COLONIAL
SUSTAINABILITY
The sustainability industry as we know it today is an
“The origin of “sustainability consulting” as a highly profitable private sector function came about via the global sustainability agenda set by UNCHE 1972, Earth Summits and COPs. These conferences brought together the global political and capitalist classes, creating a colonial environmental sector within itself, buttressed by developmental models established to maintain neocolonialism, complete with its own corporate language: greenwashing.
► Advancing development: “Human societies need to follow Western development models to attain the standards of living that Europeans presently enjoy.”
► Research and development to drive techno-optimism: “Technology may have created this mess, but new technology will surely save the planet and guarantee modern Western civilisation’s ability to thrive upon it.”
► Propagandised “hopium”: “Planetary health and human societies are in dire straits, but optimism and positivity must be maintained at all costs to maintain power structures and to centre and comfort white supremacy.”
► White feminism: “Global inequities are best and most clearly seen through the lens of white women seeking to define and understand better the struggle for equality towards a more just world - but actual world history distracts from the issues we consider important.”
intentional and strategic outcome of colonial hegemony’s global environmental agenda.
This is an agenda that quite openly seeks to justify ongoing ecocidal, genocidal and ethnocidal profiteering - under the guise of “development”.
Core values underpinning the narratives of this colonial sub-class of environment and sustainability professionals:
Members of the General Assembly’s Legal Committee display the proposed flag for the United Nations. From left to right: Andrew Cordier, (Executive Assistant to the Secretary-General), Sir Hartley Shawcross, (United Kingdom), Faris Bey El-Khouri, (Syria), Dr Wahid Raafat, (Egypt), and Dr Ivan Kerno, (Assistant Secretary-General). [Getty]
Stockholm Conference, 1972
Industrial sustainability practitioners who wish to minimise the harms their industries perpetuate could do so by paying attention to whether the above elements are at play in their projects, initiatives, organisations, and/or institutions.
► silence around or denial of colonial and neocolonial histories, using powerful, lucrative systems of hegemonic tunnel-visioning to centre white supremacist perspectives
► the romanticisation and co-optation of indigenous and “ancient wisdoms”,
► saviourism, virtue-signalling, exceptionalism,
► the centring of capitalist financial profit, and
► the bypassing of complex issues from non-Western perspectives to focus on easy solutions and romanticised ideals.
"The sustainability industry's inherent coloniality very frequently reveals itself in the following:
The Lens of Desire: Eye Miniatures (ca. 1790–1810)
