Green Action: Creating Sustainable Communities - Mar 2010

Fast Company is a business magazine that has enjoyed a lot of success in recent years in the United States. It started out in the mid-1990s, covering mostly the dot.com boom and since has established itself as a magazine that tracks "the next big thing" in business. Green has been a boon for Fast Company.  You cannot pick up an issue without finding articles like this: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/120/50-ways-to-green-your-business.html

Your assignment this week is to try to determine how a business (through its website) is practicing sustainability.  This is territory fraught with disagreements among critics, thinkers, journalists, watchdog agencies, governments, business leaders and on and on.  At the heart of this is the debate (ecological, economic, social, philosophical, mathematical . . .) over whether you can have economic growth and environmental sustainability (and social equity). 

Edward Abbey--who's writings about wilderness inspired the formation of EarthFirst! in the 1980s, a group that would commit "ecotage," or, sabotage of road-building equipment, dams, etc, on behalf of protecting nature--once wrote: "Growth for growth's sake is the ideology of the cancer cell."

Paul Hawken (a sustainabilty guru) is not oppositional to capitalism, per se, but instead champions "Natural Capitalism," as one of his books is titled.  In other words, Hawken emphasizes developing business practice, economic systems and personal behavior that are more in step with ecological verities.  The notion of a triple bottom line develops over the 1990s and becomes a differentiator for "green businesses."  Of course, this differentiator also provides market advantages: "triple net lease" if you're building and renting a green building, for example. 

Some of the world's major multinationals have gone seriously green in recent years: at least with their marketing.  Stop and think about how many wind turbines you have seen in advertisements, websites, commercials and then ask yourself how many of these do you actually see where you live (with the exception of Northern Europe and a few other spots around the globe).  Wind turbines sell, as Madison Avenue knows.

Sorting out what is a legitimate green business and what is not, or if measuring a country's GDP or GPI is what we need to be doing as global citizens and watchdogs, or creating green jobs or designing greener stuff that we sit on, drive, build with--all of these issues and many more swirl around the debate, spoken or not, about whether contemporary human economic activities can be non destructive to our planet.

If you want to read a smart, acerbic, funny and angry critic of American capitalism, read James Howard Kunstler's blog.

John