Sustainability — Facing pushback back home in Madrid
I have had my own company for six years now and as anyone who has gone down the entrepreneurial road, I have faced all sorts of criticism, pushback and peer-pressure for having abandoned the traditional corporate route, constantly being reminded of how I was mistaken and how I was bound to fail. One learns to turn a deaf ear and to continue to enjoy the journey.
I was in no way prepared to receive similar pushback by becoming enrolled at the Master’s in Sustainability Leadership at Cambridge University. When involved in casual exchanges about sustainability with friends and acquaintances back home in Madrid, I am constantly facing comments along the lines of “I don’t believe in climate change”, or, “Now meat is unhealthy next lettuce will be harmful and meat will be ok again, they need to make up their mind”. For starters, who is ‘they’, I wonder.
The worrying (and why not, sad) part is that this pushback is coming from educated and intelligent individuals, with respectable positions in relevant organizations. In short, the very same people who should be open to learning new things and more importantly that should be leading the sustainability revolution.
We, as individuals, have quickly learned to be entitled to have and freely express our opinions (I am only grateful for this) but it seems no one taught us about the flipside of this coin, namely our responsibility to embrace life-long learning, to keep an open mind and (at least try) to get well informed prior to making a statement. Why do people then, jump to conclusions so fast and adamantly express their opinions about subjects on which they are absolutely clueless? There are a number of explanations for this phenomenon, such as fear of seeming uninformed or unintelligent, ego, hubris, fake news and the role played, intendedly or unintendedly, by the press, politicians and industry lobbyists in filtering and distorting scientific data.
One of the things I most enjoy about the Master’s is that we are presented with the scientific data as they truly are. Info is raw and unfiltered, pure. However, sustainability and environmental-related information is reaching the general public after passing through several distorting lenses granting the observer a certain ‘entitlement for discussion’ when in fact there should be no debate. Climate change, biodiversity loss, the role of the meat industry in climate change, etc., these are facts, and we might as well take them at face value if we as homo sapiens and our planet are to survive and prosper.
As Antonio Espinosa de los Monteros, CEO of social-enterprise Auara, put it as I mentioned to him these encounters and conversations about sustainability: “One has to be very… what is the word I am looking for…? Mmm… STUPID, not to be open to listen to and learn from the experts of a particular field (i.e. Cambridge faculty, not me Enrique)”.
I have realized the hard way that being a leader of consequence in sustainability aiming at driving change might be a lot more difficult and challenging than I had anticipated.
