Greening Global Business
COSTING THE EARTH The Challenge for Governments, The Opportunities for Business By Frances Cairncross Harvard Business School Press 341 pp. $24.95</br></br>OUR COUNTRY, THE PLANET Forging a Partnership for Survival By Shridath Ramphal Island Press. 291 pp. $32</br></br>SLOWLY BUT surely, we seem to be abandoning the long-held notion that when it comes to business and the environment, you can't have it both ways. Our old zero-sum assumptions - profits and productivity versus the birds and the trees - have given way to a new understanding of the relationships between economics and ecology. "Doing well" is increasingly being associated with "doing good" for the earth. Conservation is no longer being seen as an inhibitor to growth, but as a stimulus for efficiency. Environmental responsibility is no longer some corporate feel-good issue, but an obligation - to customers, investors, employees, communities and others. To that extent, the notion of "greener" companies can be a win-win proposition, with salutary effects for both business and the earth.</br></br>That's an underlying message from Frances Cairncross, who argues in Costing the Earth that the partnership of clear-sighted economic policies and resourceful companies can survive, even thrive, in the new era of global environmental concern.</br></br>As environmental editor for the British magazine the Economist, Cairncross has a perspective rooted firmly on the east side of the Atlantic Ocean, where "government regulation" hasn't yet earned the same public scorn as "acid rain." Her desire to see taxes and regulations realign market signals so as to favor cleaner, greener products and processes is a laudable goal, to be sure, but it may be more at home in the current political climate of Munich, than in Marietta, Ga. Her belief that consumers and producers should pay the true costs of the environmental damage they cause is another worthy ideal, but of dubious practicality in a climate where federal regulators are prone to tiptoe through living rooms and boardrooms, leaving the fewest possible footprints in both.