We can’t manage decline and call it justice: A reflection on colonial sustainability

Reading Colonial Sustainability: Tracing the Sustainability Industry’s Ecocidal Lineage from the Doctrine of Discovery by Christina M. Sayson, Samantha Suppiah, Anna Denardin, Luiza Oliveira, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, and Ayabulela Mhlahlo was a turning point. It confronted me with truths I’ve avoided in my own professional practice. It forced a level of honesty I wasn’t prepared for—but desperately needed. This paper didn’t just make me reflect. It unsettled me.

It was, to put it plainly, a hard truth. But it’s one I now believe everyone working in sustainability must read and wrestle with.

We often talk about sustainability as if it’s inherently good. But this paper made it unavoidably clear: if we’re not addressing the root causes—the capitalist, extractive systems that birthed the crisis—we’re perpetuating colonialism in greenface. Our strategies become complicit. Our efforts, however well-intentioned, become mechanisms for the system we claim to resist.

The industry’s colonial DNA

The article traces today’s sustainability industry back to the Doctrine of Discovery, the series of 15th-century papal bulls that granted European powers divine authority to conquer, convert, and colonise non-Christian lands and peoples. That worldview—one that dehumanised Indigenous peoples and treated the land as something to be subdued and profited from—laid the groundwork for modern extractive capitalism.

The colonial project didn’t end with “independence” or the formation of the UN. It simply evolved. It learned to speak the language of progress, development, and, eventually, sustainability.

The idea that we can continue extracting from the Global South—through mining, agriculture, and even carbon offset schemes—under the banner of “sustainable development” is not just misleading. It’s violent.

What shocked me was the recognition that the very language I’ve used in my work—“offsets,” “resilience,” “development goals,” “climate innovation”—often masks the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous and traditional communities. Even as these communities are criminalised and killed for defending their lands, their knowledge is commodified and repackaged as solutions…by the very industry responsible for their displacement.

The seduction of supply-side solutions

I’ve built much of my professional practice around things like circular economy, energy efficiency, and renewables. These are important tools—but this paper made me ask: tools for what? If we’re using these strategies to patch a sinking ship rather than build a new vessel, what are we really doing?

As the authors argue, supply-side mitigation strategies don’t address the structural forces driving collapse. They manage decline. Meanwhile, injustice deepens. Extraction accelerates. Inequality expands.

And yet these are the strategies most heavily funded, widely implemented, and politically palatable. They offer the appearance of progress without threatening the foundations of power.

But here’s the core of it: if capital continues to flow toward symbolic gestures and isolated impact, it will miss the target—and the train will keep accelerating.

Movements, not metrics

What we need isn’t greener products or better offsets. We need systemic disruption.

We should be investing in movements, not just in metrics. In coalitions and cooperatives, not only in startups and scorecards. In relationships of care, community-based governance, and decolonial reparations—not just quarterly impact reports.

This means shifting from institutional sustainability toward liberatory ecological practice. It means returning power to the people most affected, most marginalised, and most capable of stewarding this planet—because they have never forgotten what reciprocity means.

The authors describe this beautifully by uplifting the stories of communities like the Bishnoi in India, who protected forests with their lives long before sustainability was an industry. These communities practiced true sustainability—not as a branding exercise, but as a sacred relationship between land, life, and people.

That’s not a case study. That’s a call to transform the system.

Reckoning with my own role

This isn’t just theory. This is personal.

I’ve realised that much of my work—though well-meaning—has stayed safely within the parameters of what’s “possible” under capitalism. What’s fundable. What’s scalable. What’s comfortable.

This paper challenged me to confront how often I’ve measured success by metrics that centre white comfort and capitalist logic. How often I’ve sought to “minimise harm” without ever truly interrogating the structure of harm itself.

Am I here to comfort empire or to confront it?

That question hit me hard. Because if I’m being honest, too often I’ve done the former. Not because I didn’t care—but because it’s easier. Because it feels safer. Because I didn’t know another way.

But now I do. And there’s no going back.

The call to hospice colonial sustainability

The most powerful insight from the paper, for me, was its closing argument: that industrial sustainability may be beyond reform. It may need to be hospiced, not fixed. Its function is too deeply embedded in the systems of white supremacy, extractive profit, and technocratic control.

And the truth is, we can’t just “reform” something built on domination. We need to abolish colonial sustainability and build something rooted in reciprocity, justice, and Indigenous sovereignty.

Yes, that means giving up comfort. Yes, that means saying no to prestige projects and glossy partnerships. Yes, it means asking more of ourselves and our institutions than they’ve ever been willing to give.

But this is how we interrupt collapse. Nothing less will do.

A new commitment

I don’t have all the answers. But I now have better questions.

From this point forward, I commit to centring root-cause analysis in my work. To challenging techno-fixes and symbolic impact. To uplifting Indigenous, Black, and land-based justice movements. To practicing solidarity over scalability.

I’ll make mistakes. I’ll miss things. But I will no longer claim to be doing “sustainability” if I’m not confronting the colonial structures at its core.

If you work in this field, I urge you: read this paper. Let it move you. Let it discomfort you. Let it transform you.

Because if our work isn’t dismantling the systems killing the planet, it isn’t work worth doing.

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.