Hope is a Discipline

A word to sustainability practitioners

By MacKenzie King, SEC

Mariame Kaba is a social justice activist, educator, and organizer who told us that “hope is a discipline.” Hope is about making a decision every day, to put in the energy and the work to be clear headed and believe in what you are doing. Working in sustainability can, at times, seem like working in the belly of the beast. We are trying to create a more just and compassionate world, but it can become hard to differentiate what is good. In this way, practitioners are often faced with the question, am I aiding what I should be destabilizing?

In the midst of a planetary crisis, sustainability practitioners need to be working with companies that are actively causing serious harm to people and the planet. However, you may be jostled and jilted into a position where you become an agent of greenwashing or PR. This is unmooring at times. We are walking a tightrope, balancing between helping corporations practice harm reduction and standing in solidarity with the oppressed. So how do we navigate this?

Think of a dancer, a ballerina as she spins. Her head seemingly stays still, staring at a singular point, and right as her eyes might be pulled away by the turn, her head whips around to find the point once again. This process of biofeedback is a combination of three aspects of our sensory system: the visual (eyes), vestibular (ears) and proprioceptive (the body's sense of where it is in space). When our vision remains fixed on a point, the eyes are moving in relation to the body, counteracting the spin. Movement is detected by the inner ears, the eyes give a reference point, and allows us to detect and control our body in space.

Without care, we can become disoriented as we work to create a more just and sustainable world. Just as a ballerina needs a fixed point to spot through her spins, sustainability practitioners need principles that keep us aware of our direction as we work.

Here are my own principles:

Principle 1: Harm reduction always.

What is measured is managed. Impacts, good and bad, are not always easy to spot. Impacts on communities and the environment can be significantly downstream to our initial actions. When in doubt, call on systems thinking so that at the very least, you and the company will have a better visualization of the challenges at hand and the potential ways to mitigate harm.

Principle 2: Collaboration over competition.

Above all else, choose collaboration. In impact work, coalition building is where we can derive power for movements of change. We need a revolution of reciprocal care. We need to call into question the narrative of separateness. We need to hospice the old as we cradle an emergent system that is built on reciprocal care.

Principle 3: Lift others as you climb.

This is the most difficult of my three principles to implement. It is at odds with what capitalism teaches: that there must be winners and there must be losers, and that most decisions are zero-sum. These are misleading takeaways. In order to have a chance at reorienting our economy to be in service of life, we need to rewire our narratives