When I first got started in this business I used to get patronised a lot. “It would be nice to [be greener],” these grey haired pillars of business used to tell me, “but we’ve got to live in the real world…” I don’t get this so much – maybe those greyhairs have moved on, maybe my own emerging crop of grey gives me a bit more gravitas, or maybe attitudes have changed, but I still find it incredible how many people are stuck in the Milton Friedman/Chicago School of Economics mindset that the only purpose of a business is to make profit.
Look at some of big business/economic stories of recent years:

• 2011 News International and the News of the World hacking scandal: serious ethical/legal failings have led to a 168 year old paper closing, share prices falling and a huge business deal put on the back burner indefinitely. [Oh, and literally as I type this, the Chief Executive Rebekah Brooks has stepped down].

• 2010 BP oil spill: causing a huge environmental disaster then failing to appreciate the scale of the impact either on the ecology or local communities. What were they doing drilling so deep? Is oil getting harder to find?

• 2007/8 Banking crisis: unethical lending and dubious unregulated “financial products” lead to a bubble which, as bubbles do, burst, causing huge economic and societal hardship. Governments have had to bail out the banks as the societal impact of letting them fail would have been devastating.

What’s in common? The one-eyed pursuit of profit with no cognisance of societal or environmental realities leading to crises for the businesses themselves, never mind everyone else.
Let’s wake up and smell the coffee. Business is a function of the economy which is a function of society which exists in the ecological world. And that, my friends, is the real world.