A critical enquiry into our services

A reluctant watchdog in the sustainability world, I often wind up calling out businesses/organisations for greenwashing – or ‘eco virtue-signalling’ as I like to call it. It’s a total drag focusing on the negative, which is the wrong way to frame the discussion around change. Plus it takes up heaps of my time which turns out I can’t even bill them for haha.

What I’ve learned however, is that everyone has a different moral compass and that people often believe they’re doing the right thing, even if it doesn’t stand up in someone else’s opinion.

How can I encourage others to act with integrity within the sustainability movement?
My best answer: act with integrity and lead by example. In this case, running a critical enquiry on our services in the hope of revealing any hypocrisy, and potentially crystallising a new direction should the need arise.

In our ‘Leadership for Change’ course (with Otago Polytechnic), we adopt a range of frameworks to simplify complex issues and communicate them in a common language. By mapping Why Wastes main offerings across these frameworks, I’m seeking to see our work as part of a system – a valuable viewpoint when our perception is conditioned by reductionism and separation. Nothing is separate in nature, and the same is true of business, society or any other human organisation. Their very ‘nature’ is an interconnected web of relationships, similar to that of a mature ecosystem. That word nature seems to keep popping up, turns out we’re not separate from that either.

– Leo Murray