Eco Business: Not Doing Enough to Have a Meaningful Impact

Extract from Peter Dauvergne's Environmentalism for the Rich (Part 2)

“Sustainable development and eco-business assume that innovative policies, scientific ingenuity, and technology will allow for continuous economic growth. And they reassuringly assume that people can consume more of just about everything and still make progress towards global sustainability.

Trust is put in soft regulation, eco-certification, fair trade, and corporate self-regulation, while great promise is seen in corporate responsibility and individual goodwill. Environmentalism of the rich offers a seductive path forward. Yet...the gains are not adding up to anything approaching global sustainability. Resulting reforms are modest and incremental, rarely scaling up to improve global conditions as firms reinvest efficiency gains, as certification and regulation deflect production into new locations and sectors, as multinational corporations ramp up production in less-regulated markets, and as unsustainable consumption continues to rise.

 

Gains are also highly unequal, with wealthy states and neighbourhoods benefiting far more than poor areas [editor: you can see this clearly in South Hobart when you compare the large public housing development where I live to the rest of South Hobart, who are much wealthier and are characteristically ‘environmentally conscious,’ but for the most part socially ignorant to the plight of the disadvantged, even when it is right under their noses], and with hardly any benefits at all in some of the worlds most ecologically vulnerable places.

Sustainability policies of governments and corporations may pay lip service to principles of ecology, but the underlying reasoning is almost always ahistorical, fragmentary, and linear, rarely integrating holistic or dynamic understandings of resilience, feedback loops, tipping points, and complex systems. The focus is on preserving patches of nature and improving the production of particular products, not on avoiding ecological risks in situations of high uncertainty, or even on reducing the ecological consequences of individuals or nations.”
~Peter Dauvergne, ‘Environmentalism of the Rich’

Peter Dauvergne is Professor of International Relations at the University of British Columbia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Dauvergne