Why sustainability needs allies not gatekeepers

I’m going to say something that might be uncomfortable.

I lead sustainability at a company that many people believe shouldn’t exist. I hear it at conferences. I see it in comment sections. I feel it in the way certain rooms shift when I introduce myself. I choose this work anyway — because I believe the most meaningful impact happens when you transform industries from within, not when you stand outside and critique them.

So when I see parts of the sustainability community react to any recognition of “difficult” companies with outrage (calling it a travesty, questioning the methodology, listing fossil fuel and tobacco companies as if their mere presence invalidates everything) I want to ask a genuine question:

Do we want transformation, or do we want purity? Because we cannot have both.

If sustainability leadership only counts when it comes from companies that were born clean, we’re not measuring leadership. We’re measuring luck.

And here’s what makes it worse: the timing. We are living through a moment where the very idea of sustainability is under attack. And instead of uniting behind everyone who is fighting to make the case that businesses can and must operate within planetary and social boundaries, we’re policing who deserves to be in the conversation, drawing lines around who’s pure enough to belong.

Let’s also be honest: there is a particular pleasure in the quick take. The one-word dismissal that earns engagement without requiring a single moment of curiosity. It’s easy to tear down a ranking without reading a single sustainability report from the companies on it. It’s easy to list people’s names as if the company they work for alone tells you everything you need to know. It’s much harder to sit with complexity. To read. To ask questions. To engage with the difficult and frustrating reality of what transformation actually looks like from the inside.

The hardest sustainability work in the world is happening inside companies that have to fundamentally reimagine their business model, their product proposition, their supply chains, their reason for existing. That work is messy. It’s imperfect. It invites criticism from people who’ve never had to make a single trade-off at scale.

When we dismiss that work (when we gatekeep who “deserves” to be called a leader) we don’t protect sustainability’s credibility. We shrink it. Progress doesn’t only count when it comes from comfortable places. In fact, the progress that matters most, almost never does.

Sustainability doesn’t need gatekeepers. It needs allies. Accountability for results, yes. Always. But dismissing companies by their origins rather than their trajectory? That’s biased and reductive. And reductive thinking has never moved sustainability forward.

This article is also published on LinkedIn. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

Sustainability needs facts, not just promises. illuminem’s Data Hub™ gives you transparent emissions data, corporate climate targets, and performance benchmarks for thousands of companies worldwide.