A responsible company owes a return not only to stockholders but to something that has come to be called stakeholders, entities dependent on or beholden to the company, but also on which the company depends. In addition to stockholders, there are four key stakeholders: employees, customers, communities, and nature.

Stockholders still get first dibs and last, but their return relies on the cooperative productivity of the other groups.

The responsible company owes its employees light-handed, attentive management; openness about the numbers; encouragement to co-operate, across divisional lines when necessary, and to continuously improve processes; freedom to organize workflow with minimal delays or interference from higher-ups; and a penalty-free whistle to blow against wrongdoing.

The responsible company owes its customers safe, high-quality products and services; this applies to both basic and high-end goods. Goods should be well-made, durable, and easily repaired. Whatever comes to the end of its useful life needs to be recycled or repurposed into something new. Marketing claims, especially those of health and environmental benefits, should be made responsibly.

The community includes suppliers, who have now become critical to reducing the social and environmental impacts of products. It is challenging for companies, with subcontracting so prevalent, to know, much less understand, their supply chain and its workings. But to know who does what and where enables a company to work with its suppliers more intelligently and productively鈥攁nd to improve the working conditions and environmental stewardship that underlie its products.

Community also includes, of course, locality. Your company needs to take responsibility for wherever your people gather for work, including satellite locations where you have stores, warehouses, or factories. Obligation to the community includes paying a fair share of taxes and a healthy dose of philanthropy, in money and in-kind contributions of products or services. Many companies now allow their local units a say in local giving.

Community also includes trade associations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), standards-setting organizations, non-profits, and other citizens' organizations that may have an interest or something to say about what your company does. Advocacy groups like Greenpeace and PETA may confront you about your practices, as may individual citizen activists through social media like Facebook and Twitter. Friendly or not, those who engage with you are part of your community in its broadest sense and deserve your attention.

Nature decides our fate but has no voice of her own, or not one that we can hear. We can't sit with her at the table and ask her what she needs to get her work done or what she cares about most. In the face of nature's silence, we have to honor the Precautionary Principle, now embedded into law in the European Union and other countries, that in the absence of scientific certainty, the burden of proof that a new product or technology is safe now falls on business. The Precautionary Principle requires us to reverse our habit, prevalent since the Industrial Revolution, to act now and deal with the consequences later.

Here are the key issues that face the responsible company in relation to its stakeholders during the next 50 years.

Stockholders: Accounting will become more complex. As ever, companies will do whatever they have to do to maintain financial health, cut the owners their checks, and meet payroll. Increasingly, however, companies will also have to measure and assign value to our social and environmental impacts or face the cruel surprise of a sudden rise in the price of carbon or drop in the availability of fresh water. The Nature Conservancy is working with Dow Chemicals to assign value to what ecosystems contribute to the economy. In 2011, moreover, Puma commissioned PriceWaterhouseCoopers to help develop an “Environmental Profit and Loss” statement to account for the full impact of the brand on ecosystems. The consultancy firm hopes to create a model robust enough to be adopted by other companies.

Governments are also changing what they count. The United Nations has endorsed the principles of the “triple bottom line,” or 3P (profit, people, planet), for government accounting. In 2010, Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, announced a major project to work with emerging and developing countries to quantify their natural capital, roughly estimated at a value of $44 trillion worldwide.

Public companies that work hard and effectively to improve their social and environmental performance will need to be protected by new laws that forbid attack by minority stockholders, who in more jurisdictions have the right to sue a company for investing in social and environmental performance at the short-term expense of stock value. At present, environmental and social improvements may be scrapped easily when a company, public or private, is sold or inherited. Several states, including California, have created a new legal class called the “benefit corporation” that allows companies to have a social or environmental mission written into their charter. Benefit-corporation status also gives a company the legal right to pursue high social and environmental standards that can benefit the company in the long term but reduce short-term earnings. An organization called B Labs grants “B Corporation” accreditation to companies that meet its standards as well as works to expand legal recognition.

Exployees: There has been a 50-year trend toward automation, moving jobs offshore, improvement in wages in developing countries, and a flattening of wages in advanced countries. The next 50 years will be marked by pressure to restore the living wage. It was assumed as late as the 1960s that the annual pay of one wage earner (usually male) should support his family. The new, more modest, goal has a worker paid one-half of what it takes to support a family of four.

To meet this goal will require further increases in productivity, most of which will come from automation, which further depresses employment rates. More workers will be better paid, yet more people will be out of work, unless there is a corresponding rise in labor-intensive, local jobs in agriculture and boutique, handicraft industries, or a shorter work week.

