One of the central issues facing both business and society today is how to reconcile economics and the environment, economizing and ecologizing.

So wrote Bill Frederick, Professor Emeritus of the business school at the University of Pittsburgh in Values, Nature, and Culture in the American Corporation.  It was Frederick’s thesis that three clusters of values – ecologizing values, economizing values, and power aggrandizement values – bump and grind against each other like tectonic plates and, thus, shape the social and natural landscape.  Ecologizing values include the values of linkage, diversity, and community.  Business values include the values of economizing, growth, and organizational integrity and distinctiveness.

The central challenge is to blend and harmonize these two value systems – economizing and ecologizing – in ways that sustain human purposes within the constraints and opportunities of the still evolving system of nature and culture.

The scope of the challenge was evident last weekend, when I was fortunate to participant in the 9^th annual conference of the Sierra Business Council at Mammoth Mountain, California.  The SBC is a proponent of the concurrent cultivation of natural, social, and financial capital.  The SBC, along with other progressive organizations such as the Sonoran Institute, recognize the business advantage of a healthy environment and robust communities.  Nevertheless, the tensions noted by Frederick remain.  Without a healthy environment, there can literally be no business.  Without healthy, profitable business, there can be no robust communities.  Further, I subscribe to the view that there is a long-term, positive correlation between wealth and environmental health (though I’m less confident that such a relationship is inevitable).

The very existence of the SBC is evidence of our ability to agree to the broad principal of the value and necessity of harmonizing economizing and ecologizing values.  The details are more difficult.  The benefits of ecologizing are diffuse, while the associated costs to businesses tend to be concentrated.  Consequently, in their struggle to maintain profitability, individual businesses may not always see the value in ecologizing behavior.  Faced with the individual imperative to survive, a business may not feel compelled by a call to act for the greater good.  This was the very point made by Hal Clifford, a featured panelist at the SBC conference who wrote a book critical of the ski industry: individual incentives shape individual behavior.

On the other hand, Ray Rasker, director of the SocioEconomics Program at the Sonoran Institute, notes that business leaders have a powerful credibility when it comes to environmental advocacy.  It’s also true that it’s tough to find business leaders who will take a public stand when it comes to contentious decisions regarding the environment.  It’s tempting to criticize business peoples’ courage, but that’s neither useful nor fair.  It’s not unreasonable for an individual businessperson to fear the cost of backlash against his or her business.  Some would have us think that such fear is driven by a slavish pursuit of profit.  Hmmm…the survival of a business requires profit.  Fear of failure isn’t always selfish – business failure impacts employees and communities, not just shareholders.  It’s possible that businesspeople that are highly visible when it comes to environmentalism (Paul Hawken comes to mind) are the exceptions that prove the rule.  Environmental activism on the part of business people seems to require either great individual courage or, possibly, insulating wealth or even a disregard for the possible negative consequences of their activism on their employees and communities.

Back in 1995, Frederick was optimistic about the outcome of the tensions between ecologizing, economizing, and power aggrandizement values.  Since then, he’s become less sanguine about the future.  He’s come to suspect that humans are pre-wired to favor power aggrandizement over ecologizing or even economizing.  I’m more optimistic.  The most promising business opportunities in some of our most environmentally sensitive regions (the Greater Yellowstone and the Sierra Nevada, for instance) are entrepreneurial and benefit directly from the “talent magnet” effect of healthy communities and environments.  These are businesses that are more likely to see a clear linkage between environmental advocacy and economic success.  I believe (hope?) that an increase in the number of entrepreneurial growth companies will reduce the risk perceived in being an environmental advocate and mitigate the power aggrandizement-risk identified by Frederick.

In the meantime, I hope that organizations such as the Sierra Business Council and the Sonoran Institute won’t waver in their efforts to bridge the often significant cultural gaps between the ecologizing and economizing camps.