I hear my own daughters talking about big companies polluting the environment, and then I realise they are talking about companies of which one I am running. But when I tell them to read the things we are doing, then they realise we are doing good things. But millennials are really a great lot.
By the 1980s, businesses had realized that environmental issues had a price tag. Increasingly, they balked. Reflexively, the anticorporate Left pivoted; Earth Day, erstwhile snow job, became an opportunity to denounce capitalist greed.
Not to say that corporations are perfect today, but even grand corporations like Dupont have made immense progress in translating some of their past environmentally damaging practices into new profit opportunities.
A number of major companies - from PepsiCo to Walmart to U.P.S. - have recognized that corporations have a responsibility to address the causes of climate change before it is too late. We do not have to wait for an international treaty or new regulations to act.
It's unfortunate that all business gets painted as wanting to oppose the environment and slow change.
Discovery Channel's 'Planet Healers' will provide a look into how businesses can exist for more than just making profits, how they can help create a better and sustainable future.
I think I was the first executive to ever speak at a Greenpeace business conference, in London in 2001. That didn't play well here at Ford, but I thought it was an important signal to send internally, that these were the kind of issues we needed to be grappling with.
Taking on corporate greed is an environmental concern.
I am on the board of corporations who contribute both to environmental problems and their solutions. And I am on the NGO side: the Earth Council and other organizations.
I have always been an advocate and was, in my last job at M&S, a supporter of the Al Gore dictum that a sustainable business can be a profitable business. We were the first sizeable company in the U.K. to prove that was the case.
I believe very strongly that corporations could and should be a major force for resolving social and environmental concerns in the twenty-first century.
There's a growing sense among large corporations that to solve global problems like climate change, the responsibility can't fall just on the government. The business community has to be a big piece of that.
No government is here forever. And there are other forces - the most potent force in our society, in fact, big business - doing good for the environment.
