John Pabon is a certified expert on sustainability. Following his work with the United Nations, McKinsey, A.C. Nielsen, and as a consultant with BSR, which calls itself, “the world’s largest sustainability-focused business network,” Pabon is also the best-selling author of “The Climate Emergency Journal,” “Sustainability for the Rest of Us,” and the soon-to-be-released in North America, “The Great Greenwashing.”
But above all, Pabon says, he’s a pragmatist.
“The earth and humanity will have to adapt. But it's not as if we can just put our hands up and say, ‘Yeah, screw it, we're done.’ Because that's not exactly it. So, I would still encourage people to do everything that can, but also taking a more pragmatic and measured look at what they're doing.”
From his current home in Melbourne, Australia, Pabon visited with Morning Edition host George Prentice to talk about sustainability as a concept and as a real-world day-to-day commitment.
Read the full transcript below:
GEORGE PRENTICE: It's Morning Edition. Hi, I'm George Prentice John Pabon's research and authorship have led him to helping businesses and individuals to what he says is make sense of sustainability. His books include The Climate Emergency Journal; Sustainability For the Rest of Us. His most recent bestseller is The Great Greenwashing: How Brands, Governments and Influencers Are Lying to You. John Pabon joins us this morning from Melbourne, Australia, where it's almost tomorrow. John, welcome to the program. I was about to say good morning, but we are half a world away.
JOHN PABON: George, how are you? And for anybody listening, that is an American accent, you hear. I just happen to be living in Australia.
PRENTICE: John, let's get right to that “big lie…” our governments and businesses et. all. Are they lying to us because they're counting on us just not knowing any better?
PABON: So I suppose to frame things a little bit when we're talking about all of this, the the greenwashing world, the idea that companies, governments, influencers are wrapping themselves in this language of sustainability, not just around being good for the earth, that's part of it, but also good for people being transparent, being open. So when it comes to greenwashing myself, my professional colleagues have noticed a massive uptick in greenwashing, kind of as we've come out the tail end of the pandemic, and that's happening for a few different reasons. I'm a realistic positivist, so I certainly don't think that all companies and governments are doing it on purpose. But that's definitely one segment of greenwashing where it's built into a marketing mix. You look at examples like ExxonMobil, who love to invest millions of dollars. They've done it for decades into marketing to try to pull the wool over our eyes. So that's one segment. You have another segment of companies that maybe they're just starting their sustainability journey. So, for them, they might be overpromising and under-delivering with them. It's not baked in. Maybe it's a mistake and I'm okay with that because we can fix mistakes. It's not built into the entire marketing mix, but the majority, I think, are kind of muddling through somewhere in the middle where they might make mistakes here but do really well in other areas. So, it's kind of a mixed bag. But again, I don't think all of them are as egregiously lying as we might think, even though the title of my book might say otherwise.
PRENTICE: Well, can you give us an example or two of what those lies might be?
PABON: Absolutely. They come in a few different forms. So, for anybody listening, it's really easy to identify, even though the marketing teams are getting much more, much more in depth with how they're trying to tease out the different ways that we observe things. So, the first is what I call green speak. So that's the traditional marketing. It's the use of semiotics, which is just a fancy word for colors and symbols to denote meaning. It's the green package that's supposed to tell you they're sustainable. It's the advertisement with a car driving through a beautiful forest. All of these denote meaning, and for anybody just taking things at face value, it sort of makes you assume the company or whoever's doing this advertising is actually green. Then there are the others that go through a form of misdirection. So that could be with bombarding you with numbers. It could be with saying, oh, look at this cute picture of kids on the front of our sustainability report. But don't look at all the child labor we might have going on in the developing world. So, they're making you look one place instead of focusing on where things actually can be improved.
PRENTICE: A company like Exxon indeed can push the needle in one direction or another just based on their size. But when we talk to small businesses... And we've been spending some time listening to some small businesses who are really being earnest on sustainability. How much of a difference are they making?
