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Anniversary Forum
The Business-Environment Connection
Christine Meisner Rosen
| I WOULD LIKE to take this opportunity to try to persuade the readers of Environmental History of the urgent importance of engaging in research that integrates business and environmental history. In my view it is essential that environmental historians join with business historians in investigating the historical interface between business and the environment. We need to do this not only because the subject is intrinsically interesting, but also because it promises to provide crucial insights into the origins of the mounting environmental and public-health crises that loom before us. |
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As Christopher Sellers and I pointed out several years ago in a similar call directed at business historians, despite decades of increasing alarm about industrial pollution, climate change, rainforest destruction, species extinction, and all the other forms of environmental degradation linked to economic activity, surprisingly little in-depth research has focused specifically on the relationship between the history of business and the evolution of the natural environment—either by environmental or business historians.1 Business historians have been especially oblivious. Blinded by the internal, corporate organizational concerns of the Chandlerian perspective that dominated the field until very recently, the vast majority have simply ignored the environmental context in which the modern corporation has evolved. Environmental historians are doing better, especially since the early 1990s, due in large part to the heroic efforts of Bill Cronon and others to extend the boundaries of the field beyond its longstanding focus on wilderness, forests, and agriculture. While the new work coming out is extremely interesting and important, however, we have only begun to scratch the surface of this important subject. Much of the new work by environmental historians focuses on business's impact on the environment, especially its negative impacts, without looking at the impact the natural environment has had on the evolution of business. More detrimentally, with a few notable exceptions, it tends to treat business as a black box, as an inherently exploitative force, (or as my teenage son might put it, as "the black box of DOOM!!"), rather than as a living system whose internal dynamics and constraints need to be explored and analyzed if we are to truly understand how the two systems—nature and business—have interacted and coevolved over time.2 |
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To integrate the history of business into our study of the natural world, we need to recognize that business and nature are inseparable parts of a single interactive system, an "industrial ecosystem," through which energy and materials cycle continuously, from nature to industry and back to nature, in a never-ending feedback loop.3 The business system feeds on the natural resources found in the earth and on energy ultimately derived from the sun, as well as on the manufactured inputs of industrial supply chains. It returns its wastes to the earth, the seas, and the atmosphere. These two-way flows take place whenever industry extracts materials and energy from the earth and processes them into manufactured goods, whenever it ships and sells the goods, and whenever consumers use and ultimately dispose of them. At every step of the cycle—not just the final, end-user disposal step—the flow-through includes a great deal of energy and material waste. Indeed, according to recent research, only a small fraction of the material that flows into the U.S. economy today gets bound up into manufactured products. As much as 96 percent is waste—mine waste, stuff that blows out the factory smokestack or effluent pipe as pollution or that is left behind on the factory floor and dumped in landfills. Most of the products are disposed of as waste as well, rather than recycled.4 We know startlingly little about how these proportions compare to the materials and energy flows that shaped our industrial ecosystem in the past—or anything else about them for that matter. |
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