Sixty years ago, communism and alien invasion seemed the biggest threats to capitalism, but today climate destabilisation is the big issue for business
As the smoke clears from the 60 candles on Director's birthday cake, let's squint through the haze and try to gauge what the world will be like—and what directors' responsibilities might be—when there are 100 candles to snuff out. First, though, let's go back to 1947, when alien invasion was the most urgent threat. The year saw the first widely publicised UFO sighting, followed by a claimed UFO crash-landing. For calmer minds, the risks had less to do with flying saucers than with the challenge of rebuilding war-ravaged Europe and Japan—and the nuclear variants of flying bombs.
Being born in 1949, I don't remember much about 1947, but the whole period was pivotal. In terms of the distant past, the Dead Sea Scrolls were unearthed, while the fabric of history was savagely rent by the partitioning of Palestine and India. Closer to home, communists took over Poland and Hungary, while the US unveiled the CIA and the House Un-American Activities Committee hunted Reds in Hollywood. Their mantra: "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?" People like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Danny Kaye and Larry Adler flew to Washington to protest-and ended up on the infamous blacklist for their troubles.
Capitalism felt itself under threat, with international communism pressing in from every direction. A year earlier, Churchill had delivered his Iron Curtain speech and the sense of insecurity was intensified by the communist takeover of China in 1949. The superpowers were on a trajectory that would culminate in the Dr Strangelove world of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), where the prospect of our species snuffing itself out was all too real. So a Martian landing probably seemed more likely in 1947 than did a future where we would break through to bright, sunny global uplands.
So what strategic failures of imagination are we suffering from today? And who might be today's Churchill-in-the-wilderness? While President George W Bush laid uneasy claim to the mantle post-9/11, a more fitting candidate might be the man he beat at the polls, Al Gore. In his book and film on climate, Gore exposed the inconvenient truth about what he dubbed the greatest challenge of our time, climate destabilisation. In his new book The Assault on Reason, he excoriates the Bush administration for its anti-democratic instincts and challenges the entire American political system, diagnosing a series of ailments which could prove fatal to democracy as we know it.
Gore concludes that the US is in the hands of an administration that refuses to share the truth with its citizens. Of even greater concern to Gore is the Bush administration's apparent opposition to fact-based reasoning, particularly processes of open inquiry, in which unexpected and inconvenient facts can surface and lead to unexpected (but vitally important) conclusions. Instead, convenient untruths are favoured. Yet, as Gore stresses, never has there been a worse time to lose the capacity to understand and address these uncomfortable emerging realities.
Four scenarios recently published by SustainAbility outline possible trajectories for our future. Only one offers any prospect of breaking through into a genuinely sustainable world. Significantly, this outcome is only achievable following a major global crisis (in this case, a pandemic that shuts down key parts of the just-in-time global economy), forcing a profound rethink. The other scenarios imagine paranoid committees interrogating business leaders as to whether they have been responsible for climate destabilisation: "Are you now, or have you ever been, a major user of fossil fuels?"
During the Live Earth concerts Gore said we should "demand that the US join an international [climate] treaty within the next two years that cuts global warming pollution by 90 per cent in developed countries and by more than 50 per cent worldwide in time for the next generation to inherit a healthy Earth". That's leadership—and an indication of future challenges for directors.
John Elkington is founder and chief entrepreneur at SustainAbility (www.sustainability.com) and blogs at www.johnelkington.com
