Business in the Age of Overshoot

It’s unusual to be a business school professor with an ecology-informed understanding of our environmental predicament. I see things so differently than most “sustainable business” folks that it’s difficult to talk productively about responses to our environmental issues, even though I, too, was once enamored with the sustainable business movement and its techno-optimism.

I see things differently than sustainable business folks because that crowd is focused on an entirely different question than I am. Whether they would admit it or not, their words and actions make it clear they are typically trying to answer the following: How can a business profitably do less harm?

Less harm than what? It depends. They often just mean less harm than the business otherwise would have caused, though that could still be more than it caused last year. That’s why we hear people bragging about companies expanding their production capacity by building gigantic new factories that will be powered by wind or solar energy. It’s unclear if they think a million new solar-powered factories would be even better.

Businesses and business schools can occupy themselves with business-level, “less harm” kind of work, and it feels to them like progress. If they avoid using a wide-lens perspective to understand our collective environmental impacts, they don’t have to think about the difference between problem shifting and problem solving, or consider the cumulative impacts of growth, or understand obstacles like rebound. And they can easily point out (typically very small) businesses doing wonderful things.

But the collective impacts really are the problem. A $27 trillion economy consisting only of conscientiously run small businesses would still take a massive toll on the environment. Business is good at some things, but voluntarily and collectively safeguarding planetary boundaries isn’t one of them.

I left the sustainable business crowd when I began asking a different question: How can we bring our collective environmental impacts back within the planet’s biophysical boundaries? Answering that question is a qualitatively different endeavor than what the sustainable business folks are doing. In fact, I found virtually no discussion about that sort of question in the business literature, which is why I wandered and eventually found fields like ecology and ecological economics, fields that offered a body of evidence and frameworks for addressing my new question.

It’s wonderful when companies pursue less destructive ways of doing business, and it’s great that business schools are talking about environmental issues. The concern is that those efforts very often lull people into a false sense of progress. We could speculate about the psychological factors at work there, but the tendency is unmistakable. People who identify with business want to believe that business holds the key to a problem that it created or at least worsened.

Ultimately, that prevents them from looking at the big picture. Here’s the big picture as I understand it: Industrialization and a growth and profit obsession, layered on top of some basic human tendencies and cultural quirks, have driven us to a point of extreme overshoot. With very limited exceptions (e.g., truly regenerative businesses), the last thing the environment needs at this point is more business.

Ecologically grounded folks usually acknowledge that businesses and markets are highly unlikely to lead us to a sustainable future. They argue that we need public policy changes to force economic actors to make decisions that, collectively, respect environmental boundaries. True enough – if businesses are to be part of an environmentally responsible future, we will have to lead them there, not the other way around. And public policy will be part of how we do that.

However, the market and the state have failed on environmental matters for the same reason: us. Yes, corporate political influence is part of the story, but even without that, we have a culture problem. Most Americans currently don’t want to give up any convenience or material affluence, and our decisions as voters, customers, investors, and more reflect as much. That must change if we want the market or the state to change. We don’t need everyone willing to live like the Amish, but we do need them to vote for people who will impose some uncomfortable changes on us in the interest of long-term thriving. We’re nowhere close to that reality in the U.S.

It’s almost taboo to say that environmental protection depends on a dramatic cultural change, because we all know just how difficult and slow that will be. Indeed, it will be, but that doesn’t make it unnecessary.

I would love to believe that we can change our culture in time to avoid severe environmental backlash. I hope we do, but it is not at all clear that we will. It seems more likely that billions of us will have to feel the pain of disruption before acting, at which point our options may not be very good.

There’s a different sort of good news to be found, though. The cultural transformation we need in affluent countries involves changes that, to my eyes, are unquestionably positive. Encouraging people to prioritize genuine life satisfaction over hollow, expensive, destructive, and time-consuming illusions of happiness – to prioritize relationships and meaningful work and nature over material luxuries and conveniences – that is worth fostering regardless of how much it scales. Every person who moves in that direction will be better off, and the environment will be better off, too.

Many of my business students feel much the same way. Not all of them, of course, but a surprising percentage. They think we’ve reached an absurd level of detached individualism, and they think our cultural aversion to inconvenience and to even minor pain-for-gain hardship is destroying us. They recognize that we are creating both environmental damage and physically and emotionally unwell people. Again, I’m not counting on a sudden cultural transformation, but there is real interest in a different way of living, even among those who have good financial prospects in our current economic system.

What we need more than new solar-powered factories is the normalization of people turning away from destructive affluence, living simpler and happier lives, and sharing those lives with others. Not utopian lives, of course, but better lives. That will take different forms for different people, and some will be able to make larger changes than others. For virtually everyone, though, it probably means contributing to and being an integral part of a dependable community. Each person who makes this kind of change makes it a bit more appealing and possibly creates new opportunities that simplify the transition for others.

For me, it also means leaving my faculty position. I may remain involved with the business school in some way so that I can help students develop a broader understanding of our predicament, but my current role feels too much like advocating for the status quo when what we need is transformation. At any rate, simply walking away from a traditional career can be a meaningful and influential act by itself, even if only a small one.

At the risk of seeming downright optimistic, I’ll add one last silver lining. Encouraging genuine life satisfaction is the kind of activism that doesn’t involve protests or other conflict. Quite the opposite. Joyful modesty is what we need.

Some people are already leading joyfully modest lives in tight-knit communities, but they aren’t typically attention seekers. A few small-scale media businesses look for them and share their stories. Perhaps more of us can look for the joyfully modest people in our lives, learning what we can from them instead of from the malignantly selfish, algorithm-drive madness running rampant today. That seems like genuine progress, however slowly it is made.