Varieties of Green Business

G.  Jones

Book | 2018

Varieties of Green Business: Industries, Nations and Time

Abstract

Published at a time of ever-increasing warnings that the pace of climate change and other environmental changes risk making the Earth unsustainable within our own lifetimes, this book looks at the past of green business to identify lessons for the future. It provides rich new evidence and insights on green business as it examines its variation between industries and nations over time. It shows the deep historical origins of endeavors to create for-profit businesses that were more responsible and sustainable as well as how these strategies have faced constraints, trade-offs, and challenges of legitimacy. The industries covered range from sustainable finance and solar energy to organic food and wine, ecotourism, and outdoor clothing. Strategies pursued range from incremental shifts towards sustainability to abandoning for-profit business entirely and re-wilding and conserving millions of acres of lands in Latin America. The book's distinctiveness lies in the use of original empirical data and the willingness to engage with both successful and unsuccessful cases. The wide geographical coverage includes not only the United States and Europe but also less studied settings, including Chile, Costa Rica, New Zealand, and Japan. The book serves as a warning against facile beliefs in the potential of win/win solutions as business tries to reduce its environmental impact or even save the planet. The lesson of history is that making business sustainable is a hard journey, littered with system-wide roadblocks, but it is a journey that is possible and one that is urgently needed.

Keywords: Green Business; sustainability; business history; eco-tourism; organic wine; organic food; waste management; sustainable finance; Ethics; Finance; History; Entrepreneurship; Accommodations Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Banking Industry; Energy Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Green Technology Industry; Tourism Industry; Europe; Asia; Latin America; North and Central America; New Zealand;

Format: Print

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Jones, G. Varieties of Green Business: Industries, Nations and Time. Northamption, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018.

The case examines the career of Joan Bavaria, a pioneer of socially responsible investing and founder of Trillium Asset Management and Ceres, the nonprofit organization advocating for sustainability leadership. It describes her personal journey from art student and college dropout to financier and campaigner for corporate sustainability. Trillium grew out of Bavaria's initial work in Boston-based Franklin Research and Development Corporation and became an independent entity in 1982. Bavaria argued that investment houses could use their funds to promote corporate social responsibility and that such investments could be profitable. This was considered extremely unorthodox in the industry at the time. In the wake of the giant oil spill from the tanker Exxon Valdez in Alaska in 1989, Bavaria launched the Ceres Principals aimed to generate standardized corporate reporting on environmental performance. Ceres grew as an organization and launched the Global Reporting Initiative in 1997. The case provides an opportunity to explore the opportunities and challenges of both SRI and corporate environmental reporting.

This working paper highlights the benefits that rigorous use of oral history can offer to research on the contemporary business history of emerging markets. Oral history can help fill some of the major information voids arising from the absence of a strong tradition of corporate archives in most countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Oral history also permits a level of nuance that is hard to obtain even if written documents exist and are accessible in corporate and governmental archives. Oral histories can provide insights into why events did not occur as well as why companies chose certain industries over others, including wishing to avoid sectors where there was extensive government interference. Oral history can shed light on hypersensitive topics, such as corruption, which are rarely formally documented. While the methodological challenges of oral history are considerable and fully acknowledged, oral history can still be seen as a critical source of data on opinions, voices, and judgements on events in which there was often silence in written records.

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Varieties of Green Business: Industries, Nations and Time

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