The Great Scam of Sustainability by Natalie Armitage

Natalie Armitage is an Earth Justice Consultant at JMB Consulting, who works presently between the UK and Jamaica, resourcing Caribbean-led regenerative solutions to prioritise indigenous land-based practices. Having worked in the Charity and Philanthropy sector in the UK and internationally for over 15 years, she is committed to clarifying the overlap of racial justice, climate justice, extractivism, land justice and indigenous wisdom.

Let’s start with the obvious. Everything about the way we live right now across the Global North is entirely unsustainable. Agreed? Great, that is out of the way. Here we are, tapping our digital wallet into the ether and beeping into oblivion, hoping something works out soon.

Somewhere within our souls, every day, we internally malfunction. Maybe when we glimpse a stack of packaging piling up for recycling with items made cheaply somewhere else. We are indeed time-poor, but you know it's wild to have this stuff delivered to your door when you ordered it the night before.You didn’t even physically leave your house to accumulate this much plastic. Convenience culture is on steroids. Many people across the world broke their backs to ship it to companies here for little to nothing. No, it’s not sustainable, honey. It’s called Global North privilege, and no, you don’t deserve it. No one does. The good people in Ghana are shaking their heads in shame at you as they pick out your discarded Marks & Spencer knickers from their homes that were dumped without consent an ocean away from you. Dutty.

Collectively, we are mashup. Everything costs too much, we’re tired, Liberal Labourites* are more than a letdown, and we are constantly getting fined when we leave the house. News consists of some variation of tragically ugly American white men getting off on making threats of Nuclear wars, the murdering of children in front of our eyes, or Elon Musk scoffing his gerbil red cheeks at us with thumbs up somewhere. The desire for dominance over people, economies and lands is so real. Billionaires drunk on power play Monopoly with the world's global capital whilst simultaneously preparing to colonise the moon. I say mash-up because whatever “burnout” means, it is more than just that. 

Ajay Singh Chaudry wrote The Exhausted of the Earth and says: 

“Someone else might be feeling it as pure bodily fatigue [and] someone else might be feeling it as ‘my people have never had a chance to express ourselves.”

Someone might be literally sick or experiencing deep depression. Ajay argues that global ‘fed-up-ness’ is actually fertile for international solidarity because it's global. And it really is; this is global. Whatever you think is bad, whilst you are still chilling inside Imperialism's core, it is most definitely worse in the countries whose entire economies are shaped around shipping you stuff to stay comfortable. 

Sustainable for who?

In the UK, we love a good old ‘innovative’ idea to ‘enterprise’ our way through a horrendous multilayered economic recession that includes escalating homelessness. It just so happens that there is a growing global market for things that make us feel better about the climate. And we love a green buzzword to tick off the list of ways to pat ourselves on the back. Let’s look at one I am referring to that the sector LOVES to use: sustainability. Listen guys, this is what it's all about now. The US loves it, Europeans are always banging on about it, and there are literally global conferences in artificially made cities like Dubai that are all about it. Get this: businesses and corporations adore it. More often, you hear about it in the Global South with things like, wait for it: ‘fair trade’ - we love a bit of that too. Oh yeah, that sounds good. Any grant proposal has to be sustainable and scalable, like bros of expansion. So, what does it actually mean?

The Oxford Dictionary defines the term “sustainable” with two specific meanings: a) “the quality of being sustainable at a certain rate or level,” with examples of quotes pertaining to profit and growth. Alright. Second definition: “the degree to which a process or enterprise is able to be maintained or continued while avoiding the long-term depletion of natural resources.”
Okay. 

Given that two different meanings of the same word allude to being able to continue making money, I am not sure we agree on what sustainability actually means, especially in the context of a non-profit organisation.

Let’s clear something up for the first definition. Capitalism in 2025 means that the Global North countries (US, Europe, Canada, Australia) are still consuming and dumping waste at a specific rate (disproportionately higher than the rest of the world) and are more responsible for the consequences of this waste than all other countries on Earth. Global South countries and Indigenous people who were colonised are extortionately exploited by them and bear the majority of the consequences. By the first definition, Capitalism is sustainable because the Global North continues to do it. 

The second definition in that case, sounds more plausible. If something keeps on going and “avoids” the long-term depletion of natural resources, does that mean it is sustainable? 

Let’s answer that. Long-term depletion of the resources we use is not really the main problem. The toxic stuff we burn- oil, coal, minerals from the ground- isn't actually proven to be running out. There is plenty of other stuff left to mine. The problem is we are enslaving humans again whilst killing billions of people and sending the ecosystem into total mayhem with the rate we are obsessed with it. We are addicts to burning fossil fuels at this point. Because of this addiction we actually have organised global systems around the guzzling of it. So it isn’t really the long-term depletion of resources per se; it definitely is the now entirely normalised extraction of all life on Earth no matter the cost to it and all life on it.

