I saw the recent Apple ad and felt instantly uncomfortable. In a year where forest fires, floods, hurricanes, and growing emissions are daily occurrences and news headlines, there is no way that mother nature would be even remotely satisfied with this progress.
I feel this ad is not only untruthful given today’s context but harmful.
It is untruthful because it creates a perception that this is sufficient progress. In the ad, Mother Nature is ok with the status and will come back next year to check in. This is not where we are on climate. To paraphrase Greta Thunberg; Our house is on fire, and we need to act like it.
What does acting like your house is on fire mean? Well first and foremost, it is not stopping to spend millions on a selfie of you working to reduce the flames in the doorway of the house. Instead, it is recognizing that the whole house is on fire, that we are all contributing to this fire, getting all hands-on deck to stop contributing to the fire and to build the systems that enable fire prevention.
So, what would this mean for Apple? Well, it would mean really thinking about what a technology company in a sustainable, socially just world looks like. It would mean wrestling with a business model that is reliant on continually growing consumption of products made with natural resources and leaving behind mountains of e-waste and polluted waters. It would involve elimination of planned obsolescence, and embracing upgradeability, reparability, and circularity.
It would involve getting all hands-on deck. In the case of Apple, that means stopping efforts to avoid taxes which provide much needed resources to governments to help address sustainability and help build a socially just society. It is appalling that Apple has avoided $15 Billion in taxes. This is not all hands-on deck. It also illuminates the abundance and scale of private sector resources working to advance current business models that are incongruent with sustainability while paltry pennies are made available to those impacted by and fighting for meaningful climate and sustainability action.
It is harmful because it creates a perception that we are on track, that incremental improvements and carbon neutral products will collectively add up to the change that we need. That can not be further from the truth.
Instead of doing what we are doing today in a more “environmentally friendly manner”, we need to reimagine what business looks like in a sustainable socially just society. We need to invest the financial and human resources to not only move there but to also build the systems that will catalyze this movement. That means we must take our resources and build the relationships, and systems structures (policies, programs, incentives and penalties…) required to enable this transition. This is nicely stated in EY’s 2022 report “In the quest for sustainable development, the only thing more dangerous than the absence of progress is the illusion of it.”
I’d like Apple and all businesses to think about how mother nature is reflected on the Board and how her influence on decisions might be reflected in a sustainable world? How might representatives from communities impacted by e-waste influence the design and strategies around design, repair and upgrading? How might employees from suppliers like FoxConn be at the table when discussing not only supply issues, but also employee pay, timelines, human rights violations and the sad state of worker suicides? How might we ensure that scarce resources are used to lobby for legislation and supports that strengthen and catalyze sustainability efforts instead of those that benefit specific organizational interests or worse yet erode previous progress?
Now to give Apple and all businesses making an effort credit, using 100% clean electricity, reducing transportation emissions, phasing out plastics in packaging, and investing in forests is good work. And yes, we want to see more work like this.
But let us be clear, this is insufficient and positioning it as sufficient is harmful. It serves to make opaque the work that really needs to be done.
