This one starts with a wonderful quote by Ryuzaburo Kaku, Ex-President and Chair of the Board, Canon : Global companies have no future if the earth has no future.

As you might have guessed, this one is about the principles of sustainable development. How to do stuff and not hurt the earth. What an ensightful concept

Growth versus sustainability

Here it is argued that it’s all Darwin’s fault, ok over emphasizing a bit here, but … . Darwin said it’s about survival of the fittest and this is what economy borrowed. We have to conquer, take over, control, be fitter than anyone else. You need to grow and grow and grow. Now that there are no longer any real places to conquer, at least not much, we need to start to live with the fact that we cannot just rape the land and go some place else when it’s dead. We are not at a time where physical things cannot go on growing indefinitely. Thinking about this, it actually explains why services is our only future for more growth.

But what about sustainable development? Here we move to sustainability, co-operation and responsibility. Thinking about this you can argue whether the stock market is really the perfect thing to fund companies. But back to the subject at hand. I don’t need to list all the environmental problems we have that might lead to real problems and the question is if companies would have made a profit if the cost to the eco system was factored in.

Drivers for change

There are different drivers for change.
- Business: some energy efficient production methods even save money
- Legislation
- Consumer Demand
- Ethical values
- Public image

Organisational response

Environmentalists argue for the 4Rs (all these 4Es, Rs, Ps, … will some day fall out of my ears! ):
- reduce
- recycle
- replace
- reuse

The natural capitalism is about trying to mimic nature as best we can, which is an interesting concept because if you fall back to Darwin, you will have to argue that some things we do have already been done better and we might be more able to use that now. A good example might be that we can now build glass windows where dirt does not stick by mimicking special flowers.

A good idea might be that next time you have to do that, ask yourself how mother nature would have done it.