We are overshooting what the Earth can manage as a consequence by a LONG way, knowing it will kill everything on it. Oh, did I mention that billions of people are already dying in this process of ‘sustainably’ continuing the way things are now. Enslavement of African People has made a comeback in The Congo, as well as making a resurrection legal in California. So no, it really isn’t something you can avoid looking at. People are forced into labour to make the laptops you work on and the devices you read this on, which you can also use to see for yourself what is happening to the people in Congo who are mining for it to be made. You can now livestream the horrific Genocides continuing in Palestine and Sudan on these very devices as well as review the latest YouTube out of the Whitehouse to show you just how it's about to blow. SO! There isn’t a mythical doomsday where everything will suddenly “run out”, forcing us to stop mining and production. The End of Days is already here, babes. It’s not a movie or a series with continuous seasons to binge on. It is actually every day. Gradualism*** is hindering us now.

‘Sustainability’ is ambiguous

You see, what is sustainable to some people in the Global North is also very violent and destructive to the majority of people around the world. Is it sustainable? The entire system of colonialism is built on stealing from faraway places and people to forcibly sustain something at a Whiteland base camp in an entirely unsustainable means through extraction from people and all life on Earth all around it. Thus, we confuse what sustainability actually means with what it pretends to mean. 

Its ambiguity lends itself to misuse with ease. If you slap the term “eco” in front of something, the assumption is you are doing well. If it just continues to grow and accumulate profit, appears to be expanding to new places, and “avoids” harm to the planet by someone's definition of that to a lot of people, then bingo: It's sustainable. 

When it comes to charities, sustainability means continuing to reach more people with minimal resources over a long period of time. This sustainability becomes even more critical if the charity expands into new areas. If it has months of financial reserves, it is considered sustainable. Even if staff are barely managing to get by, even if volunteers are shouldering much of the work unpaid. When the organisation's politics shift further right to stay afloat to be able to keep getting funding, we must ask: who ultimately bears the cost?

Actual costs to the Global South are almost always omitted from balance sheets. With those invisible costs off a balance sheet, you can make anything appear sustainable when it isn’t.

Invisible costs are not something that you don’t contribute to if you aren’t actively working in the Global South. Disconnecting local and national charities in the UK from the Global South is exactly the ignorance that got us here. Absolutely everything about your registered address, your office, your legal right to register, the oxygen you are breathing, the location you are working from, what you are wearing, working on and even what you have for coffee or tea in a break without even including your equipment you sit on and use- are all intimately connected and a direct result of it. It is a challenging thing to accept that even working-class people in the UK are a part of the Global North exploitation when inequality is so stark, and poverty is life-threatening, but we remain connected. Invisible costs don’t disappear because we choose not to identify with them, include them in our ‘mission’ or make them relevant to what we do. For example, the invisible cost of printing a logo on a t-shirt might be the forced labour to make it, the emissions to ship it, the waste it leaves that gets washed onto another coastline. Most people overlook the invisible costs the moment they hear the word “sustainability.” But those costs are real. They’re ongoing. And they’re paid in full by the Global South.

Obscene levels of white supremacy, consumerism and profit-driven growth are why the Earth is in its current state. So why are we so determined to keep all this “sustainable”? Why do we continue pushing forward, constantly searching for more “sustainable” ways to keep it all going? At its core, sustainability makes us feel better about allowing this madness to continue. In this way, it serves a useful purpose for the oppressive structures driving it.

Is sustainability a genuine attempt to tackle and stop consumption levels that are causing an issue, or is it an invitation for you to continue to consume at a level that is killing us while keeping capitalism feeling good? Is sustainability demanding the IMF (International Monetary Fund) to cancel all debts from colonisation on countries in the Global South that need to be released of their forced economic dependency, or is it building eco-lodges on other people's land and taking the money back to a fascist basecamp? Is material sustainably resourced locally and environmental waste being used, or is it a feel-good material to exploit the same cheap labour with a compostable fabric instead?

Here lies the great scam of sustainability: keeping consumerism in the Global North going which isn’t sustainable at all. That is exactly the problem in itself.

Instead of confronting this, we are getting ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) scores of our charities and organisations to show we are on the sustainability wave. Again, who is this really sustainable for?

There is not one day that the climate will explode because we broke it. In fact, the Earth will continue with or without us. Mother Nature will absolutely end us first; we can’t end her, you know? Whilst you are working out ways to increase your ESG scores, are you dealing with what is already happening? 

By 2050, Mariah Carey will be 80 years old and still banking her royalties at Christmas because we will continue to play her. Oxford Street in London will literally be underwater. The question is, will you have stopped trying to shop brands there for Christmas gifts in excess to All I Want for Christmas??

*This is a completely made-up term by myself (Natalie Armitage) for the Labour Party, Liberal Democrats and the Democrats all mating to produce people who every form of Liberal refashioned into a highly disappointing alternative to extreme fascism with related, if not remarkably similar, white supremacist agendas.

**‘Quite radical’ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/28/quite-radical-the-feeling-of-exhaustion-is-key-to-tackling-climate-change-says-author-ajay-singh-chaudhary

***Gradualism is used here to express the policy of many incremental reforms to a system over a long period of time as opposed to big change, sudden shifts, or a revolution to disrupt or even dismantle the system completely.