College of Business Administration

Preliminary Questions: Environmental indicators typically contradict each other depending on the source that you are looking at. How do we know what is true? Can we compare the prediction of the state of the environment to that of an earthquake? Often times we don’t know about am earthquake until it is too late. The difference is that we can stop/slow the negative affect of the shaken environment. If we are to err in our assessment of the ‘soundness’ of the environment, what are the risks of erring on the side of ‘conservatism’ in our judgments? On the side of ‘liberalism?’

1) Edward Abbey compares the growth of the global economy to the growth of a cancer cell saying, "Just as a continuously growing cancer eventually destroys its life-support systems by destroying its host, a continuously expanding global economy is slowly destroying its host - the Earth's ecosystem."

Do you think this is a fair analogy? Is the Earth a terminal patient, or does it (and the human race) have a chance for recovery?

2) Are the answers to the Earth’s ecological devastation in:

Science?

Changes in personal consumption?

Governmental regulations?

A combination of all three?

Are there any answers?

3) In The Ecology of Commerce, Hawken claims that “what is good for business is always bad for nature.” (p.57)

Do you believe this to be true?

How do we change this quote to be what is good for business is always good for nature?

Is it possible?

4) In the preface of The Ecology of Commerce, Hawken says “the dirty secret in environmentalism is that sustainability is an insufficient objective. Habitats can endure over millennia, bit it’s practically impossible to calculate the sustainability of specific fisheries, tracts of land, and actual forests.” (preface XV)

How can this be true?

Is it devastating that we cannot put an exact number on sustainability levels?