This week we sit down with Olly Lawder, a strategist and storyteller with extensive experience in sustainability communications. We trace the arc of sustainability communication from its origins in corporate philanthropy and early CSR, through the rise of ambitious net zero targets and "rock star CEOs," to the more cautious and compliance-driven moment we find ourselves in today. Along the way, we ask an uncomfortable question: did the movement win over the corporate world while losing voters and consumers?

Olly has spent 20 years helping major global brands figure out how to make sustainable choices genuinely desirable, not as a moral duty, but as something people actually want. The closer sustainability gets to the real reason someone buys something, the more powerful it becomes. Nobody buys a perfume for the recycled packaging. But if the sustainably sourced vanilla makes it smell more complex, more unique, more seductive? 

We dig into why terms like "net zero" and "degrowth" leave people cold, what the fossil fuel industry understands about communications that the sustainability movement still doesn't, and why the pendulum will eventually have to swing back, because none of the fundamental problems have gone away.

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