Who - or what - still can't vote?

This is article 4 of 4 in What the Future Wants from Us series. Here is article 3.

This series began with a question about representation - whether a board of composites, of avatars, could speak for anyone, let alone everyone of a given age? It ends by asking who, or what, in the future reality of 2037, still has no vote? And what we might do to give them, or it, one?

Looking back from 2037, phrases like 'corporate responsibility' and 'ESG' sound quaint. They belonged to an era that tried to fix companies one at a time - necessary, but nowhere near sufficient.

By contrast, if you think of companies as fish, then markets are the seas they swim in. Clean up an individual fish and plop it back into polluted waters, and just how far have you come? The 2030s were the decade when we finally started serious work on these commercial seas and oceans, on redesigning the markets in which businesses operate.

The interesting thing? It proved much easier to get a critical mass of business leaders to align behind market change than it would have been a few decades earlier. Indeed, we saw a strong uptick in what the Sustainable Markets Initiative had called "private sector diplomacy."

Nature's bottom lines

By 2037, it turns out, nature does have a voice in at least some of the decisions that shape its fate - close to unthinkable ten years ago. Across the 2030s, that voice grew from a whisper into something boardrooms could no longer talk over, carried by legal standing, natural-capital accounting, and nature-based solutions that could increasingly compete on price.

Four forces drove the transition. Economics: roughly half of global GDP is reckoned to depend on nature, and you do wonder how the other half imagines it would cope without it. The climate–nature knot: net zero is unreachable without healthy forests, soils and oceans. New market plumbing: the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), science-based targets for nature, biodiversity-credit markets. And Indigenous leadership, moving from the sidelines to the centre of the table.

Tellingly, much of that leadership came from the Global South and advanced against real opposition - which suggests the drivers are structural rather than merely political.

The old argument now looks like a trap: is nature priceless, or an asset to be booked? A third way emerged through the 2030s - nature given a proxy voice without ever being fully priced. Voices for nature began turning up on boards, advisory boards and councils.

What moved the needle, though, was less conscience than exposure. Insurers repriced or abandoned whole regions, central banks flagged nature loss as systemic risk, and courts began holding leaders personally to account. The game shifted from soft rules to hard ones with penalties - though applied wildly unevenly.

Defragmenting civil society

Paul Hawken saw it coming. In Blessed Unrest, he cast the vast, uncoordinated world of civil society as humanity's immune system - a distributed response to current and emerging threats. By 2037, the metaphor has only sharpened. Climate-sceptic populism now looks like an autoimmune disease: a society turning on its own defences.

And here's the irony. The failure to deliver the UN Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, made civil society more important, not less. As the 2030 deadline slid by, governments - distracted, divided, and sometimes openly hostile - did not close the gap, and neither did markets left to themselves.

But civil society's chronic structural weakness has remained its fragmentation: thousands of organisations scrapping over the same funding, attention and legitimacy. Scattered energy is easily divided and beaten. Noise tends to overwhelm signal. And the late 2020s battered the sector considerably - the abrupt end of USAID stripping tens of billions from civic groups, the sustainability recession draining another income stream, and with taken-for-granted civic spaces narrowing as protest was criminalised and organisers were surveilled.

In computing, defragmenting means gathering the scattered pieces of a file back into one place: no new data, just a better-ordered system. The decisive job of the 2030s, some civil society visionaries concluded, was to turn multiple crowds into a more coherent movement. A movement with a shared narrative, plus pooled funding, common metrics, and leadership influenced powerfully by those closest to the damage being done.

When I tested a late version of this post with Paul Hawken, he replied:

This is excellent because it names and categorises. [But he continued] I'm not sure defragmentation is the right word. Diversity is a better descriptor. Here, sustainability is imitating what all living systems do. Diversify.

I think of ecosystems as diverse and intricately interconnected. The term "ecosystem" is a human-made descriptor. They overlay, intertwine, and weave into ever more complex and regenerative expressions of the living world.

I agree that diversity is key to the health and resilience of any living system. But I do wonder whether, in human politics, diversity can also be a weakness, allowing the forces of incumbency to divide and rule potential insurgents? Your answers on a postcard, please.

Paul's postcard ran as follows:

I am not sure that diversity is a "key" to health and resilience. It is a measure. "Key" sounds like it can be analysed, implanted, or introduced. Diversity is never a weakness. It's important to distinguish diversity from difference. Heightening differences among humans is a tool of dominance and autocracy. It is called Donald Trump. Recognising and honouring diversity strengthens a system's integrity. Attempts to integrate "diverse" nature into the economy, literally or rhetorically, have failed and will always fail. It is a figure/ground inversion. The question is how to integrate commerce into nature.

My sense is that civil society can - and will - regenerate as new issues surface. Among them the public pushback against AI and extreme concentrations of wealth. New campaigns will emerge that bridge across movements and agendas, but understanding the tribal dynamics in agendas like sustainability will continue to tax us, human nature being what it is. And that, in turn, suggests the need for new - or at least recharged - leaders in the space.

