The Greening of the Boards

Encouraging news: the Wall Street Journal says that more and more corporate boards have committees tasked with addressing environmental issues, and a steady rise in shareholder activism -- which OnEarth has covered, along with other ways investors are applying some pressure to corporate entities -- is one of the reasons.

If environmental matters are getting attention at the highest levels of the org chart, well, that has to be considered a good thing. It's business, so surely the board-level conversation at most companies tends toward managing financial and legal exposure, perhaps salted with some discussion of PR value in making a show of good environmental stewardship. But remember where we're coming from -- take, for example, Ceres chief Mindy Lubber's description of a meeting with Wall Street leaders early in this decade:

Three years ago we tried to bring leaders of Wall Street financial firms and the largest pension funds into a room at the United Nations to talk about climate risks. And it was painful. They hadn't thought about it. It wasn't part of their vernacular.

Lubber is quoted several times in the WSJ story; she makes it clear that today's business climate is much more engaged with environmental concerns.

If that's the case -- if companies are routinely integrating environmental considerations into their business culture -- it seems to me that ideas about finding business advantage in clean, sustainable, environmentally sound practices might take root and flourish much more readily.