Welcome to Sense and Sustainability

Where I'm coming from, what I'll be writing about, and what's next.

Anyone who wants to write about sustainability must navigate tough issues from the beginning.

First: justify writing in the first place. There’s a lot of great work out there already, some of it incredibly powerful. What more can be said about an issue that has dominated headlines, spanned thousands of pages of research, and occupied experts for years?

Then, figure out how to say anything about sustainability when the discourse is – to put it mildly – a bit tense.

Then there’s the matter of staying focused – and finding space for optimism. Here’s a quick selection of one day’s (June 3, 2025) headlines: “Half of the tree of life,” insects, are dead or dying, even in protected areas. The US is clearing millions of acres of Alaska for extractive enterprise while Peru follows suit - close to a major cultural heritage site. Simultaneously, the featured article in the same newspaper concerns MrBeast, YouTube’s biggest star, who (apparently) catapulted himself to fame by counting to 100,000 on camera.

With everything from tragedy to frivolity accessible everywhere, all the time, can anyone even process another voice? The Titanic’s musicians aren’t just playing, they’re demanding your attention as some passengers insist the ship isn’t sinking, it’s just going through a natural cycle, and have you seen how Big Lifeboat profits from this kind of hysteria?

Amidst all this, I want to share observations about sustainability from my position within the industry. I’m not going to be sharing “actionable insights” for businesses, spilling secrets or exposing some fresh controversy. Instead, my thinking is that the challenges sustainability work addresses represent a defining moment in human history, and for better or worse the corporate world has a leadership role. Therefore, I think we should be aware of how companies think about and address sustainability. Corporate sustainability has a certain outlook and discourse that I encounter in my work, at conferences, and in the sustainability media. Once I step outside that sphere, however, perspectives shift – at least, they do for me. The differences between these worlds are worth thinking about and will constitute a great deal of what I’ll be exploring.

I called this journal Sense and Sustainability because it’s silly, of course, but also because it’s an accurate description of my project. I’d like to write about sustainability simply and sensibly, evaluating what I’m seeing against some commonsense yardsticks. While I am “in the business,” my perspective in this column is merely that of a person who wouldn’t mind if the world wasn’t on fire quite so frequently. My thesis is that if we ground ourselves in common sense and pay close attention to when sustainability work deviates from it, we can clarify some important ideas about what’s going on.

Does this satisfactorily resolve the challenges I mentioned at the beginning? Likely not. I’m still adding yet another voice to a noisy conversation, and doubtless there are people out there who will think I’m everything from misguided to actively hostile before reading a single word. Nevertheless, I’m inspired by philosopher Alain Badiou’s encouragement: “Keep going.” Badiou urges us to resist cynicism and to persist – even when success is not guaranteed. It’s my hope, ultimately, to acknowledge what’s good, illuminate what’s bad, hold the contradictions and try to make some sense of the whole picture.

If you’re interested in a thoughtful look at sustainability, you’re in the right place. If you’re a sustainability-minded consumer looking for some insights into a notoriously impenetrable field I can help with those, too. If you’d like to think about some difficult topics in a commonsense way, well, me too. I’ll be discussing the language and practices of corporate sustainability, especially in the food industry, without the complications of business jargon, without espousing quick fixes, and with some cultural theory and philosophy to guide me. This isn’t an exposé, I’m not here to spill secrets or call anybody out. Nor am I writing to send you into a panic or play on your fears. But make no mistake: sustainability is in crisis, and it’s my sincere hope that this journal can help explain why, understand how we got here, and recommend what we might do next.

I’m excited to share this with you, reader. Thanks for coming with me and I hope you get something out of what follows.

Next week: Reflections on Sustainability and Consumer Choice