How Sustainability Can Save Business

Thanks to Seth Handy, my co-host and a terrific environmental law specialist for this terrific article from The Huffington Post.

This article fits perfectly with our mission:  To convince everyone, individuals, businesses and non-profits, that there is a great ROI on investing in efficiency, reduced waste, clean energy, transforming technology and other sustainable changes.  Those investments, and those returns of good profit, have a wonderful by-product of reducing stress on natural resources.

Will split our coverage into two days, since it is a fairly long article, but here's the link if you want to read it all today: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/jim-harris/can-environmentalism-save_b_1889781.html.  Kudos to the writers and newspaper for a great job.

Enjoy and make sure you watch us this weekend on ABC 6 and The Live Well Network: 

 "This is the first of a series of weekly columns to be published on Tuesday by Tyler Elm and Jim Harris on how sustainability as strategy cuts cost, raises revenue and mitigates risk for business.

Ever since Rachel Carson's groundbreaking Silent Spring was published in 1962, environmentalists have been trying to save the planet. While there has been progress, overall the efforts have clearly failed, because the planet is in worse shape today than 50 years ago. We need not document the litany of damage here.

Decades of experience have shown that environmental initiatives pursued in isolation of the economic benefit are largely immaterial.

But when environmental objectives are framed as business strategy and tied to business operations and measured in terms of cutting cost and increasing profitability -- significant environmental benefits are generated. Sustainability then garners executive focus and corporate resources. Companies like General Electric, Interface Carpet and Canadian Tire have realized the profound bottom-line benefit that pursuing sustainability as strategy yields.

In the early 2000's a number of environmentalists were feeling the futility of the environmental movement's historic approach to business. In 2004, this led Adam Werbach, then president of the Sierra Club -- the largest US environmental group, to proclaim that traditional environmentalism was ineffective, outdated and dead. In a grist.org interview, following his speech called the "Death of Environmentalism" Werbach noted:

"Perhaps during the many battles between environmentalists and business people we have been asking the wrong question all these years. As generally proposed, the question is: 'How do we save the environment?' As ridiculous as it may sound to both sides, the question may be 'how do we save business?' When you look at the environmental movement, at the great ecological challenges that the planet is faced with, that humanity is faced with, environmentalism has proven utterly incapable of addressing them. The reason we called for environmentalism's death is so that we could call for a new movement... (one) that can address these challenges."