Can we stop pussy-footing around the big sustainability issues and tell it like it is? We need radical change quickly, but businesses still thinks it's something to look at once the economy is sorted!

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Rapid mass scale change IS possible but only when a tipping point is reached across all areas of human activity and, Occupy Tent Cities apart, we are nowhere near that yet. These are signs of a mass awakening by people but not by business - who, by and large, see such activities as being done by misguided out of work woolly liberals...

Further, barring Sarah's world leader scenario happening soon - and we all know that will not happen - the most effective driver of wide-scale change is going to be new businesses set up from scratch who do not have to be tied to the status quo in anything they do. Businesses are needed that do EVERYTHING differently from the conventional at the outset and so prove that sustainable business IS possible. And that it can create outcomes that don't look that much different from the conventional and that the Hair Shirt has been washed in fabric softener. When such business set up and make their way commercially against the dying tide of the past is what will mark the moment at which corporations generally are forced to take stock of their own activities and either throw in the towel or turn themselves upside down to survive - because the paradigm businesses will be more efficient at every level in all of their activities than any conventional business.

This is reiteration: Existing businesses find it impossible to become sustainable just because that's the way it is - it means too much change without any immediately visible benefits.

There needs to be clear example of businesses who do everything in a sustainable way - from sourcing raw materials to their refinement, manufacture, distribution, bringing to market, consumption and disposal - and paying detailed attention to all aspects of everything else that I've missed out in the supply chain - through to how people are employed, how they use and interact with their environment and the workplace and how they manage its energy energy consumption. And all that stuff.

The only barrier to that happening is skepticism that doing anything different from the norm can generate financial returns - and there not being business leaders wanting to make the change who have the experience to start up from scratch and are taken seriously by sources of seed capital. RIch bastards aren't likely to invest when they can still make unreasonable returns in the conventional economy.

Without the example the status quo will not alter substantially.