The spirits of Christmas past and present; to shape the future

Spirits of Christmas past

Traditions — we love them. They enable us to shape our collective identities, help us navigate through milestones and punctuate our lives. They warm us with familiarity and drive in us the desire to share experiences. We all have memories of traditions growing up: the food, the atmospheres, the familiar feelings that give us a warm hug inside.

When we take a bite of the food or hear the music, we get our Proustian madeleine moment — memories come flooding in. Our memories, and the idealisation of them, drive our behaviours in the quest to relive or recreate them in our present, with a constant drive to make them bigger and better.

Spirits of Christmas present

As the fall and winter holiday seasons roll in, we see pumpkins everywhere. Then trees, baubles, tinsels, lights — and far less prominently, Hanukkah candles, Eid feasts, Bodhi celebrations. And the gargantuan shopping sprees: food, electronics, books, clothes, vacations, everything in between.

At a time when we are still dealing with the repercussions of a pandemic, we need all the cheer we can get. Nevertheless, the pandemic is not the only challenging crisis we face. These interventions that cheer us up come from the natural environment and have repercussions on other living organisms — interactions that can lead to more jumps of zoonotic diseases from wild animals to humans, as we keep infringing on the natural environments of other species for extraction and gain. As Prof. Dame Sarah Gilbert, one of the creators of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, warned: future pandemics could be more lethal and more contagious than Covid-19.

In 2019, we threw out eight million pumpkins after Halloween — pumpkins that could have been consumed as food, that could have fed the entire UK with pumpkin pies. They were discarded after serving a purely decorative purpose. With the waste of the product itself, we wasted everything that went into its production: the labour, the soil and its nutrients, the land, the water, the fertiliser and pesticides and their own supply chains. This says nothing of the creation of monocultures to supply seasonal, decorative demand — with ripple effects including deforestation, loss of natural habitats, impoverishment of communities and a reliance on extractionary economics.

We have just come out of COP26 where the results were disappointing, at best. A month later, the urban fabric of London is covered with cut trees, light decorations and messages of consumer abundance under the guise of peace on earth. It is as if we all suffer from collective dissonance — not realising how our choices have ripple effect repercussions, and how our alarm at the dangers of climate change is not translating into behavioural change.

Shaping the future

Things are not all doom and gloom. Activists are on the move. We know of the youth mobilisation, the Friday strikes for climate, and other grassroots movements. We also see a slow shift from businesses and organisations toward more sustainable, purpose-driven futures — the establishment of the entreprise à mission business status in France, driven by movements including Le Club de Rome. Emmanuel Fayat, the former CEO and Chairman of Danone, introduced Carbon-adjusted EPS and launched One Planet for Biodiversity at the UN Climate Summit in 2019, before being pushed out by activist investors who felt he was focusing too much on stakeholders rather than shareholder return.

We can also observe the impact that Engine No.1 — a David-sized venture capital firm — had on the seemingly immovable Goliath that is ExxonMobil. They came in as an investment fund challenging a status quo that nobody seemed to question, even as it was no longer financially viable. As Charlie Penner put it: "We think it equally unrealistic to expect humanity to wipe itself out without at least attempting major shifts." When he examined Exxon's eroding returns and trailing stock performance: "How are they the experts?"

We see a shift of venture capital, hedge funds and other investors toward impact investing, some with that as their core mission. We see a rise in the integration of ESG metrics into financial reporting, risk assessment and investing. But it needs to go further — it is still peripheral to organisational strategy. We need to make human and planet-centric metrics central to the organisational purpose, vision, strategy, value and impact framework.

An ecosystem approach

In our race to net zero we need to think on multiple levels, in flexible constellations enabled by wayfinding mindsets. Here are four of those levels:

Creative thinking

The evolution of our traditions to make them more sustainable — whether by looking back to the origins of celebrations and how they were marked before industrialisation, or by transforming them into something new, different and exciting that fits a sustainable vision of the future.

Behavioural thinking

Behavioural change that extends beyond the consumer to producers, suppliers, policy makers and the ecosystems they inhabit — in four-dimensional dynamic frameworks that evolve, respond and adapt. Understanding that human needs and behaviours are not just those of the visible few, but those of a multitude of interconnected voices and stories. Redefining our relationship to consumption and reconnecting to our own waste. Redefining waste as a source material and thinking in spherical — not just circular — ways.

Systems thinking

Thinking in interconnected systems: in food production and agriculture, using three-sisters approaches, permaculture, forest agriculture and traditionally natural local production that does not encroach on natural habitats without creating symbiotic relationships with them. The multidimensional use of land and natural resources. Understanding the network effect and the interconnectivity of plants, animals and weather ecosystems — the ancient forest networks that Suzanne Simard describes, and how they affect the resilience of the individual versus the collective in a forest; the flying rivers and green oceans of the Amazon rainforest that help the rest of the planet breathe. Designing our systems, organisations and cities in the same way as these natural systems, so that the micro and individual grow for the benefit of the micro and collective, and vice versa.

Data-driven thinking

Data flowing from all branches of the ecosystem — giving us a clear vision of our current carbon footprints, feeding our intelligence systems, and bringing forth the hidden voices and stories that have hitherto been ignored. Data that allows us to understand our relationship to and impact on systems, and most importantly our ignored relationship to waste — our own immediate waste as well as the waste we generate along the way. With data, analytics and intelligence we can tell a multitude of stories that help us reshape our views of who we are, what is important to us, and how to move toward a shared future. The importance of data protection becomes paramount: what data we feed into our systems, what questions we ask of it, and how to keep it safe. This is only going to accelerate with the evolution of quantum computing and artificial intelligence — so when we fix the data and the stories going in, we shape different outcomes coming out.

Radically new traditions

It is time to reconsider what our traditions are really about. Christmas is a time for birth, life and the celebration of the emergence of life from the long slumber of winter — whether we look at the Christian tradition, its earlier pagan iterations, or other religious celebrations. We need to reimagine how we can transform these traditions to be part of a new sustainable future that aims to maintain the integrity and quality of life on this planet for all its inhabitants.

It is not the responsibility of individuals alone. It is also the responsibility of large corporations and small businesses to offer better. Of governments to be bold in creating policies that lead and encourage — guided by the most courageous and sustainable businesses, not the most exploitative. Of religious leaders to help pave the way of custodianship rather than exploitation. Of educators to instil new behaviours. Of communicators — media, advertisers, content creators big and small — to tell a different story, and not hide behind tradition as justification for the unexamined.

Can we invest in creating new traditions while aiming to be net zero, or even carbon positive? Can we reshape the landscape of our systems while preserving the human, cultural elements that bind us together? Can we build a sustainable future without losing the things we value and love?