Click to visit a great 3P resource L. Hunter Lovins, one of the most famous sustainability proponents in the United States, was recently interviewed by the Sustainability Industries Journal. SIJ caught up with her to find out what she had been doing since leaving the Rocky Mountain Institute in 2002. It sounds to me like she has been pretty busy, what with founding and managing Natural Capitlism Solutions.
In the interview, she introduces a concept which is slightly different from what we are used to, and one which I have had trouble articulating in the past. She talks about the integrated bottom line as a solution to the problems with triple bottom line reporting. If you have ever tried to account for your organizations social and environmental responsibility, you have probably noticed that doing the right thing often seems to reduce your profits. The integrated bottom line is a reporting concept that solves this conceptual dilemma.
Let us share in her wisdom:
With the triple bottom line, you’ve got these two other areas—social and environmental—that become costs and drag down profit. Now, those things are integrated into the sustainable business model, and they provide cost reductions and better management, which positively affect a company’s bottom line. We’ve got a new breed of business leaders right now that realize the economy exists to serve people. John Mackey at Whole Foods is a good example; for these people, profit is not the only reason to be in business.
And again:
There will come a point when people just get it, and it will be this 30-years-in- the-making overnight success. We just still have to get over this hump of whether environmental and social initiatives belong in the cost center or the profit center.
One more time:
Nick Stern wrote this great essay recently about how carbon represents the biggest market failure of all time. We need to unleash a new energy economy, and we can’t just do it through government mandates. The companies that get it right and address these problems first will be the billionaires of the future.
Want more? Check out the original article.
Comments
Does Lovins always get it right?
One thing I shied away from mentioning in the original post is my reluctance to endorse some of Lovins' statements. I read this quote around a year ago on Grist.
The resource use data for vegetable calories vs. animal calories is quite clear, and demographers' concerns on overpopulation/overconsumption make this information important to our succession planning.
What do you think?
A vegetarian diet is
A vegetarian diet is probably going to stay the most sustainable (in the land use sense, etc) just because you are consuming something that does not need to be refined again. I kind of think of raising grains to feed cattle as just another process of refining the food... one that takes several years, a good deal of land, water, and produces considerable waste.
I think to be realistic about it though, you have accept that people are not going to change their diets that much. People will not become vegetarian in an attempt to make better use of the land or whatever benefits might be obtained. Sure, a small percentage will and do, but not the average person.
With that in mind, grass-fed cattle is probably the best way to go. You aren't wasting all this grain that took 6mo to grow in a large field that could be consumed directly or made into bread and other products. At least with grass-fed animals, you are mostly feeding them off the land that they are contained on, and the waste they produce can to an extent be used as fertilizer to produce more fodder. They can also eat feed manufactured from stuff like cottonseed after the oil has been removed for commercial use.
Cows are like bio-lawnmowers though, and you can't keep them in a single field forever. They need to be rotated to new pastures with more food unless its extremely large. Plus, if you've ever seen what happens to a field of cattle after a lot of rain, they might need to be moved around after that anyway.
If you are going to eat it, I think thats the way to go, and there will always people that are going to eat steak (taste in food aside, there is a long tradition of sorts and status behind it). There is a cost issue too, though... and of course its a lot easier and probably much cheaper to have cropdusters spray chemical fertilizers and herbicides onto a field for such cattle than to maintain it in other ways... and there is already enough waste runoff from these sorts of operations...
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