John Elkington is a leading thinker in business sustainability. He is likely best known for advancing the idea of the Triple Bottom Line, see here. He has a somewhat positive take on where humanity is going regarding sustainability. He sees profound market shifts towards sustainability coming. He calls these Green Swans. Green Swans, Black Swans,…
Category: Sustainability
Sustainable Marketing And Commerciality
My regular collaborator, Jonathan Knowles, has a new piece in the Journal of Sustainable Marketing. He tackles the idea of sustainable marketing and the role of marketers in the world of for-profit companies. What then does he have to say about sustainable marketing and commercialism? For-Profit Organizations And Social Progress Knowles starts by arguing that…
Population As A Disaster
Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb in 1968. I read a version printed in 1988 which had a 1978 update. It is a gloomy book that makes bold claims of famine and crises. There have certainly been problems in the last 55 years but nothing like Ehrlich predicted. It is an over-the-top book written by…
History Of Sustainability
Jeremy Caradonna wrote a history of sustainability in his book, Sustainability. (I read the revised edition from 2022). This work draws linkages from early ideas of sustainability and looks at where we are now. Things have moved forward, and back, on the sustainability front. There is some interesting history. As someone who lives in Georgia,…
Eliminating The Concept Of Waste
In their book Cradle to Cradle, sustainability writers William (Bill) McDonough and Michael Braungart argued that we should be thinking not in terms of Cradle to Grave — birth to death — for products. Instead, we should be thinking of reuse. Their second book along those lines, Upcycle, goes further. Their basic argument is that…
The Path To 2050
How can the world get to carbon neutral by 2050? This is the date the Paris Agreement specified for getting away from the activities that produce greenhouse gasses (see here). Many would argue that that the Paris agreement was not ambitious enough. Still, we don’t currently have a clear plan to reach carbon neutral by…
Triple Bottom Line
John Elkington gave us the idea of the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) in 1994. In 2018 he proposed that the idea be recalled for a retooling. Things hadn’t worked out as he hoped. The Triple Bottom Line The idea behind the Triple Bottom Line is simple. Rather than fixating on financial performance alone, the bottom…
Competitive Advantage And Social Purpose
How should firms approach competing using their commitment to social and environmental purpose? This was the challenge tackled by Omar Rodríguez-Vilá and Sundar Bharadwaj in their 2017 article published in the Harvard Business Review. (Sundar is a colleague of mine at the University of Georgia). The approach they outline seeks to show a clear way…
What Has Been Studied In Academic Sustainable Marketing Research?
It is (almost) always interesting to go back and discover what has been studied in the past. Academic journals in the marketing field have been with us for many generations so we have a large sample to look at. Brian Chabowski and colleagues in 2011 reviewed what had been studied in academic sustainable marketing research….
The Environmental Impacts Of Foods
There are many things that can impact a person’s, and a community’s, impact upon the environment. Some things we might be able to stop doing. That is not the case with eating food. We have a large number of people on the planet and we all have to eat. As such, an important question is…
