There are some things that money can’t buy. And for everything else, there’s a market for it. There are fundamental problem with relying on markets for salvation from environmental indifference. While my aged uncle, among many others, insists that nothing moves likes like the markets, and never before has environmental interest been so “on fire.”
This, other tell me as well, is true. In environmentalism-versus-time graphs, things are on a hockey stick.
But, not to get side-tracked, the point: while the markets may encourage interest, it does not breed interest. When the stimulus for interest is woven into the business economy, it comes across as little of a person-by-person change of heart. This is why when something achieves a ‘less attractive’ or ‘sub-optimal’ ‘bottom line’ (or, my favorite, ‘triple bottom line: society, economy, environment’), the thing is dismissed. As with many other areas of market economics, what’s fashionable is what”s sold. Perhaps there is a lot of gray area between Aldo Leopold and Kerouac’s Dharma Bums and simply devoting your disposable income to Mountain Equipment Coo, organic, vacuum-sealed trail mix and fair trade coffee.
As eloquently as Green Biz can say it, Sustainability Reporting is Not Sustainable.The fanciful fanfare is not a substantive benchmarking process, and even the top dog, GRI, whose name is everywhere and whose manifesto on reporting is a standard, is not powerful in its own right or prevalent enough ini the reporting world to drive markets home.
Who will decide if the market is the problem or the solution?