Companies that swim against the tide? Exploring sufficiency?

Abstract

The earth’s ecosystems are under threat. This threat ranges from climate change through to those threats that are less well known at this stage but due to become more prominent in the future such as desertification, water shortages and bio diversity collapse. The blame for this reduction and dilution of the earth’s environment falls at humanity’s feet. In turn our pre-eminent economic framework (capitalism) that prioritises businesses pursuit of profit maximisation and infinite growth is heavily criticised, largely because they arise concurrently with environmental destruction maximisation. Given the finiteness of the earth, we cannot continue to maximise our rate of environmental destruction in pursuit of the next profit target. To begin to bring us back into balance with the environment and to enable us to find a way through the foretold environmental strains that does not continually perpetuate future problems we need to embrace the concept of sufficiency. In so doing we will put the economy where it belongs, a social construction that is second to the environment. This is the basic platform for this paper and the proposed point of departure for future research. To research companies that appear to put the environment first and the economy second and in so doing extract the lessons that can be learnt, or at a minimum the impediments and roadmaps for change.