Business : Sustainable Development

The most widespread, common meaning for the terms “sustainability” and “sustainable development” come from the Brundtland Commission Report from the United Nations. According to this report, sustainable development "meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (Brundtland Commission 1987).

In the ensuing twenty years since this definition has been introduced, many people and organizations have explored what it means. Complexities abound in terms of the choices that individuals, corporations, governments, and other organizations need to make from this perspective. For example, just asking the question, “how far into the future do we need to project in order to consider the needs of future generations?” is inherently complex. Such choices inherently affect the autonomy and well-being of those who come after us as well as those of us who are here now.

Despite these complexities, pragmatic approaches that embrace the notion of sustainability are being brought to fore by people, all types of companies, organizations, and governments because doing well by doing right is its promise. For example, we see that consumer preferences are lining up to favor companies that are good stewards of people and community, the environment and profits. Good stewards of all three of these concepts are following a triple bottom-line approach to sustainable development.

Sustainable development has emerged as a way of thinking and pursuing innovation that continually asks questions, connects the dots, and makes course corrections to make things better today and over the long haul. Such a process involves understanding how things work and how they are connected. This requires a systems approach to finding problems and lasting solutions. Systems approaches look for how our lives have rich interconnections with economic, environmental, and social factors, and then finding ways of integrating these interconnections in new ways that encompass a balance among them. As a result, the process of sustainable development takes hold where economic, social equity, and environmental needs are simultaneously addressed.

Frequently, the term “sustainability” gets mistakenly associated with notions of environmental performance, exclusive of economic and social considerations. This situation comes about because environmental considerations in the past have been an underappreciated aspect of the systems that support our lives. Everything we know, use, and consume ultimately comes from nature. Our world economy relies entirely on natural capital: sunlight, wood, oil, water, oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, plants, animals, soil, metals, and many other things. Because of this foundation of our economy, we are able to organize ourselves in wonderfully diverse and rich societies all around the globe. Nature truly remains at the core in the pursuit of sustainable development.

The Native American credo of "don't eat your seed corn,” Dr. Seuss' (1971) The Lorax, and William Forster Lloyd's (1833) “Tragedy of the Unregulated Commons” also illustrate dimensions of sustainable development. For the first item, obviously if someone consumed the seed needed for next year’s planting, today’s small meal comes at the expense of being able to produce food entirely in the future. In The Lorax, deforestation and devastation remain once all of the resource trees are removed for consumption without planning for their replenishment. The commons metaphor describes a pasture shared by local herders who want to maximize their yield and so will increase their herd size whenever possible. The dilemma is that as each herder individually gains as each grazing animal is added, the pasture is slightly degraded. The situation illustrates how it is easy to be caught in an individual race to accumulate the most before overgrazing collapses the whole resource for all other herders. All three clearly illustrate examples that are not sustainable.

What are some systems level issues that jeopardize the commons? Consider Jared Diamond's book, Collapse (2005) that identifies five factors that contribute to collapse of a civilization: climate change, hostile neighbors, trade partners or outside sources of essential goods that go sour, environmental problems, and, finally, a society's response to its problems. The first four may or may not prove significant in each society's demise, Diamond claims, but the fifth always does. The salient point, of course, is that a society's response to environmental problems is completely within its control, which is not always true of the other factors. In other words, as his subtitle puts it, a society can choose to succeed or fail.