Waking the Giant

August 29, 2010

It's hard to imagine that just five short years ago it was not uncommon to encounter strongly held doubts about the role of industry in global warming and environmental degradation. Imagine having a conversation today with a colleague who didn't believe that business has a primary responsibility to account for all of the environmental cost throughout the entire lifecycle of their products. Hard to imagine, isn't it?

We only have to look back to mid-2005 to find a well documented record of such ignorant opinions in the fossil record.

Writing for the Canada National Post in an opinion piece in the summer of 2005 (Part1 | Part 2,) Peter Foster gave one of the last great examples of the then widely held bias against environmentalism at the end of the Age of American Awakening that characterized the nearly 60 year period that began in 1949 with the publishing of A Sand County Almanac, which shocked the American conscience with accounts of the rapid disappearance of wilderness, and ended with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which scared Americans into action. Gladly, the sort of industrial posturing practiced by Foster, designed to protect business-as-usual practices of take-make-waste, has all but vanished from popular social discourse. The rapid transition toward a business climate where industry takes direct responsibility for environmental impact was aided by none other than Ray Anderson, Founder of Interface Corporation, and the very person who Foster accused of chicken-little preoccupations with industrial impact on our finite biosphere.

Foster's diminution of Anderson's sudden awakening to the problem and his role in solving it would not be a popular angle on today's Op Ed page. But in 2005, before the effects of climate change were witnessed by so many, and before the impact of industrial practices were widely understood, Foster's position on environmentalism was common place.

One can hope.

Today, 15 months after Foster's attacks on Anderson, we business people who embrace the belief that industry can be a force for improving the biosphere continue to be challenged by skeptics like Peter Foster.  And in the face of the slings and arrows we can take comfort in Machiavelli's sage words:

"Entrepreneurs are simply those who understand that there is little difference
between obstacle and opportunity and are able to turn both to their advantage."

Incidentally, the most egregious offense in Foster's articles was not the attacks on Anderson, but his superficial, uniformed slander of Paul Hawken's seminal work, The Ecology of Commerce. If Foster's salacious attacks left anyone wanting for confirmation of Hawken's credibility, take a listen to the audio of his brilliant segment in the Seminars on Long Term Thinking posted under the 2004 archives at:
http://longnow.org/projects/seminars/

What are the forces that will drive the change toward this vision for 02010?  How does industry, government, and society adopt the principles set out by Hawken and reward corporations like Interface?  How do readers expose opinion's like Foster's as part of the problem?

Comments

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