The Long Read: Is It Time To Retire Sustainability? The Sustainability Game Lynn Johnson 3 July 2022 In a 2021 video about climate change and biodiversity loss, George Monbiot said he thought less than 1% of people fully understood the scale of the emergency we are collectively facing. He blamed the media, saying, “They allowed this entire shitfest to happen". I agree with this, but I also believe that, at least for the extinction crisis, global conservation organisations must shoulder part of the blame. In April 2017 I wrote an article, Want To Know Why Conservation Is Failing? Read On… I stand by everything I wrote all those years ago [...]

Would You Let Your Home Decay Around You? No - Are you sure? Lynn Johnson 9 June, 2022 As rational animals we believe we wouldn’t live in a home obviously decaying around us and not do something about it if we could. But this is exactly what we have done, and continue to do, with the only real home we have. The interesting question is why we can compartmentalise what we do so easily. An example of this compartmentalisation became apparent in the recent Australian federal election. Many of the suburbs who voted out Liberal Party MPs, in some municipalities for the first time in the party’s history, did so [...]

Broken Chains Lack of supply chain control laid bare. Lynn Johnson 8 May, 2022 The global pandemic has laid bare how international free trade relies on fragile and poorly understood supply chains. These supply chains are optimised solely for efficiency and just-in-time availability and, as a result, lack both transparency and resilience. Supply chains started to break down almost immediately at the beginning of the pandemic, causing basic items to be rationed in supermarkets. Adding to the strain, international, online shopping exploded. As lockdowns have ebbed and flowed in countries around the world, production and distribution in this global trade system has buckled. The scale of the current disruption due to lockdowns [...]

The Sustainability Game: Creatives, Keep The Blood Off Your Hands Because, if you are helping to sell it, then you are helping to kill and exploit it. Lynn Johnson  10 April, 2022 That much business behaviour today is neither ethical nor sustainable in any industry is hardly news to observers of corporate conduct. Faced with a situation where we are already exceeding planetary boundaries, any push for ‘more’ (growth, consumption, sales, profit) has to be considered not just unethical and unsustainable, but suicidal. And yet, everlasting economic growth remains official government policy everywhere and is the default premise of any business operating under capitalism. Given the profit and growth driven ideology [...]

Broken Systems A Corporate Criminal Justice System Has Never Existed Lynn Johnson 21 March, 2022 Over recent years there has been an ever-growing dialog about how to deal with the transnational, organised crime associated with the trade in endangered species and environmental goods. As the legal and illegal trade in endangered and exotic species are so intertwined that they are functionally inseparable, some time ago I found myself exploring why so few inroads have been made in dealing with this transnational organised crime. One question I started considering more-and-more was, could the reality be that there is just too big an overlap between transnational organised crime and white-collar/corporate crime for [...]