About Di Digest | Back Issues | Mailing List | Email DI | On Line Features

The Natural Step

No it's not the latest dance craze but a four-step guide for leading organizations to sustainability. In Sweden, pop stars, politicians, corporations, and King Carl Gustaf have all fallen in line behind cancer researcher Karl-Henrik Robért's four System Conditions of organizational sustainability. From transnationals to tulip farms, organizations are asking themselves: (1) Are they systematically decreasing their economic dependence on underground metals and other minerals? (2) What about lowering their use of 'persistent unnatural substances' like CFCs? (3) Do they erode 'productive parts of nature' like forests and wetlands? (4) Is their resource use wasteful or extravagant? Serious stuff and already 25% of Sweden's companies have taken their first steps toward sustainability. Electrolux took the Natural Step and now manufactures non-CFC-using refrigerators. Ikea and McDonalds (Sweden) are also innovating, spurred by this non-confrontational approach to improvement. Watch for the movement to leap into the international sphere with a US version later this spring, associated with luminaries like author Paul Hawken and companies like Monsanto. Similar steps are being taken in Britain, Switzerland, Norway, Poland and Canada. [four benchmarks for sustainable management]

Factor 4 n. the idea that doubling wealth and halving resource use is quite possible right now in many industries and economic sectors

Robert, Karl-Henrik. Educating a Nation: the Natural Step. In Context 28 (Spring 1991): 10-15.

Hawken, Paul. Taking the Natural Step. In Context 41 (Summer 1995): 36-38.

NOT HOT

- Green Gloss

What were all those frogs and butterflies doing sitting on the covers of corporate environmental reports a few years back? These creatures found themselves in a distinctly unnatural habitat as companies aspired to appear green. A quick look inside showed a different picture, with environmental claims being more PR than substance. Governments have been known to don similar camouflage. Finance Ministries in OECD countries, for example, are talking lots nowadays about green budget reform but still doing precious little about it (see DI #4).

Business Ethics Resources on the Web

<http://www.ethics.ubc.ca/papers/business.html>
<http://www.betterworld.com/BW/index.htm>

Contact Information: Sweden: The Natural Step Foundation, Amiralitetshuset, Skeppsholmen S-111, 49 Stockholm. USA: TNS, 17 Msgr. O'Brien Highway, Cambridge, MA 02141. Email: natstep@2nature.org