Building Green and Building Profits

by Rick Fedrizzi (US Green Building Council/GreenBiz) ... I’m constantly confronted by — and confronting — people who just don’t get who I am and what I do. You could say I stick out like a green thumb, thanks to my convention-bending belief that profit can (and hopefully will) save the planet.

Of course, by "save the planet," I don’t mean the 4.5-billion-year-old space rock we call home. The rock will still be here even when people aren’t. What I mean by "save the planet" is save the world as we know it — a world in which modern civilization and civil society are able to thrive.

It has become abundantly clear at this point in human history that, if we want to continue to thrive, we must not exploit the natural world, but live and work in harmony with it. Over the past 20-plus years, I’ve worked hard to bring together a community of like-minded professionals who have the skills to turn the dream of a sustainable future into a profitable reality.

Outside of the green building community, however, espousing this point of view is often met with a blank stare — if not fierce disagreement. After all, everyone knows the private sector and the environmental movement are mortal enemies, right?

We read about businesses fighting environmental regulation because it threatens their profits, or environmental protesters putting themselves between greedy loggers and the endangered owl. It’s an easy narrative to get your head around. Everyone has a clear, simple goal: making a buck by pillaging the Earth, or killing jobs to save some flora and fauna. It’s an "either/or" scenario in most everyone’s book.

The idea that it could be "both/and" is, to the vast majority, unfathomable. And that’s no surprise. After all, this is how we’ve seen the world for the past 50 years. Environmentalists and business leaders know their friends and foes. It’s clear who they need to "defeat" in order to "win."

Here’s the thing about this adversarial worldview: For a long time, it pretty accurately described the facts on the ground. The environmental movement was absolutely right that the only way to get business to lessen its impact on the environment was through the time-tested method of agitation, legislation and regulation.

Without the force of law, no amount of pleading could get the private sector to clean up its act. Industry had no incentive — and no desire — to give up profit and growth (as they were used to accounting for it) for a cause that wasn’t their own.

And the environmental movement knew it, so they protested and lobbied to pass major pieces of environmental legislation that we revere to this day: the Clean Air Act signed by President Nixon in 1970; the DDT ban, which followed in 1972; the Clean Water Act, passed over President Nixon’s veto that same year; the Montreal Protocol on CFCs in 1987; the Oil Pollution Act, signed by President George H.W. Bush in 1990 in response to the Exxon Valdez spill; and many more.

Meanwhile, the business community was right, too. What environmentalists were demanding was, essentially, a shifting of priorities away from profit and growth, and toward environmental stewardship and public health. And for businesses, these shifts seemed as unnecessary as they were expensive.

Environmental disasters are severely impacting the private sector. For instance, 2012 saw the most extensive U.S. drought recorded since the 1930s, resulting in $17.3 billion in lost crops. And on a single night that same year, Hurricane Sandy caused an estimated $65 billion in damage, including at least $20 billion in lost business during the days that followed. Sure, Sandy was a "superstorm," a supposedly once-in-a-lifetime event.

But who could fail to notice that severe weather is becoming more frequent and more costly with each passing year?

Even if you write off the increasing impact of severe weather as some sort of meteorological fluke, the impact of pollution is impossible to deny. In fact, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that air pollution contributed to around 7 million premature deaths globally in 2012, stating, "Air pollution is now the world’s largest single environmental health risk."

The cost of pollution can be measured not only in lost years of life, but in trillions of dollars of lost economic activity. For example, China has seen incredible economic growth over the past several years — but what if I told you that growth could be even higher?

But a new narrative is emerging — a new way of thinking, even — that is deeply rooted in reality, not distorted by history. While the old narrative claims that the environment is the enemy of growth, the new narrative holds that the environment and the economy are deeply, fundamentally connected.

They share common enemies: waste, inefficiency, pollution, climate change, resource scarcity and environmental degradation. They also share a common ally: sustainability. And instead of intractable, insulated groupthink, they share a common outlook: greenthink. Greenthink occurs when businesses, nonprofits, governments and individuals marry environmental and economic principles for the benefits they can receive from both.

Troughout the global economy, a select number of enlightened companies are already engaged in greenthink by leveraging the power of sustainability to drive profits. These businesses aren’t using less energy and fewer resources in the name of self-denial or out of the goodness of their hearts; they’re consuming less in order to earn more.

The economic incentives are changing, and so are the business models. The result is a measurable reduction in the damage that many companies inflict on the environment and people, an increase in the quality and desirability of their products and services, and a reward in the form that business understands best: cold, hard cash.

If you’re an environmentalist, it’s time to face up to the limitations of the environmental movement, its strategies and its methods — and it’s time to start using private-sector forces to drive change instead.

If you’re a business leader, it’s time to sustainably transform your enterprise before environmental factors transform your marketplace. I’m writing this book for warmhearted conservationists and coldblooded capitalists, because profit can save the planet, and saving the planet will be great for business. READ MORE