Sustainability needs realism to work, part II

(This note follows on from an earlier one, Sustainability needs realism to work. If you want the first half of the argument, it's here: https://www.jeroenwats.com/notes/sustainability-needs-realism-to-work)

I own a Range Rover. I've wanted one since I was a boy, and years later I ended up working at Land Rover, a job I genuinely loved, every single day of it. Owning one now isn't an accident, it's something I chased for a long time.

I don't drive it often, it comes out for hauling gear, for launching the odd sailing boat, and most often for taking the dogs to the beach. I maintain it properly rather than replacing it every few years. None of that changes what it is. It's still a 4.4 litre V8, sitting on my driveway, and driving it less doesn't make it the right choice. It just makes it a slightly less frequent wrong one.

Part one of this argued that binary thinking, clean or dirty, right or wrong, creates distance instead of progress. I wrote that easily enough about EVs and petrochemical dashboards, interior elements and bumpers. It's harder to write about the car on your own driveway.

So here's where I actually stand. I've spent years working out what happens to a composite yacht hull once its racing life ends, trying to build something that doesn't just become landfill. I also own a car built entirely against that same instinct. Both things are true about the same person, at the same time, and I'm not going to pretend one cancels out the other, or that keeping this one maintained instead of buying a new one somehow balances the ledger. It doesn't.

It's no different from someone who eats carefully all week and still lights the occasional cigarette, or pours the glass of wine nobody would call necessary. Nobody's fooling themselves that the cigarette is fine because it's rare. It's a guilty pleasure, plainly, kept in check rather than justified. That's genuinely what this is too.

What I've come to think is that demanding total consistency is usually the wrong demand. If the only people allowed to talk about sustainability are the ones who've already got every part of their life perfectly sorted, almost nobody qualifies. That's not a high bar, it's a wall, and walls don't move anyone forward, they just let people opt out entirely, telling themselves they'll engage properly once everything else is fixed first. Which never quite happens.

I'd rather be the version of this that's actually true. Someone who eats less meat during the week and still owns a V8 he's not ready to give up. Someone building circular materials while occasionally driving something that works against everything that work stands for. Not because the contradiction is fine, it isn't, but because pretending it doesn't exist helps nobody, and refusing to act until it's resolved helps even less.

Progress was never going to come from spotless people. It comes from people willing to admit exactly where they stand, contradictions included, and still choose to do the next right thing anyway.