It costs the same to send a person to prison or to Harvard. The difference is the curriculum.
Green business is not about tie-dyed T-shirts. It’s about transforming the industrial system itself into one that looks at all the connections.
We are speeding up our lives and working harder in a futile attempt to buy the time to slow down and enjoy it.
Businesses who are members of Businesses for Social Responsibility or the Social Venture Network are internalizing costs on a voluntary basis and therefore raising their costs of doing business, but their competitors are not required to.
How much harm does a company have to do before we question its right to exist?
When the planes still swoop down and aerial spray a field in order to kill a predator insect with pesticides, we are in the Dark Ages of commerce.
Local companies don’t have to internalize their costs, and few actually do, but they tend to more often because the owners live there and they have to show their face in town, and their kids play with other kids.
Luck is earned. Luck is working so hard at your craft, service or enterprise that sooner or later you get a break.
While there may be no “right” way to value a forest or a river, there is a wrong way, which is to give it no value at all. How do we decide the value of a 700-year-old tree? We need only to ask how much it would cost to make a new one, or a new river, or even a new atmosphere.
Being in business is not about making money. It is a way to become who you are.
What we already know frames what we see, and what we see frames what we understand.
The financial capital is being concentrated by corporations, institutional investors, and even our pension funds, and being reinvested in companies that repeat this process because it provides the highest return on that financial capital.
I think an old style of addressing environmental problems is ebbing, but the rise of the so-called conservative, political movement in this country is not a trend towards the future but a reaction to this very broad shift that we are undergoing.
Interestingly, the oil companies know very well that in less than 30 years they will not only be charging very high prices, but that they will be uncompetitive with renewables.
Intelligent policies will be largely self-regulating in the sense that the system of incentives and standards makes it absolutely ludicrous to not move towards clean, internalized systems of cost and production.
Information from destructive activities going back a hundred years right up until today is being incorporated into the system. And as that happens the underlying framework of industrialism is collapsing and causing disintegration.
I’d rather fail at something important than succeed at something trivial.
In short, industrialism is over.
We assume that everything’s becoming more efficient, and in an immediate sense that’s true; our lives are better in many ways. But that improvement has been gained through a massively inefficient use of natural resources.
What a great time to be born, what a great time to be alive, because this generation gets to completely change this world.