Today’s treatment of our environment is tomorrow’s slavery

The pain and suffering that continues to be caused by slavery, despite its abolition nearly 200 years ago, is provoking apologies, reparations and changes to townscapes across the country so that the racists who exploited the slave trade are no longer celebrated. High profile businesses and institutions have pledged to try to put right at least some of the damage caused by their forebears. That may have occurred two, three or four centuries ago, but there are many living today who bear the legacy of the enforced movement of people from homelands in Africa to the Americas. Few arguments are raised in objection. Slavery is simply a crime, a stain on humanity.

In a generation or two the same will be true of environmental damage caused by today’s businesses, printers and publishers included. How will it be possible that people running businesses at the start of the 21st century knew about the damage caused by greenhouse gases, understood the damage that PVC and some other plastics can cause, ignored alternative sources of energy by burning fossil fuels, and did little or nothing to prevent damage to the environment that in 50 years’ time will be all too obvious? Companies will surely be held to account, if not by members of the public, then by governments imposing retrospective taxes to try to put right the damage that is has occurred because business declined to make changes in the here and now in 2023.

Very few print businesses today have any direct connection to the age of slavery and very few printers can expect to be in continuous ownership 50 years down the line. This may explain why relatively few UK print businesses are actively reducing impacts. If there were any hope or expectation that today’s print businesses would be around in some guise, today’s leaders might make different choices and might look to the long term. The long term doesn’t matter if the plan is for the business “to see me out”. In that instance it can be business as usual or simply paying lip service to addressing the environmental concerns of customers and other stakeholders. But even if the business does not endure, the children and grandchildren of today’s owners will be around to suffer the consequences of lack of action today. Generations to come will blame those in charge today just as the finger is pointed at those in charge of slave traders in the eighteenth century.