Have you heard of the new Tools for Tomorrow program at Sustainable Seattle? If you haven’t here’s the scoop: Sustainable Seattle has partnered with Bainbridge Graduate Institute to bring you a sustainable business program packed full of resources that can be utilized by all. For starters there are CSR Leaders Roundtables where business leaders discuss the viability of going beyond the triple bottom line to bring about better business for all. Good Business Workshops are a series of engaging workshops that teach leaders innovative ways to make your business more sustainable. Lastly, but certainly not leastly, this program provides Industry Innovator Forums with big name speakers, like the one held at Seattle Public Library last night featuring Hunter Lovins.
Did you miss it?
Luckily, I’m here to re-cap.
If you aren’t
familiar with Hunter Lovins, here’s the gist-- she is not only a member of the
Boulder County (CO) Mounted Search and Rescue Control, in 1983 she received the
“Right Livelihood Award,” or the alternative to the Nobel Prize, and in 2000
she was named by Time magazine “Hero for the Planet,” and in 2009, Newsweek
awarded her with the “Green Business Icon.” Lovins is the President of Natural
Capital Solutions, a mentor for the Unreasonable Network, a scholar at BGI, and a
consultant for scores of companies. All in all, “Hunter has played an active
role in educating senior decision-makers in business, government, and civil
society to restore and enhance natural human capital while increasing
prosperity and quality of life.”
Donning a cowboy
hat, Lovins stepped up to the podium looking nothing short of Super Woman.
That, and the fact that her most recently published book is entitled, The Way Out: Kick-Starting Capitalism to
Save our Capitalistic Asses, I knew I was in for a treat.
Lovins started out by highlighting the grim
realities of what Donella Meadows 1972 book entitled, Limits
to Growth. Ocean acidification, global warming, forest depletion… these
aren’t just things we read in textbooks that may happen in the future, they are
happening now. Lovins points out that there are many apocalyptic-esk type books
out there that can help readers determine how to survive the impeding environmental and
economic destruction. You can read these she says, but she feels sentimental about this “human
experiment,” and adds that figuring these problems out is dependent on whether we
even have a future.
To turn things
around, Lovins doesn’t believe that it will be governments; it’s going to be
businesses.
Lovins poins
out that business start-ups are creating the most job growth and that,
furthermore, sustainability within business enhances every aspect of
shareholder value. She highlighted a number of companies that are using
sustainable business practices to increase their profitability. For example, Unilever's Executive Director, Paul Polman, has challenged the corporate
status quo by ridding their company of short-term business reporting, claiming
that these kinds of practices have created the mess in the first place. Success
stories like these not only make businesses more environmentally responsible
for their products, but they also place them in synch with the rest of society:
exactly how they should be.
Lovins also
touched upon the need for policy that focuses on and measures such things as
health, joy, intelligence, strength, beauty, and education like models of Gross
National Happiness as opposed to Gross National Product, which accounts
negative things such as costs of illness and disease, lawyer fees for divorces,
and pollution clean-up costs as boosts to our economy. Lovins quoted
Buckminster Fuller, saying, “The best way to predict the future is to create
it.” We can’t create a better future if what we are measuring is outdated and
effectively destroying our very livelihoods.
Nearing the end
of her talk, Hunter Lovins introduced John De Graaf, independent filmmaker and
author of Afflenza: The All-Consuming
Epidemic, and most recently, What’s
the Economy for Anyway?, and Laura Musikanski, the Executive Director of
the Happiness Initiative, a Seattle-based nonprofit that aims at spreading
Gross National Happiness across the nation.
During this part
of the forum, Lovins, De Graaf, and Musikanski spoke about the recent UN
conference they attended, where leaders from around the world are transforming
the way we think and understand our economy and what it truly means to live in
a place where well-being, not just monetary profit, is the bottom line. This
kind of transformation is happening, if only in the tiny country of Bhutan.
Lovins, et al attested to incredible changes occurring around the world, noting
the UN Global Compact initiative, but pointed out that these changes are
occurring at a slower than necessary speed and urged for committed participation
from everyone.
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