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Dys-HOPE-ia?

The more you learn, the more you realise it’s complicated.

After finishing my masters in sustainable leadership development last year, I’ve been on a bit of mission to listen closely to the new language of sustainability that’s evolving in our industry discourse. There is quite a lot to be heard — and gratefully quite bit to be celebrated.

The recent progress achieved by sustainability and DEI executives is all the more admirable given that, pre-pandemic, these newly minted professional roles barely existed.

At the Edinburgh TV Festival’s inaugural Climate Content Summit in June, a reality emerged that, even when commissioners say that they want to be pitched clever ideas with climate messages baked in, producers are hesitant to ‘waste’ their one shot at an order in today’s brutally tough market with a concept that could be deemed risky. On the upside, that means there are a lot of clever, climate-driven ideas still safely locked in drawers.

September saw the Responsible Media Forum’s Mirror or Movers event, now in its 10th year -  dedicated to investigating, debating and challenging the impacts of media content on society and the environment and counts many major broadcasters and media owners in its membership. I chatted to a young woman, jetlagged and working for a big publishing company, who had just returned from Climate Week in New York. She said the irony had not lost on her that several hundred people had flown to NYC for a few days to talk about climate solutions. But more worrying was that nobody seemed to be feeling particularly comfortable about having uncomfortable conversations about what is a very discomforting situation.

We need to get stuck in at the business end, as it were. There are no easy management solutions to this ‘wicked’ problem. It’s one that requires a different sort of thinking, a new way of collaborative debate. As a start, we could come together to develop a sense of ‘critical hope’, defined as ‘the ability to realistically assess one’s environment through a lens of equity and justice while also envisioning the possibility of a better future’. By any measure, a ‘realistic assessment’ of our environmental predicament is uncomfortable. But if we can challenge and sit with that discomfort, maybe that’s OK. It’s hope as an act of resistance.

Back at the Edinburgh Climate Content Summit, Jack Bootle, head of science and natural-history commissioning at the BBC, called for a better understanding of the need for systemic change. Alf Laurie, Channel 4’s head of factual entertainment, then called for “a third way” — systemic change was also called for by the entire panel at a sustainability session for the Big Picture Network at Content London a couple of weeks ago – but what does it mean to us?

So I asked the panellists to describe what systemic change means for them, to share their most radical dreams of change for our industry. It started off well, with speakers imagining a time when sustainable lifestyles, businesses and communities were no longer the exception but norm; a time when we stop glamorising high-carbon lifestyles and when care for each other and our environment is no longer a choice but second nature. But within a very brief time, we found ourselves back in our TV-industry safe zone, discussing the technicalities of green production and what best generator to use – that’s undoubtedly good management – but a sizeable leap away from developing leadership on the subject.

We all have our world views. Mine revolves around the firm belief that capitalism as we know it — the grand colonial project — is well past its sell-by date. Arguably, global economic growth leads to increased consumption of natural resources, pollution and loss of biodiversity whilst simultaneously widening the gap between wealthy and poor. It’s not a view shared by everyone, but all stories have a legitimate place at the table, because we all need to question, challenge and interrogate the status quo. We must all be brave enough to ask those uncomfortable questions to assess, honestly and unflinchingly, how we are doing.

Producer Eric Vogel, CEO of Norway’s Torden Film, was at Content London to discuss his Rose d’Or-winning film Dome 16, a futuristic sci-fi climate drama for young adults. I was particularly struck by his remark that a core objective of the film was to show that, even in dystopia, there is love and laughter, human stories and connections.

Thanks Eric. I’ve been searching all year for a liminal space between what is and what will be — a place between blind faith and doom. We don’t, any of us, know what’s coming. We can only attempt to continue to build something new that has a better chance of delivering justice and equity for all. So I’ll be waving goodbye to 2023 on a triumphant wave of dys-hope-ia. Good luck!