It is time that we put climate at the forefront of everything we do and start saying no to jobs that falsely claim to benefit the environment, writes Tullia Jack, Associate Professor of Service Management
This is a debate article. The opinions expressed are the authors own.
Dear students,
This is not a drill.
When I started teaching sustainable fashion in 2012, ”sustainability” was still daggy, hempy and a bit embarrassing. Back then, my students were just beginning to grasp the scale of the problem, but once they saw it, they couldn’t un‑see it. Their projects were messy and sometimes naïve, but they were trying with their whole selves to live as if the climate crisis was real.
Most of you can recite the crisis perfectly: 1.5 degrees, tipping points, IPCC, planetary boundaries, you probably even know the SDGs off by heart. And then, in the next breath, many of you tell me your dream is a sustainability role at a major oil company or fast‑fashion brand, ideally with an international relocation package and a fancy job title.
David Graeber called them ”bullshit jobs”, roles so pointless that even the person doing them suspects society could function fine without them. In sustainability, we’ve invented a sub‑species: green bullshit jobs. The ones that massage emission inventories, polish ”net zero by 2050” brochures, or design the reusable cup campaign for an airline that keeps opening new routes.
Here’s the hard part: I am scared I am helping train you for precisely these green bullshit jobs. Are my classes a conveyor belt into the greenwashing departments of organisations still betting on a cooked planet?
In 2018 hundreds of thousands of students signed pledges not to work for companies expanding fossil fuel extraction, and to use your leverage to push institutions to divest. I was proud, inspired, a bit in awe. What happened to you?
I want us to practice refusal.
I lecture about climate justice, sacrifice zones, frontline communities already losing homes, livelihoods and lives. Then I mark essays about green influencers, sustainable energy drinks and innovative budget airlines.
Something is rotten in the state of sustainability.
Yes, the climate crisis is terrifying, and we have to deal with it in digestible chunks. I tell myself that wanting a salary and some stability is not a moral failure. But I still wonder if I am failing you, and if we are all, collectively, failing the moment we are living in.
So here is what I actually want for us.
I want us to treat the climate and biodiversity crises as the non‑negotiable background of everything we do. Not just a themed week. I want us to centre climate justice. To trace how profits depend on extractive supply chains, unpaid care, land grabs – and to sit with the communities resisting that, not as stakeholders, but as political actors we stand alongside.
I want us to practice refusal. To treat saying NO as a skill. That might mean asking uncomfortable questions in job interviews, writing rejection emails to employers whose business model conflicts with your values, or joining others to push your future workplace, or this university, to change.
I don’t need you to be pure. I need you to be awake, situated, conflicted – and still willing to act. This is not a drill. This is your one wild and precious life, in the only climate we will ever have.
With love, frustration and stubborn hope,
Tullia Jack, Associate Professor of Service Management
