The role that government, brands, and individuals play in sustainability
by Claire Shay
Lately, all we have heard on the news is talks of climate summits, protests, and how sustainability will play a big role in the fashion industry in 2020. Bloggers and social media influencers (myself included) focused on sustainable fashion are on the rise. Amidst all of the chatter about sustainability, we overlook the most important aspect. We need real change and that begins by holding everyone accountable. In order to hold every player accountable, we need to understand what it is we need to hold everyone accountable for. After all, the teacher cannot grade the student’s test without the answers. The responsibility for enforcing sustainability can be divvied up amongst 3 players: governments, private companies, and the people.
Claire featuring sustainability in her February 2019 New York Fashion Week look, including a sustainably made, organic cotton top, a rented faux fur coat, and a skirt purchased in 2015.
I have found that the best metaphor for explaining the responsibility of the government, companies, and the people can be explained through the three branches of the United States’ government. Congress creates laws, the Executive branch enforces the law, and the Supreme Court interprets the law. Using this same example, we can liken world governments to Congress. Governments are responsible for creating meaningful legislation that will hold everyone accountable to being sustainable. Companies have the responsibility of interpreting the legislation; they will act as the Supreme Court as they determine the best course of action for how to operate in a sustainable manner. Lastly, we the people are the Executive branch. We have the power to hold governments and companies responsible.
Let’s put this model for change into a real world example to showcase how we can utilize this example in the case for sustainability.
The stock market crash and subsequent financial crisis in 2008 created the world economic disaster since the stock market crash in 1929 that triggered the Great Depression. Several factors led to the financial crisis in 2008, but it can primarily be summed up as thus:
Housing prices had finally start to decline in 2006, triggering many people to take out loans they cannot pay back to buy houses and take advantage of low prices. Because the government did not regulate how lenders offered home mortgages, lenders offered more and more mortgages to those they typically would not extend a loan to (people with poor credit, no steady source of income, etc.). The greed of the banks kicked in when these mortgages were packaged up and traded on in the stock market. This behavior ballooned up until the “bubble” finally burst. People couldn’t pay back their loans and lost their homes. Lenders were left with billions of unpaid loans to cover, and banks were left holding the worthless stocked that caused them to lose billions. The government had to then step in and save the economy from total collapse through bailing out the banks.
The 2008 financial crisis serves as a template for how government, companies, and the people have to work together in order to prevent disaster. We are at the brink of an unprecedented climate disaster in our Earth’s history. We as consumers have acted very much as people did in 2006 when it comes to our shopping habits. We buy more and more and more, depleting the available resources of our Earth and raking up a cost that we cannot pay back to our planet. World governments have more or less looked on helplessly, content to let fast fashion companies such as H&M and Zara trick their customers into thinking they are buying sustainable when these companies are creating more waste than ever. This bubble will pop, our Earth’s resources will be completely depleted, and the result will be a barren wasteland of garbage that no amount of money can rescue. Unlike the financial crisis, there is no Option B for the government to inject money and save the planet from utter destruction. There is no Planet B.
Claire at the United Nations in September 2019 attending a conference for leaders in the media industry to promote the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals