Greening Business, Root and Branch: The Forms and Limits of Economic Environmentalism

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to examine the roots of our obligation to preserve the land and its resources, to address in some systematic way the "So what?" response to the massive documentation of environmental dete rioration and the accompanying environmentalist imperatives. We will begin with an exercise in deconstruction?the parsing of an event, just one event, to extract from its account some of the problems that environmental ism has got itself into, especially in dealing with the multiple faces of American business. From that point we will be in a position to address the central project of the paper, an elaboration of an ethic for the appreciation and protection of the natural environment, "the land," for short, meaning the earth, all its life, all its resources. The event in question was the presentation of a paper at a meeting of environmental funding agencies, hardly the sort of thing that normally ruffles the feathers of angels dancing on the heads of pins. The program of the meeting featured reflections from a variety of sources on the status of the nation's environmental initiatives. To the enormous chagrin of the leaders of the environmental movement, two relative youngsters, Michael Shell enberger and Ted Nordhaus, upended what had been a relatively unified forum with an argument that environmentalism, as a movement, was dead,