Sustainability or PR exercise?

I'm glad I slept in a bit this morning. I've been off work for the last three days of the week, but I was spending lots of time at the Globe 2008 conference, where I was volunteering. Three days of conference, walking around, greeting delegates, answering questions tired me out. It's hard being pleasant eight hours a day ;)

There a few things I enjoyed about the conference: meeting other volunteers (many interested in sustainability), getting acquainted with clean tech companies in the Trade Fair, some of the panels where the discussion was made lively by involving the attendees or having a good representation of various stakeholders in the panel speakers. As far as networking was concerned, I think volunteering made it hard to have meaningful conversations with delegates, as we were always pulled away from our posts to help with various tasks.

There are several things I didn't particularly enjoy though: delegates who walked in and out of conference rooms throughout presentations (people walking in 45 minutes late), delegates not turning off their cell phones and letting it ring as they rushed out of the conference room (brilliant), and panels that were often one-sided and not really addressing the sensitive points of a given topic. I think the conference could have also benefited from networking rooms. They were serving coffee between sessions, but the coffee tables were in the corridors and there didn't seem to be enough sofas for people to sit down and catch up with other attendees. Finally, neither the Trade Fair nor the conference were very green, with lots of promotional material printed on glossy paper, lots of cheap, plastic swag, a delegate bag made out of nylon or soft plastic that had a terrible chemical smell and since the coffee breaks only started after the first session (no coffee before the morning session), delegates were forced to get coffee from Starbucks or Tim Hortons, usually in single-use paper cups.

I do think a lot of the presentations were also PR for the oil and gas industry in Canada. I cannot belittle the effort made by these companies towards reducing their environmental and social impact, but when their core operations are so damaging in the first place, the concept of sustainable business practices by these companies is hard to swallow. I recently rented a movie by the NFB called The Refugees of the Blue Planet. This documentary discusses the impact of "development" by large multinationals on rural communities across the world. Many of these refugees are in developing or third-world countries, but the film also talks about Alberta where family farms are slowly being shut down by the drilling of H2S (sour gas) wells close to their homes. Farmers end up in evacuation areas where they would be required to leave at a few hour's notice to avoid being exposed to toxic levels of the gas. I'm pretty sure all the major companies involved in the drilling have sustainability departments and publish detailed yearly reports about their environmental and community initiatives. Hard to swallow.

I heard from many delegates who were also unimpressed with many of the panels. Session attendees often tried to challenge panelists to answer some difficult questions, but the answers they got were often vague or blatantly avoided the questions. On a dialogue about the partnership between NGOs and companies, one attendee asked a panelist to provide examples where their relationship with NGOs went beyond philanthropy, where the company had listened to the NGO and then changed some of their business practices accordingly. The company representative had spent his entire speaking time listing contribution made by his employer to non-profit organizations, but could not give any examples of changed practices as the result of a partnership with one of these organizations. Interesting "partnership" indeed.