Challenge of Sustainable Business

Greening your business is the challenging and highly rewarding task of pursuing the path to sustainability. Over the past few decades, in what writer Paul Hawken, in his book Blessed Unrest, describes as “the largest movement in the world,” millions of people across the globe, including thousands of businesses, have been pursuing a goal of sustainability. A very elusive concept, sustainability has suffered from many attempts at a clear definition. “Meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” the somewhat cumbersome definition from the 1992 Earth Summit and the earlier Bruntland Commission, is one of the most common. But the clearest, most succinct definition that I’ve seen comes from a presentation at an environmental education conference by folklorist Susan Fowler. Susan accompanies all of her wonderful storytelling with sign language. She was struggling to come up with appropriate signs for “sustainability,” and hit upon a simple solution. The sign language description for “extinction” is the two signs of “death” and “forever.” In a flash of insight, Susan signed “life” and “forever” as sign language shorthand for sustainability—life forever—the diametrical opposite of extinction. Life forever—the valiant attempt to keep life, in all of its myriad variety, flourishing for as long as humanly possible, and for as close as we can get to forever, is as clear a definition of sustainability as I have seen.