This is a good example of why we need companies to be a Force for Good because it lays out clearly three key transitions we have already begun.

Description

Three concurrent, intertwined transitions -- demographic, economic, environmental -- are what historians of the future will remember when they look back on our age. They are transforming everything from geopolitics to the structure of families. And they pose problems on a scale that humans have little experience with. As Harvard University biologist E. O. Wilson has put it, we are about to pass through "the bottleneck," a period of maximum stress on natural resources and human ingenuity.

A recurring theme is that business is not necessarily the enemy of nature, or vice versa. Traditionally the economy and environment have not even been described in comparable terms. The most-watched economic statistics, such as gross domestic product (GDP), do not measure resource depletion; they are essentially measures of cash flow rather than balance sheets of assets and liabilities. If you clear-cut a forest, GDP jumps even though you have wiped out an asset that could have brought in a steady stream of income.

Greens blame the plight of spotted owls on loggers; the loggers blame unemployment on self-indulgent ornithology. In fact, both are victims of a system of unsustainable forestry.

So, we need measures that quantify the economic value of ecological assets. (The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, published in 2005, identified services -- from pollination to water filtration -- that humans would have to provide for themselves, at great cost, if nature did not. Of the 24 broad categories of services, the team found that 15 are being used faster than they regenerate.)

And we need frameworks that allow businesses (and all humanity) to profit from those assets in a way that is sustainable. (When the environment is properly accounted for, what is good for nature is often what is good for the economy and even for individual business sectors. Fishermen, for example, maximize their profits when they harvest fisheries at a sustainable level; beyond that point, both yields and profits decline as more people chase fewer fish.)

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For the full article visit: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-climax-of-humanity

 

Validation

The Scientific American is a well-respected periodical.