· 6 min read
I love being a ghost, not to be confused with ghosting, which essentially means being incommunicado. Millions of ghostwriters are out there; most don't even know they are since they are employed and create content that never mentions their names. Consider consultants, ESG/ Sustainability report writers/contributors, marketers, or any other content meant to serve customers, the public, or their management to demonstrate and publish their sustainability credentials.
As a ghost, you can write for others who may be apprehensive about writing about sustainability or regeneration. 78% of content creators in the sustainability space fear their company or clients may be accused of greenwashing based on the content they create. One of the causes is a lack of education, knowledge and navigating the strategic conflict between the sustainability and progress narrative. We’ve seen many examples where companies have changed or retracted earlier sustainability claims and there are those that are actively falling into the greenhushing trap out of fear. The fear of being accused of greenwashing is justified because we still live in a sustainability world that focuses predominately on climate change in public discourse and regulatory compliance. Instead, we should focus on planetary boundaries because as long as we maintain our carbon tunnel vision, the fear, and justification for being accused of greenwashing will persist, especially when one considers our dependence on Nature to scale and mitigate the effects of greenhouse gas emissions. This is where ghostwriters can help. They have been requested for decades, primarily in the technical, financial, and medical industries, and we now see a rising trend in the sustainability space, primarily due to increasing complexity and backlash.
While Time magazine's list of the top 100 most sustainable companies is commendable, it's important to note its limitations. The criteria, which focus on Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions and deforestation, provide a narrow view of sustainability. The exclusion of Scope 3 and extended product responsibility metrics, particularly the risk of pollution, highlights the need for a more comprehensive approach to sustainability assessments.
I hope these companies also realize that the work involved in becoming genuinely sustainable is a goal that still requires a lot of development.
The dominance of services, technology, financial institutions, and pharmaceutical companies in Time magazine’s sustainability list raises an important question. Can a consulting firm or a financial institution be deemed sustainable if it provides services for companies in extractive industries? If these firms are promoting sustainability from a perspective of planetary boundaries while also focusing on efficiency gains and profitability, then we may be on the right track.
The same could be said for communications service providers. The faster technology advances, the more mobile phones, tablets, and laptops must be replaced with newer models, driving further adoption of new technology for growth at the expense of natural resources and energy required to make them. The amount of e-waste is exponentially growing and increasing now that Artificial Intelligence is booming. Let's not forget to mention the explosion of energy and freshwater demand to serve the ever-expanding number of data centers that operate the underlying infrastructure.
Big pharma contributes in much the same fashion as they need to provide more and more maintenance medicines, which are the most profitable, to treat ever-increasing cases of mental health, cardiovascular, and other human-induced illnesses, all of which end up in our wastewater where proper wastewater management is insufficient.
What is completely missing from the list is Big Agriculture, in other words, the food that we must rely on to execute our daily activities. Luckily for writers like myself, we don't need that many calories. We need to make sure we burn enough during the day by getting off our behinds and going for a run. So, how can we help those sustainability officers in the agricultural sector? Let's not forget the FMCG sector.
We have a sustainable and now emerging regeneration content creation dilemma. Anyone who writes about sustainability and regeneration should ask themselves if they truly understand the current human predicament, which some call poly-crisis. At the same time, others have concluded that we are actually in a metacrisis. Educating oneself requires reading and listening to all perspectives, even the ones you disagree with. Being well-informed is critical, and for those who work in businesses where the progress and growth narrative dominates, you may wish to read an excellent essay by Daniel Schmachtenberger called Development in Progress.
A company's sustainability messaging often fails to acknowledge that it harms the planet and that its purpose harms one or more planetary boundaries. Customers want nothing more than transparency, integrity, and tangible initiatives that show how a company is dealing with the negative impact it is creating instead of hiding behind compliance and positive accomplishments. Finding a company’s blind spots may be worth investigating. It is, after all, a standard practice in Go-to-Market strategy development.
With many now questioning whether companies and public institutions can be trusted, it is imperative to demonstrate and provide proof of the positive impact you are making and also reduce and, ideally, eliminate the negative impact as much as possible.
This leads me to another recommendation for creating sustainability and regeneration content: learn ecolinguistics. The free course is available here. I highly recommend it to all writers and content creators who wish to contribute to the narrative of sustainability, regeneration, and systems change.
Another growing resource is allegorical literary fiction. I added the following line when I wrote the short story Casandra's Curse.
Cassandra's ex, however, did ghost her, and he was an icy son of a bitch.
You may be familiar with Cassandra's curse, and in this story, she is a journalist, yet she works with ghosts as part of her writing to strengthen her message. Many would read it on the nose, as they say. Still, I have learned that a disguised purposeful message tends to linger longer in a reader's conscious and subconscious and find relevance when confronted with a similar situation within their environment. Why is this important? It is sometimes better to write in allegorical terms to reach those less well-informed, as many would discard or even refuse to read any direct messages about sustainability, climate change, biodiversity loss, mental health issues, or pollution. Who, after all, reads a company’s ESG/sustainability report?
In conclusion, change is afoot, and the undercurrents of that change, while radical to some, are emerging. Fundamental societal change will emerge through alchemical processes from those channels. These undercurrents may not be featured in news feeds, but like subversive, undercurrent, and alternative cultural movements from the past, we will see that those attuned to the purpose and messaging will create a more meaningful impact on our global civilization. Write wisely.
illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.
