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Business and Environment Roundtable
Accountability Across Sectors
by Bodhi Burgess, ELP Fellow 2001-2003
 In light of recent scandals at Enron and WorldCom, many Americans are becoming cynical about business's ability to regulate itself. There is little incentive in the current business climate to move toward financial honesty, much less social responsibility.
Each of the four major sectors in our economic system -- nonprofit, public, academic, and private -- has the responsibility as well as the means to hold businesses accountable. The environmental movement should aim to work within all four sectors to create a collective vision for positive social change and environmental sustainability that focuses on solutions, not problems.
Environmental nonprofits have been working for over 30 years to ensure corporate accountability. Nonprofits, since they have credibility with the public, can take the lead in disclosing corporate activity and providing awareness of environmental issues. For example, Rainforest Action Network worked with Home Depot to eliminate old growth timber, and organizations like Business for Social Responsibility and The Natural Step help develop sustainable business strategies.
Similarly, the government plays an enormous role in accountability. Environmental regulations like the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, and Clean Air Act often simply push the problem off to lower-income communities or less-developed countries that don't have the political status or legal resources to keep a level playing field. More needs to be done to develop policies that hold everyone accountable and do not just displace environmental problems. For example, we need real campaign finance reform that reduces the power of corporate interests in government. Also, we need to eliminate subsidies that benefit the polluting transportation, oil, and agriculture industries. To encourage conservation, we need to shift the tax burden off income, homes and necessary consumer goods and onto resource usage such as land, emissions and raw materials. Lastly, international standards should create taris on a sliding scale based on social and environmental performance.
The academic sector needs to provide a framework to discuss environmental concepts that is free of business influences. For example, the meat and dairy councils funded the nutritional pyramid that prescribes significant daily meat and dairy consumption. Such special interests in education can lead to misinformation, and it is academia's role to ensure unbiased learning. In addition, if environmental issues were introduced into the classroom from economics to art, more employees and executives would share a common language to create social equity and environmental sustainability.
Even with the other sectors enforcing accountability in these ways, business must change its own view of success in order to be sustainable. The vast majority of businesses have adopted the standard economic theory of "maximize profits and minimize cost." In large part, this was born out of the Industrial Revolution, when there was an abundance of resources and a relatively small qualified work force. Now, as the population explodes, we are faced with the exact opposite problem. We have an abundance of people while at the same time we are quickly eating up our natural reserves. Given this, business needs to shift from the outdated paradigm of products to one of services, and expand its view of the "bottom line" to include environmental sustainability and social equity. This new "industrial revolution" would make businesses self-accountable and, eventually, make regulation unnecessary.
By fulfilling their individual roles in accountability and environmental sustainability, all economic sectors play a part in steering this massive ship to a new course. All systems must be employed if we are to shape our future in a sustainable, and for some time restorative, manner.
Positive social change starts with being positive and ends with change.
Bodhi Burgess works to expand business's view of the bottom line to include social and environmental factors. Most recently, he was sustainability coordinator in the first environmental position ever created at Birkenstock USA.
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