|
Sustainability currently ranks as one of the most popular programs
being touted by management consultants, business gurus and MBA educators.
As with so many programs for "business excellence" that
have gained popularity in the past fifty years - including synergy,
strategic cost management, total quality, reengineering, organizational
learning, lean manufacturing, leadership, innovation and more -
sustainability promises great benefits. But just like those past
programs, it does not encourage business leaders to reconsider conventional
thinking about what it means to do business. Consequently, sustainability
programs build on the flawed assumption that economic well-being
depends upon endless growth - a growth that is now occurring at
a suicidal rate.
"...sustainability
promises great benefits...[but] it does not encourage business leaders
to reconsider conventional thinking..."
It is a well-known fact that our push for ceaseless economic growth
is creating very adverse conditions for life as humans have always
known it on Earth. Driven for fifty-some years by the imperative
to maximize their owners' financial wealth, businesses relentlessly
produce more and more goods for humans to consume. "Restraint"
and "moderation" are no more words in their lexicon than
is awareness of Earth's inability to sustain this wild production
pace. Addressing the adverse impact of this production on Earth's
system calls for new ways to think about doing business.
Today, the industrial economy uses Earth's resources at rates that
hugely exceed the capacity of Earth to regenerate and restore those
resources. Making this possible is the fact that humans in the past
century began to generate energy from Earth's fixed supply of fossil
fuel at a rate several thousand times the rate at which the Sun
supplies energy to the Earth each day. Over a few billion years,
Earth's life-support systems adapted remarkably well to the Sun's
daily supply of energy. Then, the human economy recently imposed
a wildly extravagant flow of new energy onto those support systems,
significantly dislocating the chemical balance of Earth's atmosphere
and causing increased and intensified human occupation and degradation
of Earth's habitat. In turn, this atmospheric dislocation and habitat
disruption have resulted in long-term climate change and a sharp
rise in extinction of non-human life species.
If, as many experts claim, business activities are primarily responsible
for severely diminishing Earth's resources and throwing the ecosystem
into dangerous imbalance, surely business leaders must revise the
way they think about their mission. However, sustainability programs
do not seem to be altering their basic, conventional assumptions
about the role of business in society. Advocates of sustainability
do propose changing the way businesses design, produce, and sell
the products that most humans consume. These sustainability programs
advocate that businesses promote "eco-efficiency," the
steady pursuit of ways to produce each unit of output with less
energy and less raw material, especially less fossil fuel. Unfortunately,
sustainability programs do not introduce new ways of thinking about
the purpose of business, notably the notion that a business exists
to maximize its owners' financial wealth. Because sustainability
programs do not question conventional thinking, they do not mitigate
the drive to sell more and more. That imperative remains intact,
unchallenged. Consequently, gains in resource efficiency that sustainability
programs achieve are invariably offset by increases in total output.
Eco-efficiency is not sufficient to eliminate the problem that our
industrial growth economy poses for Earth's ecosystem because it
does nothing to question the thinking that originally created the
problem it is trying to solve. New thinking is required that challenges
the accepted idea that economic welfare requires humans to consume
more and businesses to grow year after year after year. Whereas
sustainability programs currently encourage people to improve how
efficiently they perform an activity, they ought to be asking...
[continued from email newsletter]
…instead, whether people should be engaged in the activity
at all. Every business that advocates sustainability should ask:
Is our way of doing things compatible with stable, just communities
and a robust planetary ecosystem that sustains all life?
Sustainability programs will only make a profound, lasting, and
constructive difference for society and Earth when they reflect
new thinking based on new values. Programs in place today place
a high value on finding environmentally efficient ways to produce
more and more goods for consumers and gaining increased financial
wealth for owners of capital. At best, they reflect the interest
of companies that want above all to do business as usual but that
are willing, to their credit, to make some modifications to limit
the destruction. Limiting the destruction, however, is not enough.
Sustainability programs need to value something other than merely
helping businesses contain the damage as they sell more and increase
total output.
If they are to genuinely help humans survive on this planet, sustainability
programs must reflect new thinking. New thinking informed by modern
science recognizes that as long as business activities center on
helping only humans thrive, the planet's health will decline rapidly.
The only truly sustainable business practices are those that permit
all life to continue undiminished, indefinitely. Practices designed
to achieve this end must balance two imperatives. First, they must
be able to provide humans the things they need to flourish in their
unique habitat. Second, they must do nothing to impair the ability
of all other life systems to thrive in their habitats. The level
of thinking implicit in this definition of sustainability radically
shifts the focus of economic discourse. Instead of focusing on the
imperative of growth and the problem of "externalities"
the discussion now shifts to the issue of fulfilling human needs
and nurturing human talents in the context of Earth's capacity to
produce and regenerate resources. And instead of turning to abstract
theories of markets, prices and finance to define economic and social
questions, attention now shifts to concrete knowledge of bio- and
geo-systems that enlightens us about Earth's capacities - and limits
- to support all life.
When sustainability programs raise informed questions that reflect
a deep knowledge of ecology and cosmology, sustainability leaders
will inevitably reject many currently popular answers to human social
and economic problems. They will see, for example, that "competitive
free market" solutions to such problems actually weaken the
cooperative, communal bonds that characterize, and preserve, all
living systems. Moreover, they will understand, just as surely as
the concept of "flat earth" is wrong, so the concept of
independence as a condition that supports life is wrong. Bonds and
relationships pervade Earth, uniting all living systems. These relationships,
not competitive struggle among independent systems, sustain and
enrich life. Finally, as their scientific knowledge of Earth's system
further deepens, sustainability leaders will realize that private
ownership of more than one's immediate living space is inconsistent
with any system that operates like Earth's ecosystem.
Sustainability is not something for we humans to define in terms
compatible with human intellectual abstractions. It is not a practice
we invent to apply to economic and social affairs. Sustainability
is a condition that already exists. It is there, where it has been
for over 4 billion years, in Earth's magnificently evolving system.
The relationships in this intricate system nurture and sustain all
life. Any human theory of economic or social activity that is not
grounded in, and supportive of, Earth's system is not going to help
us keep this planet a comfortable home "unto the seventh generation."
For example, "triple bottom line" is a concept not grounded
in a sound understanding of Earth's dynamic system of interrelationships.
It invites us to think about the dynamic and multi-dimensional interrelationships
between Earth's ecosystem and human activity through the one-dimensional
and linear quantitative language of finance, economics and accounting.
Instead of using the triple bottom line to reduce all human and
environmental issues to the language of economics and finance, true
sustainability programs require a concept that discourses about
economic issues using the language of relationships and community,
the language of Gaia. What if our behavior makes it impossible for
Earth to sustain human life as we know it? All the sustainability
programs in the world that seek results by making adjustments to
the status quo cannot do enough to guarantee true sustainability.
Only thinking at a new level can do that. Sustainability programs
need to transcend our conventional economic and social ideas and
focus with laser-like attention on one paramount concern: living
in harmony with Earth's entire biosystem, with all life, and maintaining
the bonds and relationships that enable such harmony. We need to
live nature's way, fitting in and cooperating, not compelling, competing
and destroying.
Dr. Tom Johnson, a Professor of Business Administration
at the Portland State University School of Business Administration,
has authored numerous papers and books including Profit Beyond
Measure and Relevance Lost, and was a featured keynote
speaker and workshop leader at several In2:InThinking Network conferences.
|
