see, this new approach gives us a long-term cost-saving framework to simultaneously advance business, the natural world, and human communities.
Both our energy and material processes are thoroughly discussed and reconsidered. We reflect on the most intelligent source for help with the key changes inside business and why this consultant holds such promise for humankind. Stories of cutting-edge businesses of all sizes, types, and locations in the sustainable business movement are featured along with metrics to measure success. We consider the appropriate roles of specific business positions as well as the function of higher education and of government in this movement. In the face of the current globalization trends, we examine the possible evolution of regional communities into healthy, diverse, abundant, self-supporting, and beautiful places for countless generations to grow and prosper. Finally, obstacles to this transformation and the lurking pitfalls that impede its progress are explained and considered.
I congratulate you on your decision to explore the ideas contained in these chapters. Students of all ages who consider the themes found in Fundamentals of Sustainable Business react in a variety of ways to the experience. As an educator in this regard, I have known many people who have described the experience as an epiphany — business people who now thrive by putting these principles into practice, consumers who contribute by reassessing and redirecting what they buy and whom they patronize, and college students who follow their new passion in the preparation for their professional careers. Many of these engaged citizens choose to lobby their political leaders to work for positive changes in policy directives.
At the same time, some seasoned business folk find it difficult to accept these ideas in their entirety, owing in part perhaps to their reluctance to acknowledge personal complicity in the insidious tragedies of business as usual. Others lack the familiarity and understanding of the natural world and how our industrial activities systematically degrade our mother planet. Still other experienced adults accept and internalize the tenets of this movement and very quickly become impassioned supporters. But no matter which perspective you bring to the table, this book will provide a compelling and stimulating journey through a variety of dilemmas and solutions that offer previously unimagined outcomes for businesses, the natural world, and human communities. The extent to which this reading experience produces a change in perspective and generates action is personal and dynamic. Some readers may find that they intuit huge implications and changes generated by this body of thought gradually. In fact, if you read this book a second time, the principles outlined herein may resonate even deeper with you and provide an even more enjoyable and rewarding experience.
Your background and life experiences no doubt help to motivate your curiosity in this movement; actually, the foundation of my involvement with sustainable business is also rooted in the distant past. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in the industrial town of Alton, Illinois located on the banks of the Mississippi River just north of St. Louis, Missouri. My mother’s standing rules were that her boys (my two older brothers and I) play outside every summer day (unless it was raining) and walk over a mile across town to and from our grade school and high school. Because of her edicts, I regularly landed in Alton’s many parks and woods and at the river’s edge.
One bright summer day I was climbing up and over a variety of dead tree snags along the banks of Old Man River when I noticed a curious tan rock about the size of one of my mom’s chocolate chip cookies half buried in the riverbank sand. After extracting and washing off my prize, I noticed two curious markings on one side of the rock. Unable to interpret their meanings, I ran back into town to Haynor Public Library. I carried my find into the geology section and in about 45 minutes, to my amazement, I found an illustration of a nearly identical rock in a book of fossils. The text confirmed it as a fossil of a freshwater fish. I returned home later that afternoon and carefully wrapped this treasure in one of my father’s old rags and placed it gently among my other priceless finds of petrified wood, broken arrowheads, and various other unidentified rock specimens for later examination in my childhood leisure. This attention-commanding experience was fairly typical of a long line of magically satisfying everyday events that the outdoors continually provided in my youth. Clearly, nature was a fountainhead of wonders and mysteries for this ordinary Midwestern boy.
After graduating from high school in 1971, keenly aware of my affinity for the outdoors, I earned a bachelor’s degree in wildlife management from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. I spent the better part of 1977 working near Mt. St. Helens for the U.S. Forest Service in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest of Washington State; I missed the violent 1980 volcanic eruption by only a few geological seconds. In my next 20 professional years, I worked in the outdoors again, this time employed by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.
Firmly ensconced inside the State of Illinois workforce and heading for full retirement in 2013, I was drawn to pursue a Master’s degree in Environmental Studies at the Edwardsville campus of Southern Illinois University. A graduate degree in my lifelong passion would hopefully fill in the gaps left by my casual but consistent efforts to improve my understanding of the natural world and how humans relate to it. After completing two years of evening classes and a thesis that concentrated on contemporary sustainability issues, I graduated in May 1997.
Seizing on the opportunity to maintain academic momentum and commit professional suicide, I resigned my enjoyable and reasonably lucrative position with the State of Illinois and intrepidly began the pursuit of a Ph.D. in Environmental Science at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. With my deep curiosity about man’s relationship to the natural world and a newfound passion to teach, I spent the next three years enrolled in doctoral courses, teaching undergraduate courses, and working diligently on my dissertation research project. I successfully passed my comprehensive exams and defended my dissertation research, which dealt with sustainability factors in ancient civilizations, and graduated in May 2000.
I accepted an assistant professor position at the beautifully wooded campus of Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan and began my life as a tenure-track professor in August 2000. Just as I was firmly committed to teaching environmental studies and geography, another life-changing opportunity appeared. The Aquinas provost called a meeting with the business and science faculty in the fall of 2002 and asked if anyone had an interest in developing a new academic concentration involving environmental studies, science, and business.
I was dumbstruck. It was surreal. An interdisciplinary program of business, environmental science, and social science! Throughout my undergraduate and graduate academic careers I had always believed that single-discipline learning was not the best approach to quality education (my undergraduate professors disagreed). I believed that a plethora of important connections exist between the physical sciences, social sciences, humanities, business, and the natural environment, and that many of these relationships had not been identified, explored, and emphasized by academia. I ardently pitched my theory to the provost, and he subsequently asked me to organize and lead this new interdisciplinary program.
And so my sustainable business odyssey began. I learned that a number of business leaders in West Michigan were already pioneering ways to link profits, people, and the planet. I contacted these forward thinkers and invited them to discuss the design of a new academic program that would provide our graduates with an expertise in conventional business, physical science, social science, and environmental studies, as well as with a new approach to business. Most of these inimitable professionals graciously agreed, and together, we set out to develop a program that would provide a training ground for undergraduates in this new approach to business.
For the academic design, we considered the interdependencies between man and nature, the key components of thriving human communities, the need to provide financial advantages for businesses, and the intention to pass along a better world to future generations of all species. A formidable challenge for our plucky and passionate group.
These anecdotes are some of the background circumstances behind my involvement in the sustainable business movement. Further, having two daughters and four grandchildren motivates me to work as