Changing the system

Which brings us to the operating system underneath the markets we must now change, indeed transform. Advance market commitments, coalitions like the Climate Group's RE100, and governments shaping whole sectors - electric vehicles in Norway, fertilisers in the Netherlands - showed the shift was already under way by 2026.

Cities, it turned out, did much of the heavy lifting through the 2030s. An estimated 68 per cent of humanity will live in them by mid-century, and they already emit over 70 per cent of energy-related CO₂. As international cooperation frayed, city networks like C40 and the Smart Surfaces Coalition became key engines of progress.

For forty years, the sustainability movement had largely managed decline - curbing negatives, disclosing risk, standing as the last line of defence against nasty surprises. Turning Black Swans into Green ones meant switching from defence to offence: spotting potential exponential solutions and marshalling the policy, finance and storytelling needed to tip them before the negatives tip first.

The advisory board's take

Sofía returns to her earlier themes. "Nature, where I'm from, is both glorious and dangerous to love out loud. The people who stand in front of the bulldozers are still being buried. So don't offer me a metric. Offer nature real legal standing - rights a court will enforce - and protect those who already defend it with their lives."

By contrast, Yusuf starts from scarcity. "For us, nature isn't a rainforest. It's water, or the lack of it, and a sun that has turned from friend to threat. My grandfather fished a river my cousins have never seen full. Spare me the biodiversity brochure and price the aquifer - now, while there's still water in it." On organising a global response to global issues, he notes the warning that the Northern version of this argument keeps missing: "A shared platform sounds wonderful until you realise it's also a shared surveillance list."

Once again, Mei amps up the friction. "Standing, protection, rights - those are all things somebody must enforce, which means somebody must pay, which means someone has to count and measure the outcomes. I am not being cold. The things I can count are the things that got built. Measure your success in more nature - more forest, more fish, more birdsong - but measure it. If the reports thicken while the woods thin, we have built the wrong instruments."

Castor, 5, ecosystem engineer

For this final run, the seventh seat goes to a non-human. Castor is a beaver, one of a small family released in south-west England as part of a semi-legal rewilding project. AI-voiced here, naturally, but unapologetically proud of his job title.

He begins, as beavers tend to, by reworking the ground beneath the argument. "First, let me say how good it is to be back. Your ancestors trapped my kind down to the last kit - for our fur, our meat, the musk in our glands. They saw the silence that followed as Progress, capital P. Four centuries later you reintroduced us, then expressed surprise when the rivers seemed to heal themselves!"

He is unsentimental. "Generally, you did not bring me back out of any great love," he notes. "Instead, you brought me back because I am cheaper than you. I build dams that slow the floods you can no longer afford to insure. I dig wetlands that hoard water for your droughts, filter your farm run-off, recharge your aquifers and bank carbon in the mud. A human contractor would invoice millions. I work for nothing, and you never once enter me in your accounts!"

Castor has listened in to the panel's arguments about giving nature a voice but is unimpressed with the framing. "You have spent an hour asking how to give nature a seat at your table. I have no interest in your table. I am not a stakeholder. I am a key part of the living foundations of your world. As some of you have argued, your economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the wetland, and the wetland has never been consulted about anything, not even its own drainage."

Coda: Arjun, 26, economist, India

Our last voice, bringing the spotlight back to humans, comes from Arjun, a young Indian economist who has also followed this series. At first, he seems almost apologetic:

I have spent six years learning to optimise a model. It prices a forest at zero until someone logs it. It discounts my grandchildren to almost nothing. It files half of GDP's dependence on nature under 'externality' - a word I now realise means the part we decided not to think about. I was taught this is rigour. I suspect it is a very elegant way of being wrong.

You keep saying: change the operating system, not the players one at a time. But who wrote the operating system? Economists did - the prices, the discount rates, the models that tell every minister and CFO what counts. The steepest learning curve of the next decade belongs to my discipline, and we are near the bottom of it.

So I am changing my research focus. Not abandoning the mathematics - India cannot afford romantic economics - but aiming it somewhere more honest. My professors will call it a career risk. I would rather get the important questions roughly right than the trivial ones absolutely correct.

You asked whether the system could change. I am twenty-six, I was trained to defend the old one, and I changed my mind in a single afternoon. Reprogram the people who write the rules, and you reprogram the rules. Start, if you like, with me.

Are we nearly there?

Children on long journeys ask whether we are nearly there. My answer: we have tumbled a long way down the curve of creative destruction, but the climb up the facing slope of creative reconstruction still lies ahead.

Which returns us to the question our first post left open. Should anyone trust a synthetic advisory board? No - but that doesn't mean properly designed ones can't be useful, used well. Our avatars are fictional, even if based on real-world data and trends. The process has certainly helped me think, and rethink.

My sense is that we are only part-way through a great U-bend of technological, socio-economic and political transformation. This is the gruelling stretch every great change must pass through, when the old system fails faster than the new one forms and the costs land before the rewards. In such circumstances, I suspect we will need all the advice we can get. Human or, increasingly, synthetic.

Whether you agree or disagree, please let me know what you think.

This article is also published on John Elkington's Substack. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the opinions of leading Sustainability Thought Leaders, their views do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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