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Sustainability, Ethics, and Business Performance
by: Jeffrey Hollender, Co-founder, Executive Chairman, and Chief Inspired Protagonist, and Ashley Orgain, CSR and Sustainability Education Specialist, Seventh Generation, Inc. and Ted Nunez, Director, Ethics & Corporate Compliance, Kaplan EduNeering.
What is Sustainability?
On August 9, 2007, a Google search on the word “sustainability” produced 40,600,000 results. On August 10th, there were 40,700,000 results, an increase of 100,000 entries in just 24 hours. By August 14th, the listings had climbed to over 41 million. Whether it’s the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes, the United Parcel Service Corporate Sustainability Report, sustainable diapers, or even the Sustainability Store, sustainability is a hot idea. Never mind that few really understand it, let alone use the word appropriately, sustainability has become what businesses, governments, hospitals, and schools want to do, what the media wants to write about, and consumers want to achieve.
There are almost as many definitions of sustainability as there are people who are inclined to try and define it. The Forum for the Future defines sustainability as “A dynamic process which enables all people to realize their potential and to improve their quality of life in ways that simultaneously protect and enhance the Earth’s life support systems.” One of the most often-cited definitions of sustainability is the one created by the U.N.’s World Commission on Environment and Development, which defined sustainable development as development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” For its part, Wikipedia defines sustainability as “the capacity to maintain a certain process or state indefinitely.”
Sustainability centers around the interconnectedness of economies, societies, and ecologies. It embodies the intent to provide the best outcomes for both human and natural ecosystems now and into the indefinite future. In essence, sustainability is about the long-term maintenance of individual and community wellbeing that is achieved through social equity and the responsible use of natural resources.
Sustainability poses the challenge of how to limit or reduce the negative and often unintended consequences of human activities on ecological systems, from the local watershed to the global atmosphere. To grasp what the challenge of sustainability means for business and society, it’s helpful to draw a lesson from sound economic practice: just as a well-run company will not overspend or over-borrow, lest it sink into financial crisis, so too a society and its economy must not overuse or misuse the goods and services provided to it by nature, lest environmental crisis follow.