Humans and Sustainability of Nature's Life Support System

During the last few decades, humans have emerged as a new force of nature. We are modifying physical, chemical, and biological systems in new ways, at faster rates, and over larger spatial scales than ever recorded on earth."
1998 Address by the
President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

"Sustainable development" refers to an ideal of widespread economic prosperity that sustains nature’s life-support systems enabling expansion of the next generation's choices rather than limiting them. Imaging the ideal serves to define a more preferable state. Backcasting from that future vision specifies alternative paths forward. This frame encompasses a wide range of innovative corporate activity at the nexus of business and natural systems that is transforming existing markets, creating new ones, and embedding sustainability principles in firms' strategies. The growing imperative to systemically incorporate environmental impacts, health issues, community effects, and a longer-term fiduciary responsibility to stockholders provides a strong incentive to companies to both understand this changing competitive landscape, and explore its inherent new opportunities.

Humans have become a central force in nature. While having always influenced the physical environment around us, our reach has been extended so dramatically in the last 50 years through technology and globalization that we are now living in a watershed moment in history. Our anthropogenic impact has altered fundamentally the chemistry, ecology, and biology of living and non-living systems. This has occurred because our progress has resulted in an historically unprecedented population explosion with accompanying exponential growth of industrial production and materials throughput. Technological advances now race to keep pace with the resulting demand for land, water, materials, energy, and food. The rates and scales of change combine with staggering volumes of waste that disrupt and potentially impair natural systems worldwide (e.g. habitat, climate, the hydrologic cycle, and biogeochemical cycles). Yet these same natural systems provide the critical services on which we depend - clean water, healthy air, clean energy, productive soil, healthy food.

SOURCE: Darden Business Publishing, University of Virginia
Introduction to GBUS 806: Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Sustainable Business – a second year MBA course offered by Prof. Andrea Larson, 1999-2005