Finally, more companies are likely to follow entrepreneur Jack Stack's advice to offer equity to a broad base of employees to increase their engagement with their jobs.

Customers: As everything becomes more expensive, customers will become choosier and buy less. They will increasingly demand to know whether products qualify as healthy and humane. And broad, innovative applications of those 400-plus social and environmental indexes will help customers choose products made by companies that pay fairly and work to tangibly reduce their environmental damage.

Communities: As travel and shipping become more expensive over the next 50 years, we are likely to see at least the partial restoration of a company's sense of locality. This can help make local communities stronger and more resilient, and more active in the effort to attract and keep beneficial employers.

Responsible businesses will have to work more closely with NGOs and interest groups to reduce environmental harm and improve working conditions throughout the supply chain. Trade associations and third-party verification organizations will become more important as more companies benchmark their social and environmental standards, work to raise the bar, and have their efforts to meet them monitored and verified by independent parties. Above all, companies will have to work as true partners with their suppliers, in a climate of trust. Profit will come not from taking advantage of one another, but from efficiencies gained by understanding each other's problems and meeting each other's needs.

Nature: As customers learn more about the consequences of ravaging the natural world at our current pace, they will pressure companies to do far more, more quickly, to reduce the damage they cause. Rising cost will constitute its own pressure on companies to adopt more responsible practices. Expenses will rise for natural resources (especially energy and water) and for waste disposal. Companies, not individuals, generate 75 percent of the trash that reaches the landfill or incinerator. Packaging, for which the producer is responsible, is disposed of almost instantly by the consumer and comprises a third of all waste.

The need to use less energy and generate less waste will in turn require companies to conduct life cycle analyses (LCA) of their products. The LCA teaches a company how to reduce the environmental impact of its products from their origins as raw materials (derived from water, the soil, or underground) through their manufacture, useful life, and eventual disposal. Finally, companies will have to track environmental performance through all business reporting systems.

It is essential to decouple the definition of economic health from economic growth in the use of materials and energy. It is not pie in the sky to say so. Germany, Japan, and China, among other governments, have announced their intention to create “circular economies” that promote reduction, reuse, and recycling of materials. Japan passed a law in 2000 to increase resource productivity by 60 percent, increase recycling by 40 to 50 percent, and reduce waste disposal by 60 percent by 2010. As of 2008, it was on track, according to World Watch's 2011 report.

The U.S. needs to follow suit and create its own circular economy. This would require eliminating government subsidies and tax breaks for industrial agriculture, oil and gas production, and other non-renewable resources, so that prices would reflect true costs. The U.S. Treasury, for example, pays $2 billion a year to support the price of chemically intensive conventional cotton grown in California and Texas.

In a post-consumerist society, it's critical that we stop using the gross domestic product (GDP) as a barometer of social health. As economist Joseph Stiglitz puts it, we need to expand the idea of GDP to include non-economic factors. In October 2010, The U.K., following the lead of Bhutan, Canada, and France, adopted (with some nervousness on the part of its Conservative government) a “happiness index” that defines quality of life more broadly than does GDP. The U.K. index includes metrics on job satisfaction and economic security, satisfying relations with friends and relatives, having a say on local and national issues, health, education, environmental health, personal security, and volunteer activities.

Were we to grow less distracted by our consumerism and consumption, and to spend more time with friends and family, or work with people we want to help, or learn something we have always wanted to be able to do, wouldn't that make up for missing yet another sale at the mall? The pursuit of national wealth through trade of increasingly useless things has for a few decades kept us in more clothes than we need but has nothing to do with the pursuit of happiness. And it simply no longer works.

It is financially unsustainable for the world economy to require three percent annual growth, which corresponds to the three percent growth a company must now maintain to outpace inflation and prevent job loss. Yet the economy in advanced societies no longer creates sufficient well-paid jobs; the speed of automation outpaces that of job creation. All rich countries face high levels of debt because fewer well-paid workers pay the taxes to sustain outlays for health care, education, and the military.

Excerpted from Yvon Chouinard and Vincent Stanley's (Patagonia Inc).

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Where to start?

The answer depends on your role in your company. If you're not the CEO or don't have the power to establish a “corporate sustainability program,” you can start anywhere. Check over the lists to see what you, in your particular company role, can do. It is a myth that taking better care of people and nature is at odds with business excellence. But what if your boss believes that? Concentrate on money-saving steps. No boss worth her stock options will stop you from saving the company money.

Or say you are a CEO. You want to go green. At least get greener. But as CEO you don't have the power this book's other readers might think you have. You have a board to answer to, nervous stockholders whose politics and level of environmental knowledge vary, a business climate that befuddles every tealeaf used in forecasting. You may rely on a CFO or COO who is convinced that climate change is a hoax, or damn well should be. How do you get him or her going? How do you bring along your people?

The best answer is to follow Daniel Goleman's creed: Know your impact, favor improvement, share what you learn. As a method, these work in sequence: You have to know impacts before you can favor improvements before you can share what you've learned.

You can undertake your greening in three steps.

First, engage your team, with as broad participation as possible, to find out the worst things your company does, what costs you the most in reputation and profit, and what will be the easiest to correct. The easiest problems for your company to correct may seem complex and difficult to another, depending on the company's values and traits, and whether its cultural bias is for innovation or safety.

Address first what you suspect you know already: tease it out. What nags at you most whenever you hear about it (or see its consequences)? What is it you think you can do something about鈥攖hat your company will be good at getting done? Ask your team to ask themselves the same questions.

Step two: Get together with your people to name your priorities for improvement, then winnow the list. Decide what you'll do first, how much time and money you'll spend on it, and how many people will be involved. Define what intiial success will look like. Write that down on one page you can circulate among your team. Once you've figured out what improvements you want to make, where you can draw on your company's greatest strengths, take the fewest risks, save the most money, and create the most opportunity, go for it.

As you learn, share what you learn with as many people as possible in your organization, even if you don't think you (or they) have the time. Then share what you learn with stakeholders: suppliers, your trade association, key customers, even the key competitors you call on when you need to form a united front to get something done. Take advantage of the trust you earn, and you will earn more of it, especially if you are credible and tell the truth about your mistakes and failures; get going a little snowball of support.

Finally, using the trust you've deepened, the knowledge you've gained, and the confidence and pride that have built throughout the organization and among stakeholders, ask yourself: What does your company now know that enables you to take a next step that may have been out of reach before but suddenly lies within sight?

Keep going. Here's what will happen.

The company will get smarter, and more people will start to care deeply about creating a better-quality business through improving its social and environmental performance. In so doing, your people will have to pay better attention to all the business fundamentals鈥攁nd this boost in applied intelligence will result in a more fluid, less wasteful organization. You will spot money leaks you could not see before, and you will gain the confidence to recognize and go after opportunities that a company bound by traditional corporate see-no-evil politesse cannot begin to address. Success motivates people, including your strays.

Doing good creates better business.

We know this from experience, both from our own years in business and from talking to others. Wal-Mart first had to learn how many millions of dollars it could save by eliminating unnecessary packaging for deodorant before it could adopt a long-term goal of zero waste. The company had to see how much environmental harm it could avoid and money it could save in single-stroke decisions before becoming more systematically responsible.

You may expect internal resistance at first, of course, depending on what you try to do, especially early on. The poet William Stafford once wrote that no poem should begin with a first line the reader can argue with. It distracts the person you want to reach. Get your people nodding in full agreement a few times before you say something that challenges the half-sleep of received wisdom.

A social and environmental initiative might start with something that unarguably needs doing. As they gain experience, your colleagues will become more aware of more nuanced, harder-to-spot social and environmental impacts, and of opportunities to reduce them. They will start to share a language and a cultural bias that favors improvement. Once an apparal manager at Wal-Mart hears the buzz on how much money the company has saved by eliminating packaging in one department, and how much more can be saved by similar measures, she will feel implicit permission to devote some time from her busy day to minimize packaging in her own part of the business. Managers often cling to the safety of familiar practices until they see their colleagues (and competitors within the company) dare to imagine, then implement, better practices. Courage can be contagious. So is success.

You'll need the support, early on, of company heroes at various levels in the hierarchy who are held in respect for their wisdom or competence or both. These heroes may not be among the company's most predictable advocates for social and environmental improvement鈥攖he 20 percent of us who sing in that choir. Expect and embrace surprising sources of collaboration, especially from thoughtful, often relgiiously motivated or stewardship-inspired conservatives, and for the collaborative process to change the company and everyone involved.

We underscore how critical it is for you to share what you learn as often and with as many as you can. Transparent social and environmental improvements will gradually increase your base of committed support within the company, from the margins (or the heights) to the center; any entrenched traditionalists gradually shuffle to the side, go elsewhere, or retire.

As your company comes to know more, and becomes confident enough to work collaboratively with outside partners to reduce environmental and social impacts, it will adopt that work permanently as a part of doing business. It becomes irresistible.

Excerpted from Yvon Chouinard and Vincent Stanley's (Patagonia Inc).

The post How to Make Your Company More Environmentally Friendly appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead described how we experience nature's “creative advance” as perpetual novelty. But nature generates its changes at a much slower pace than we now allow her and in more complex ways than we can easily recognize. We need to be more aware of what we do to the planet, do much less harm鈥攁nd do it far more slowly.

We harm nature by what we add to it, how we alter it, and what we take away. We have added a number of chemicals that nature didn't have to absorb before the 19th century, and that we didn't have to deal with as health issues. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) identified 62,000 industrial chemicals in 1979, without screening or proscribing their use. Only a few hundred have even been tested. You carry in your own body traces of 200 chemicals unknown to your ancestors, some of them toxic in large amounts, others slow-acting carcinogens in small amounts. And a chemical present in your blood might have no affect on its own, but prove dangerous in combination with another. Untested interactions among the various chemicals released into nature can form up to three billion combinations.

Because we know so little, itc is difficult to track our disease back to their environmental source. Certain diseases have become prevalent in affluent countries at much higher rates than in the less developed world, and they may reflect a reduced physical resilience. These include inflammatory autoimmune disorders like asthma, allergies, lupus, and multiple sclerosis. Nonsmokers who reach middle age can now expect to have levels of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a precursor to emphysema, equal to that of smokers. Breast cancer rates for women have tripled during the past 30 years, and only five to 10 percent of breast cancers are considered hereditary.

Scientists are slow to link specific cancers to specific environmental causes, such as high-voltage wires, PCBs in the river, your cell phone. Few cancer catalysts have been studied as closely or confirmed as positively as cigarette smokes. But some environmentally caused illnesses can be traced: mercury poisoning, for instance, has been proven to result from eating too many large predatory fish, such as tuna and swordfish.

We have added significantly, through runoff from sewage and fertilizer, to the nitrogen and phosphorus in the water supply; the extra nutrients create algae blooms that choke off oxygen and kill fish. Half of the lakes in Asia, Europe, and North America suffer from this process, called eutrophication, as does much of the Gulf of Mexico.

We have altered nature.

The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, up by 19 percent since 1959, has now reached its highest level in 600,000 years and continues to grow, making hot air hotter, cold air colder, and increasing the ferocity of storms. Arctic winter ice deceases nine percent each decade, and every winter more of western Antarctica's ice shelves calve into the ocean. The Larsen B Ice Shelf alone was the size of Rhode Island and took only 35 days to collapse.

We have borrowed from nature what we can't pay back.

In 1960, humanity consumed about half of the planet's potential resource capacity. By 1987, we exceeded it. Twenty-five years later we are using the resource capacity of one and a half planets, though the pattern of consumption is unequal. Europe, proportionate to its population, consumed the equivalent resources of three planets; North Americans, seven. The consumers are unevenly distributed, and so is the consumption, though China and India, the world's most populous countries, now have sizeable, growing, appetitive middle classes.

Biologists agree that we're in the midst of the planet's sixth extinction crisis (the fifth was that of the dinosaurs). A 2009 study in Nature named biodiversity as the “planetary boundary” that humans have violated more than any other, among nine identified “Earth-system processes and associated thresholds, which, if crossed, could generate unacceptable environmental change.” Their proposed threshold for extinction was 10 species per million per year. We are losing species now at the rate of 100 per million per year, or 1,000 times (not a typo) the normal rate. Thirty percent of amphibians and 21 percent of mammals are among the most imminently vulnerable, including the polar bear, rhinoceros, tiger, giraffe, and gorilla. Twelve percent of bird species are threatened with extinction, as are 73 percent of flowering plants, 27 percent of corals, and 50 percent of fungi and protists.

Water withdrawals from lakes and rivers have doubled since 1960. As more of the earth's major rivers鈥攐n which huge populations depend鈥攆ail to reach the sea, the ocean's coastal eutrophic, or dead, zones expand. The dammed Colorado River is now rarely allowed to flow into the Gulf of California and its former delta is a toxic swamp. By 2025, no Chinese river will meet the ocean all year long, which will devastate wetlands, and decimate bird and fishlife. China's rivers will no longer be lifelines for her people.

