Sustainability: Why have we failed?

Let me begin with this. This is not a balanced take on our collective failures in sustainability and transition. I write this as someone who has spent over twenty years thinking, researching, and working within these terrains, often through the rigor of an analytical lens. But how far can analysis take us when the systems we've trusted have so thoroughly failed? This text is meant to provoke, not persuade; to stir reflection, not offer reassurance; to invite reckoning, not resolution.

We are surrounded by theories and stories explaining why our world is fraying—some familiar, some comforting, some conveniently narrow. But what if the roots of these crises run deeper than we care to admit? What if failure was always the most likely outcome? What follows are ten propositions: perhaps more radical than you are used to, perhaps more controversial, and definitely more inconvenient.

1. Because market-based capitalism was built to fail. The economic and political systems that dominate the world today—industrial capitalism, colonial extraction, corporate empire-building, and the myth of endless growth—were never designed to be sustainable. They were designed to extract, accumulate, and expand at any cost. This is not a system in crisis, it is a system achieving exactly what it was built to do.

2. Because the same forces that built this system are clinging to power as it collapses. From the European colonizers to the industrial robber barons, from the post-war growth evangelists to today’s billionaire elite, the logic has remained the same: take as much as possible, break lots of things on the way, own it all. This is why, in the face of planetary breakdown, corporations are still building and selling millions of new personal cars instead of creating smarter collective mobility solutions. Why industrial agriculture, with its seed monopolies, its factory farms, its pesticide-soaked soils, continues to grow, while regenerative farming remains marginalized. Why new fossil fuel projects are still being approved (and subsidized), even as wildfires, floods, and droughts accelerate. The goal has never been survival for all—only profit for the few.

3. Because collapse itself is profitable. Every disaster is an opportunity. The same industries that created this crisis – Big Oil, Big Ag, Big Meat, Big Pharma, finance, military industrial complex, etc. – are now making trillions off its consequences. They sell carbon credits while drilling for more oil. They privatize water while droughts worsen. They fund climate-denial think tanks while investing in “green” markets they control. Disaster capitalism thrives on catastrophe.

4. Because we are locked in a Double Bind. We are told that the economy must grow or risk collapse, but growth itself is what is driving planetary breakdown. If GDP stalls, financial markets wobble, unemployment rises, and governments panic. If GDP expands, emissions rise, ecosystems are disrupted, and extraction deepens. There is no safe direction within the logic we have built. And yet, mainstream economics has spent decades avoiding this reality. Instead of questioning growth itself, it clings to fantasies of “green growth” and “decoupling” that have never materialized. The dilemma is not technical, it is systemic. We have failed because the economic system we live within does not offer a survivable way forward.

5. Because those in power refused to see what was being lost. It is often said that we didn’t know how much was at stake, that we didn’t realize we were dismantling the planetary systems that sustain life. But that is not true. Indigenous peoples knew. Many scientists knew. Farmers watching their soil turn to dust knew. Communities poisoned by industry knew. The warnings were clear, repeated, urgent. The problem was not communication, it was power. Some like to say that the environmental movement just hasn’t been persuasive enough. Or that scientists aren’t good at marketing. But no. Those in control chose not to listen, not to see, not to imagine the damage, because it was not yet their world that was unraveling. Denial was not a failure of understanding, it was a strategy.

6. Because this is also a failure of power and democracy. Certain vested interests – the fossil fuel industry, steel, cement, plastics, car manufacturers, global finance – have been allowed to shape the rules of the game. Governments have failed not just in policy, but in controlling corporate influence, reining in speculative finance, and preventing the privatization of public goods. What we call a crisis of governance is, in truth, a crisis of power, where markets have overridden democracy, where money has corrupted politics, where private interests dictate the future of the planet.

7. Because the forces of the status-quo have the most sophisticated propaganda machine in history. They have built the greatest mind-manipulation machinery and storytelling apparatus, and lobbying industry in human history. They have spent decades buying governments, funding denialism, controlling narratives, and numbing people into passivity. Alternative futures have been ridiculed, sidelined, or simply never allowed to enter public discourse. The result? A failure of imagination, where most people cannot even conceive of a world beyond this one.

8. Because those who warn us are ignored, or crushed. Warnings come, they always come, as indigenous communities, scientists, and environmentalists fight to stop the destruction. And they are not just ignored, they are silenced, criminalized, discredited, murdered. Not because they fail to communicate, but because the system they speak against is designed to drown them out. The problem is never a lack of data, clarity, or urgency. It is that too few people in power have any interest in listening. It is always more profitable to cast doubt, to delay, to spread the illusion that there is still time. The failure is not just that people spoke and weren’t heard. It’s that the world was structured so their voices would never matter. The ones who fed the collapse held the microphone, and those who spoke on behalf of the planet were worn down, one battle at a time.

9. Because we have been blinded by a climate-centric focus. Even those who see the polycrisis (or whatever they call it) often insist that climate is the defining emergency—the mother of all crises. But climate collapse is not the root problem; it is one symptom of a much deeper unraveling, caused by extractive economies, by the severing of human and ecological relationships, and by the relentless pursuit of growth at all costs. And yet, because climate is measurable, because it fits within models, markets, and policy frameworks, it has become the dominant focus—while species vanish, soils erode, water disappears, forever-chemicals spread, and societies fracture. It is easy to sell the illusion of a simple solution (the so-called energy transition) to a simple problem (too much CO₂ from fossil fuels), while ignoring the deeper collapse unfolding beneath. If fossil fuels vanished overnight, the collapse would still be unfolding. We have failed because we treated climate as the crisis, rather than seeing it as one thread in a far greater collapse. The real work lies deeper.

10. Because too many still believe the system can be reformed – and because it does not know how to die well. Even now, in the face of collapse, the dominant response is to tweak, not transform. Governments set distant climate targets while approving new oil projects. Billionaires fund geoengineering schemes instead of questioning capitalism. Investors rename their portfolios “green” while continuing to chase endless growth. The fantasy of a smooth transition allows destruction to continue. But this system does not know how to step aside. It was built to expand, not to contract; to dominate, not to transition; to extract, not to restore. Instead of softening its landing, redistributing power, or making space for what comes next, it thrashes, hoards, and tightens its grip. It escalates control, criminalizes dissent, and clings to the fantasy of endless growth – even as collapse accelerates. It would rather take everything down with it than face its own limits.

We can all see what failure looks like, but what comes next is not yet written. "Sometimes, you are born into the ending of a world", as Federico Campagna says (quoted in Dougald Hine’s book “At work in the ruins”). This world is ending, but something else is beginning. Not in boardrooms, not at summits, not in the dying halls of power, but in the places where no one is looking. In communities that have been practicing other ways of living long before collapse had a name. In land that is restoring itself where extractive modernity has retreated. In stories and ways of knowing that were nearly erased but never fully lost. The French intellectual Edgar Morin (103 years old!) says it well: "Like the Renaissance, our era should be an occasion for widespread rethinking. Everything needs to be rethought, to begin anew. Everything, in fact, has already begun, but we don't know it. On every continent, in every nation, there is already a multitude of local initiatives in the direction of economic, social, political, cognitive, educational, ethical or existential regeneration. It is these multiple paths that can, by developing together, combine to form the New Way."

What survives will not be decided by the old powers. It will be decided by those who refuse to be ruled by them. By those who are already composting the remnants of this world, already tending to the roots of the next. The shift is not waiting to be designed. It is already growing. And the next civilization, which we may call ecological, is already growing – but it is not waiting for a name.

This article is also published on Substack. 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.

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