PABON: I don't want to say that they're not making a difference, because any move of the needle in the right direction is is great, but we certainly need to reframe a bit how we approach the entire idea of saving the planet, because now things are so big, we need to be doing things at scale. So, the idea of a people up sort of approach to sustainability is still important. But I think for me, at least in the way I do my work and my, my theory of change is that it's the private sector that A should be responsible for cleaning up because they got us into this mess, but b they have access to resources, capital, capacity that individuals certainly don't have. And governments have kind of washed their hands of doing. So I do really put a focus on the private sector. Now, as you mentioned, small businesses within the private sector are interesting because they can just by merit of being new and small, they can be more nimble. They aren't so ingrained with bad practices, like some of these larger established companies that have a really hard time changing their bad habits. So smaller companies can really pave the way. What I've noticed certainly in my work, I've consultancy as well, and our our clientele is sort of split between larger companies, but interestingly small and medium sized businesses who notice the valuation of sustainability. And I have no problem talking about sustainability and money. I think we should talk about it a lot more because money makes the world go round. So, these small companies have noticed, oh, investors actually like when we have sustainability built into the way we operate. And that's what we want to see. Are they doing things at scale yet? Maybe not. But hopefully as the market continues to focus on businesses that are doing the right thing, those companies will grow and become the next generation of large companies that are, by their very nature, doing the right things.
PRENTICE: And on an individual level… while a good many people that we will hear from this week are walking the walk… and recycling or composting or changing up their transportation habits. What is the answer to just as many people who say, “Well, what's the point? It's too late; it's not even a drop in the ocean.”
PABON: The biggest hurdle that we have, and this is the fault of sustainability professionals. So, all of my colleagues, it's our fault. So, we'll take the blame. We're terrible at marketing. We always have been. You know, you think of the traditional approach to marketing around saving the planet. It's the burnt out hellscape of an Earth. It's the sad polar bear on the ice cap, all of these tropes that really if you're just sitting back and watching these things on TV, you think, “Okay, I'm one of 8 or 10 billion people, what am I actually supposed to do with all that?” And you kind of become despondent, apathetic, and you say, “Oh, it’s somebody else's problem or it's so big I can't do anything about it.” And we definitely take the negative credit for doing that, but would certainly encourage people to think a bit differently to get out of this idea that we're doomed because I don't really think we are. Again, I'm a pragmatic realist, so things will change. The earth and humanity will have to adapt, but it's not as if we can just put our hands up and say, yeah, screw it, we're done. Because that's not exactly it. So, I would still encourage people to do everything that they can, but taking a more pragmatic and measured look at what they're doing in the book, The Great Greenwashing. I actually spend the last section turning the mirror on ourselves, and really challenging the reader. Are you doing everything you can? Is recycling enough, or is there something else that you can do? Are you just assuming and greenwashing in your own personal lives because you think that use recycling is the example? Again, that's actually making a difference, when in reality household recycling makes up less than 10% of all global recycling. The rest, the other 90%, comes from businesses. So can you be doing something else that will exponentially increase the amount of positive that you're having on the earth?
PRENTICE: I'm going to ask you then to give me an idea. What can I do?
PABON: In Sustainability for the Rest of Us, I talk about that very issue. The whole books about that issue. But I look at it more…I'll say philosophically; and I hope that doesn't turn anybody off. But the biggest thing that I think we need to do, and I don't know who told me this originally, but this idea that you can do anything but you cannot do everything is so important because I think certainly as people who care and there are a lot of us, you know… there are millions and billions of us around the world that care. It's not as if you are alone. If you're listening to this and you're thinking, oh, it's just me against the world. It's not. There's an entire army of people fighting alongside you, but you can't do it all. You know, if I go outside, I want to adopt every stray dog, give money to homeless people, and then go read to the elderly on the weekend. I can't do that. I'm only. One person only have so much capacity, resources and sanity. To be frank. So I'm not unique. That's the same for everybody. So really pick what it is that you're going to contribute to and devote your life to. And that could be any number of things. The sustainability world is wide and far reaching. It doesn't mean that you have to go and hang off the side of a whaling ship. You can do impactful things locally with some sort of a local charity. If you want to go bigger, you can devote your life like I have to. Being in the profession and working with corporations, going in-house. There are a million different ways that you can contribute to making the world a better place. So, I won't sort of bring anybody to one conclusion or another because that's up to them to decide. But to be really confident in this idea that you can focus on one particular thing, knowing that there are billions of others that will pick up maybe where you can't.
PRENTICE: I'm so excited you circled back to Sustainability For The Rest Of Us. And again, your books include The Climate Emergency Journal and most recently, The Great Greenwashing. And he is John Pabon, in Melbourne, Australia. “G'day” to you. And most importantly, thanks for giving us some time this morning.
PABON: Absolutely. Thanks, George.
Find reporter George Prentice on X @georgepren
Copyright 2023 Boise State Public Radio
