Business and Environmental Sustainability

This paper is about what some have called "the next industrial revolution."1 My starting assumption is that in the early years of the twenty-first century humanity is faced with a cluster of significant economic, ecological, and ethical challenges. Extreme poverty, exacerbated by a cycle of political repression, war, famine, disease, and natural disasters, confronts hundreds of millions of people on a daily basis. Throughout the world, hundreds of millions of human beings struggle just to get the basic necessities of life: clean water, nutritious food, shelter, health care, education, jobs. Population growth guarantees that these problems will only intensify in the immediate future. Justice and common decency, as well as self-interest, requires that these problems be addressed by those living in the economically developed world. Addressing these challenges will require significant global economic activity, integrated with social and political leadership. However, the earth's biosphere, ultimately the only source for all this economic activity, is already under severe stress from just the type of economic growth that many assume is the solution to these challenges. These factors will require that business in the twenty-first century be practiced in a way that is economically vibrant enough to address the real needs of billions of people, yet ecologically informed so that the earth's capacity to support life is not diminished by that activity and ethically sensitive enough that the human dignity is not lost or violated in the process.