Worldwide, wetlands diminish and disappear year by year, as do coral reefs and mangroves; major fisheries are collapsing. Loss of rainforst continues in poorer countries. Conventional plowing and planting without crop rotation has led to significant loss of topsoil鈥攁t the rate of one inch a year in the American Midwest. It takes 500 years for an inch of topsoil to form naturally.

The human consequences of ecological overreach are magnified in poor countries and in countries like China and India, which have large poor populations: shrinking resoources only aggravate the basic challenges of inadequate food, water and sanitation.

In short, the world is becoming a desert. Globalization, a man-made but not humanly controlled process, is largely responsible for the current speed at which life turns to sand. Globalization moves with great speed to identify, then harvest resources for human needs but crawls slowly to repair the devastation it has left in its wake. It is fast but stupid, brutal, and imprecise; to cull a tree, it takes out a forest.

Those who watch the forest be cut and raise their voice against it cannot be heard when the company that did the cutting does not belong to the community. And there is little community representatives can do. When local politics becomes subservient to distant economic power, the concept of citizenship, of its duties and possibilities, loses its meaning. The human commons loses its value; it too becomes a desert.

Because Yvon has his roots in climbing and surfing, as does our company, we can't leave undiscussed the loss of wilderness or wildness, which is as much a spiritual concept as a definition of place. By naturalist Margaret Murie's definition, wilderness is where the hand of man does not linger.

As men and women we are part of nature. If we were to have no experience of wild nature, or no way to know of it, we would lose entirely our sense of human scale. We derive our sense of awe from our ability to feel nature's force. We better know ourselves when we come face to face with the magnificence of the unknown. Emerson, Thoreau, and other transcendentalists learned and taught these lessons in New England in the 1830s though 1860s. They showed us that we can learn directly from nature about who we are and how to live.

After an accident left him sightless in a darkened room for eight months, John Muir, a native of Scotland, began his long walking journeys, first from Indiana to Florida, then famously to Yosemite. During his wandering years, Muir carried a tin cup, a handful of tea, a loaf of bread, and a copy of Emerson. (The two men were to meet one day in 1871 in Yosemite.) Muir's writings on the geology and botany of the Sierras gained him fame, respect, and economic independence. Perhaps his greatest achievement was to persuade Teddy Roosevelt to abandon the comforts of Yosemite's government camp and go off with him to sleep in bedrolls directly under the stars. That night might be regarded as the birth of the conservation movement: Muir talked Roosevelt into creating Yosemite National Park.

It might surprise some to know that, in 1971, Roosevelt's political descendant Richard Nixon, on signing the Endangered Species Act, said:

This is the environmental awakening. It makes a new sensitivity of the American spirit and a new maturity of American public life. It is working a revolution in values, as commitment to responsible partnership with nature replaces cavalier assumptions that we can play God with our surroundings and survive. It is leading to broad reforms in action, as individuals, corporations, government, and civic groups mobilize to conserve resources, to control pollution, to anticipate and prevent emerging environmental problems, to manage the land more wisely, and to preserve wilderness.

If the United States is the birthplace of conservation, of the very idea of wilderness as its own value, of nature as a teacher, we have not kept stride with the rest of the world. Forty years after Nixon gave that speech, we are still the leading practitioners of the kind of high-growth, material-intensive capitalism that is to blame for the destruction of nature. The respected Environmental Performance Index (EPI) in 2010 ranked the world's five top countries as Iceland, Switzerland, Costa Rica, Sweden, and Norway. Germany, the U.K., Franch, and Japan are all in the top 20. The U.S. has fallen to the 61st position.

This decline reflects American's growing environmental apathy. In a 2011 poll, Pew Research Center reported that only 40 percent of Americans considered protecting the environment a high priority, down from 63 percent 10 years earlier.

Will this continue? In the 1960 book Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System, an analysis of juvenile delinquency in an overorganized world Paul Goodman predicted the youth movement that would rise up in the decade that followed. The civil rights and women's rights movements also arose in response to conditions that looked unshakably stable and hegemonic at the time.

Any situation keenly out of balance eventually reveals itself to large numbers of people as absurd. So it will be with our own current social and environmental disequilibrium. The authors hope that those born in the 1980s and coming into their own now will, all their lives, pursue meaningful work and do the right thing, which is to say be responsible to other people and to nature. The authors hope they reject the official story told by governments and corporations that a healthy economy relies on the suppression of social, ecological, and individual health.

It's a competitive world: Will Iceland win?

Excerpted from Yvon Chouinard and Vincent Stanley's (Patagonia Inc).

The post The End of Nature: How Did Things Get This Bad? appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.