Is it possible to be apolitical and care about sustainability?

This isn’t a rhetorical question. It’s one that cuts to the heart of what kind of person and professional I believe I can be.

I’m a technical guy. I studied chemical engineering and worked as a process engineer and technical sustainability consultant for years. I also lecture in engineering and sustainable development at two universities. I’m very left brained; I love mathematics, physics, computing, statistics and the engineering sciences. I also love engineering design — how to apply the principles of engineering to real problems.

In that context politics hasn’t really come into what I do. Someone comes to me with a specific problem or design they want done and I go away and do it. If it requires me to learn a specific piece of environmental legislation, for instance, then I simply treat that as another input into the problem set. How or why that law came into being hasn’t been relevant to me. For my teaching there is a syllabus and a set of outcomes that determine what I do.

I care about the environment; after all, that’s why I work in the environmental field. But this has always been driven by data and scientific concerns — not a political viewpoint.

In a sense, that pragmatic, data-driven attitude enables a kind of naive approach to working in the environmental space. It’s a narrow blinkered view that abdicates the goals and the motivations for my work to someone else; a client, a government body, a professional authority.

However, I’m now working independently for the first time in my career. This has required me to think more deeply about the reasons for what I do. It also demands that I consider the kind of clients and projects that I want to pursue — something I never really needed to do previously.

I’m also becoming much more aware (mainly via Twitter and LinkedIn) of how many people form their world view from the opposite direction; they start with a political perspective or ideology, and this drives their opinions. This applies to Left and Right proponents alike. Data, objectivity and science don’t seem to come into it, except where such sources feed the political person’s confirmation bias.

I find this approach discomforting. For one, it’s vulnerable to shocks as new or irrefutable information comes to light. Tying one’s world view, and in a sense one’s identity, to a political ideology can be risky. It also means you risk losing yourself in conspiracy theories and distorted thinking as you try and protect your world view from new evidence or developments.

I don’t claim to be objective. I know I have my biases and my foibles just like everyone else. I think the difference is I’m prepared to bend or completely change my view if the evidence is of sufficient quality.

This leads me to a challenging place. The standards, goals and objectives in our society are set at the top: government, big business, institutions. These are all inherently political organisations, run by political people. If I, as a sustainability professional, want to be more effective and make more of an impact in my work, I may need to get uncomfortable and start playing the political game. I may need to consider alliances with people with similar goals to me, even if I find their reasoning flawed, their economic ideas flaky, or their prejudices jarring.

Do the ends of being an effective sustainability professional justify the means of politicising myself? I wish this question were easy to answer.