustainability is a concept seeking to account for the earth’s ability to carry aggregate human environmental effects now and into the future. One major effect, greenhouse gas emissions, has clear and measurable negative consequences that threaten the environmental stability upon which our current societies and economies depend.
Ethical and educated citizens are concerned about this. They want to see safe and sustainable practices, products and food. To satisfy these concerns, meaningful standards and measures are called for, yet, industry in general has shown it prefers to hide numbers and data that show systemic consequences, claiming such disclosures might reveal proprietary information. As examples, both General Motors and Volkswagen now face huge fines and recalls for their explicitly dishonest behavior. For good reasons, many citizens simply don’t fully trust big business.
In Sonoma County, one big business is the wine business, and Sonoma County Winegrowers (also known as the Sonoma County Winegrape Commission, a wine marketing organization formed in 2006) thus faces an inherent credibility problem associated with their well-advertised Sustainability Initiative: it’s not earth-systems based, it’s profit-systems-based. It ignores inconvenient truths about the full environmental costs of transportation-related greenhouse gases, dangerous pesticides, and groundwater depletion.
Control and manipulation of information, “spin,” thus becomes a tactic designed to obfuscate actual sustainability. This initiative demonstrates how the term “sustainable” will likely follow the same path to cliché as “organic,” “green,” and “natural.”
Our point is that we know of only one meaningful way to measure sustainability, and that’s using true cost (also called full cost) accounting, a method providing public access to data which documents the full systemic effects of a human activity — social, economic and environmental.
True sustainability is not a marketing campaign, or an example of fuzzy-headed green idealism. It’s about adjusting the aggregate impact of nine billion people so we won’t ruin our species’ future. Locally this means answering questions, such as: Does our county’s exploding wine-tourist-hospitality sector qualify as truly sustainable when examined using full cost accounting methods?
Sustainability gets lip service but the truth is that it’s being ignored by a profit-based structure that thrives on short-term thinking and the implementation of a well-coordinated short-term political calculus. Local revenue and tax generation combined with candidate campaign financial support all but guarantee implicit collusion between government and business. Accordingly, compromises allowing unsustainable activities gain government approval, as if compromise is the goal, not sustainability.
There are large companies committed to using true cost accounting to measure their sustainability. Interface Inc., Mars, Inc., and PUMA shoe company are all solid examples of companies using methods the wine industry can and should emulate. Credibility can’t be bought, but it can be earned.
True sustainability asks us to tell it like it is and not greenwash or make an ad campaign out of our serious planetary predicament. When it comes to sustainability, citizens want to make decisions based on the full story, not just a piece of it.
Sustainability requires us to concentrate immediately on addressing our most serious planetary crisis. It’s well past time for PR spin. Anything less is, well, unsustainable.
—Sun Editorial Board
