Profiting From the Crisis

The sustainability industry is growing faster than the crisis it claims to solve. As ecological collapse deepens, the market built to manage it expands in parallel. That correlation should trouble us, because it raises an uncomfortable possibility: what if the system was never designed to eliminate the problem, but to sustain it?

In 1980, the French philosopher Michel Serres published Le Parasite, a book built on a striking claim. The parasite, Serres argued, is not an external anomaly that invades a system from outside. It is a constitutive element of the system itself. Serres layers three meanings of the word 'parasite' — the biological organism, the social freeloader, and noise in a communication channel — and in doing so exposes an unsettling pattern: beneath every ordered relationship lies an asymmetric chain of extraction. The parasite does not destroy its host. It transforms the host, usually to its own advantage.

What does this have to do with the sustainability industry? Consider the numbers. The global ESG advisory market has surpassed $40 billion and is projected to reach $80 billion by 2030. Add carbon markets, certification schemes, ESG data providers and reporting software, and the total climbs into the hundreds of billions. What feeds this industry? Unsustainability itself. The deeper the ecological crisis, the larger the market becomes. Had emissions fallen, biodiversity loss halted, and water stress eased, the industry's reason for being would have shrunk — or changed beyond recognition.

None of this requires bad faith. Thinkers like Ivan Illich analyzed the tendency of modern institutions to generate the very problems they claim to solve. Institutions, Illich argued, typically begin with the intention of solving a problem, but over time evolve into mechanisms that reproduce it. The sustainability industry operates on a similar logic. It sustains itself by converting unsustainability into something measurable, manageable, and trackable. The system was not built to eliminate the problem outright — it was built to make the problem administrable. This is not an individual moral failure; it is a structural condition. Everyone inside the system — myself included — may genuinely want better outcomes. But the system does not reward outcomes. It rewards process.

The third layer of Serres's parasite is noise in communication. Information theory, thanks to Claude Shannon, tells us that once a message exceeds a channel's capacity, it stops carrying information and becomes noise. This is precisely what the sustainability industry now produces. The volume of sustainability data an average public company generates today dwarfs what it produced a decade ago. Frameworks have multiplied — GRI, TCFD, CSRD, CDP among them. Yet more data has not led to better decisions. If anything, the abundance of data has legitimized inaction. 'We don't have enough data yet' has become the most sophisticated form of procrastination available to any organization. The results speak for themselves: more reporting, more frameworks, a bigger industry — and global emissions still setting records. Correlation is not causation, but the parallel growth of the industry and the persistence of the crisis suggests that expansion is compatible with the crisis becoming chronic, not with its resolution.

Complexity in these frameworks is not a natural law; it is a design choice. Consider the technical intricacies of the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), CSRD's double materiality principle, or the EU taxonomy's screening criteria. Each has a legitimate purpose. But is this level of complexity truly necessary — or do the industry actors embedded in standard-setting processes (consultants, rating agencies, software vendors, audit firms) have a structural interest in preserving it?

Turkey offers a concrete illustration. CBAM has placed enormous compliance pressure on Turkish exporters. Yet rather than building internal capacity, most companies outsource the work. Knowledge is not transferred; it is rented. When the service provider leaves, institutional memory disappears with them. This is not capacity-building — it is dependency-building. And the industry has structural incentives to sustain that dependency.

This essay is itself part of the industry it critiques. Writing about sustainability adds to its noise. But acknowledging that is not surrender — it is an attempt to start from a more honest place. What we may need is not more data, but less data that means more. Not more frameworks, but fewer, more accessible ones. Not a bigger industry, but a smaller, more effective one. We must confront this honestly. Otherwise the sustainability sector will remain indistinguishable from Serres's parasite: a structure that claims to transform its host, while ultimately feeding off it.