Why Should I Care About Sustainability?
I was challenged this week with the question… if I was a skeptic of the environmental movement, why should I care about sustainability and why should businesses care?
Here is why I think why:
The last 100 years of human existence under the current industrial revolution have brought some of the greatest benefits to our species: increase in life expectancy,
Life Expectancy Over History
increases in leisure time, increase in prosperity, instant global communication, and much more. While impossible to deny the great benefits of the current economic paradigm we are living under the benefits have been gained at an extreme cost to our environment.
Here are just a few facts and statistics on the environmental/social damage we have caused:
- According to recent studies, 70% of the world’s marine species are at risk of extinction
- Humans have destroyed over 80% of the world’s forests
- 40% of our waterways are undrinkable
- The US has 5% of the world’s population and 30% of the waste
- Average American creates 4.5 lbs. garbage a day — an amount doubled from 30 years ago
- 99% of all those things we buy are not in use after 12 months.
Some would say that sustainability is just the new “fad” since sustainability has gaining popularity in recent years, but creating a new economic model that preserves our single planet, including the limited amount of resources on it, for our future generations is much more than just a “fad”.
Think about this if you had these 2 options of economic models to choose from and aspire to:
- A model that uses un-renewable resources which are finite, creates more waste than product, and destroys our habitat to the point where animals and humans can’t survive in it.
- A model that uses the energy income of our planet, creates no waste byproduct (all waste is used in another system), and maintains our habitat for animals and humans to flourish indefinitely.
Which would you choose? And why shouldn’t we as a society aspire to create that kind of model?
The environmental/social/economic problems our world faces are complex, highly interconnected, global in scale and these problems affect every single person, business, organization and government in the world. For these reasons people from all backgrounds, industries, and cultures need to care about these problems if we want to truly create a sustainable framework for humans to live in and not just “pass the blame” to someone else.
And why should business’s care?
A great example on how business can help solve these issues comes from the book “Mid-Course Correction” which profiles the Interface carpet 
company in their adventure on becoming ecologically neutral midway during their business’s life. The book shows with examples why being ecologically conscious is good for the bottom line because using less raw materials lower costs, creating less waste saves money, recycling materials reduces raw material costs further, sustainability attracts more customers increasing profits, and sustainable practices boost the morale of employees increasing productivity and lowering employee turnover.
While the problems of the world are immense and numerous I like to view them as opportunities waiting to be solved by the entrepreneurs of the world…
I’ll end with a great short video about our environmental impact and the tipping point we are nearing:
11 comments