Nicholas Eisenberger serves as Managing Principal at GreenOrder, an environmental consulting firm based in New York and known to some as the McKinsey of green business. He spoke with me recently about the need to redirect, redefine, and regulate Wall Street's riches, as well as the connection between education and a sustainable New York City.

Michael Kroon: Can corporate sustainability help Wall Street recover from the current financial crisis?

Nicholas Eisenberger: I think there are two ways to react to this crisis. One is to go into raw survival mode and really scratch and scrabble for savings and dollars and ways to pay the bills using the conventional thinking that we've been using but in many ways has gotten us into this crisis. Or we can think more deeply about what has gotten us to this point and whether we're investing in the right things. We are not investing in a sustainable environmental and energy future in sufficient amounts. And so I think the enlightened way to look at this crisis is to take a step back and consider how can we double downon the time, money, and resources we are investing in a more sustainable future with the hope and goal of creating a richer planetary future and a richer and more sustainable future overall.

MK: With the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) kicked off last month in Northeastern states and a concurrent increase in other regulation, do you sense a tension on Wall Street between increased oversight and shareholder shell-shock?

NE: Again, I think that certainly part of the reaction to the RGGI I'm hearing on the street is people saying "I don't have time for that right now. That's a nice-to-have." But that reaction is much smaller than I would have thought just a few years ago.

I was at the Clinton Global Initiative here in New York a couple weeks ago while this panic was going down. And there I was sitting with 1,500 other people from around the world -- many of them world leaders or captains of industry or heads of civic society groups. And the buzz was that this crisis is really demonstrating the issues that we have been talking about for so many years relating to energy, environment, education, global health, poverty - that these are the things being neglected. And it's not necessarily that we had poor regulation or not enough regulation, but as Clinton said at the end of the session, we haven't really been investing in the right things. We have failed to imagine the best way to get rich.

So to get back to your question, I think there will be a temporary hit in some cases to efforts to regulate in terms of things perceived to be costly will be less attractive now than they might have been a year ago. On the other hand, there will be the impulse to regulate more. People are taking away as the lessons of this financial crisis that we failed to regulate behavior in the right ways. So I think those things will kind of fight each other out in the market place for the best ideas, and I'm hoping that what wins is the idea that we need to fundamentally re-orient the way that we believe we can have a sustainable and financially rich society.

MK: You said we've failed to imagine the best way to get rich. As a founding member of Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2), how do you see the role of New York business in that reimagination and the innovative navigation of environmental crises?

NE: E2 is such a great organization, and I'm pleased to be a part of it. I had a revelation back in the early 90s to use the tools of business to address the environmental problems that we face. The market is the most powerful force on earth and you need to harness that power, among other things, to address the environmental challenges we face.

And so I was completely thrilled when I found out that Bob Epstein and Nicole Lederer had created Environmental Entrepreneurs whose goal was to harness the skills, networks and intelligence of the business community to suggest better ways of addressing environmental issues, and I immediately signed up. Although it started in California originally, New York has come into its own, and we have been able to have an impact at both the city and state, regional and federal levels in ways that have been far beyond the raw size of the membership of E2. Business leaders have an important role to play around the table in addressing environmental issues; policy, law and the other traditional tools can be supplemented in very powerful ways by that voice.

MK: Helping cultivate tomorrow's leaders in that dynamic dialogue, tell us about your work with New York SunWorks and the Growing Up Green Charter School. What connections do you see between science education, public awareness and a more sustainability city?

NE: Great question. I'm very pleased to be associated with these organizations that are working at a local level to bring environmental awareness to a broader and broader community.

SunWorks is the brainchild of a college friend of mine - Ted Caplow- who had the idea of creating, essentially, a self-sustained eco-system that used water and power from its surroundings and created life from that - hydroponic, greenhouse life. And then engaging the local community - local children and adults, and tourists along the New York waterfront - to try to make tangible and realistic renewable sources of power and how you can grow your own food in a limited space in an urban setting. And they've had an impact and visibility far beyond where they're sitting out there in the middle of the Hudson on a barge. They've had thousands and thousands of schoolchildren and local and international visitors come across and have made a nice impression.

Their larger project at SunWorks has been to help propel a larger movement for urban rooftop agriculture as a more sustainable approach for how a city can help feed itself. And that's a very important long term project if you live in an urban setting.

The Growing Up Green Charter School is the brainchild of a small group of individuals who really wanted to use the lens of sustainability to enrich the educational experience in the community of Long Island City where there are educational challenges and not enough educational opportunity. They set out to help make a much more engaging experience, whether it was in the classroom - the actual physical facilities and the way they're operated - to the extra-curricular activities and the actual curricula. So the Growing Up Green Charter School has just received tentatively its charter from the State Department of Education, and it looks like that's going to be a reality, so we're really thrilled about that.

MK: Is there anything else you'd like to share with our readers?

NE: These are challenging and frightening times in many ways, but I still remain fundamentally optimistic that we are at the very early stages of figuring out how to live our lives and create wealth in ways that are far more sustainable. Everything from the solar-powered briefcase that I carry that helps me avoid having to plug in at the airport to the new models of cars that are coming - I think this is just the early, early stages of what we're going to see, and I am very hopeful that the coming years, while filled with the kind of challenges that we're seeing now, are going to see more sustainable solutions find their ways into our lives in multiple ways that we can't anticipate right now. So I'm fundamentally optimistic.