Two Conferences, One Message: Sustainability Needs a Bigger Tent

Last week, two members of our team attended very different sustainability conferences: one at the B Lab Champions Retreat, the other at EarthX. Both came back with a surprising amount of common ground.

B Lab drew a crowd of certified B Corps, social enterprise advocates, and purpose-driven business leaders. EarthX brought together scientists, explorers, investors, and major corporations, many of them not traditionally associated with the sustainability world. The audiences and the language used were different, but the underlying tension was the same: how do we stop preaching to the choir and actually move the needle?

From architects to builders

One of the most striking moments at the B Lab Champions Retreat came when Dr Michael McAfee  from PolicyLink challenged the B Corp community to shift its identity. For 20 years, B Corps have been what one speaker called "frontier architects," proving that a new kind of economy is possible. Now, the call is to become builders: to take that blueprint and start reshaping the broader economy, policies and all. That means working with organizations outside the comfortable, values-aligned community B Corps have created, and it means updating the standards to match. The new B Corp framework moves from a flexible points-based system to a pass/fail model with seven areas of accountability, designed to create more consistency and, ultimately, more collective impact.  Finally, the Retreat was the launch of a new collaboration between PolicyLink, B-Lab, and White Men for Racial Justice for a broadened policy collective action initiative. 

The ROI question isn't going away

At EarthX, the conversation was less philosophical and more blunt: where's the money, and who's making it? Speaker and author Andrew Winston made the case that the ROI on sustainability is both real and increasingly urgent. Countries like China and India are outpacing the U.S. in clean energy investment, and companies that don't move risk being left behind. The circular economy framing was similar; at every stage of a supply chain, there is value to be captured from waste. As our own Hannah Zimmerman observed after the conference, "You have the money, and we have the ideas. Let's just figure out how to do this together." The challenge isn't the idea; it's making the connection between the people with the solutions and the people with the capital.

The language problem

Both conferences surfaced a version of the same issue that the sustainability world has a language problem. Jargon and politically charged terms are getting in the way of the very coalitions we need to build. At EarthX, the push was to drop loaded terminology. "Circular economy," for example, immediately reads as environmental to some audiences, when really it's just smart resource management. At B Lab, our Pip Cross noticed the same dynamic in real time: "Every now and then, I would find myself hearing an acronym I didn't know. And every time somebody asked me to clarify one of mine, it was a really good reminder of how we're working in our silos." 

What actually moves people

Perhaps the most memorable thread from EarthX wasn't about data or policy at all. It was about beauty. Several speakers, including scientists and ocean researchers, argued that the most effective tool for rebuilding public trust in science isn't a better statistic. It's a better story. One speaker described the astronauts returning from a recent mission to the moon. They didn’t really talk about the moon but rather described our home planet as a fragile, luminous oasis in our otherwise empty solar system; it cut through in a way that emissions charts rarely do. Hannah summed it up simply: "We have kind of lost that in the conversation. People care about keeping our planet beautiful. If we could get back to asking what we actually want, I think we'd find a lot more common ground." Showing people what there is to protect, and making them feel something about it, may matter more right now than any reporting framework.

The common thread

What both conferences made clear is that the sustainability movement is at an inflection point. The moral case still matters, but it can't be the only case. The business case still matters, but it needs to be broadened beyond short-term ROI. And the people doing the work can't keep talking only to each other. Whether it's farmers, investors, or policymakers, the path forward runs through unusual alliances, translated language, and a willingness to meet people where they are.

We don't have to agree on everything. We just have to agree on enough.