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Thunderbird inks first dual degree partnership with law schoolThe Biosphere Rules
Editor’s Note: In  a new article released in the February 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Thunderbird’s Professor Gregory Unruh, Director of the Lincoln Center for Ethics,  shows how companies can put their products and practices in harmony with planet earth. The article presents three “Biosphere Rules” that distill the sustainability of nature into simple steps any company can take. Below is an excerpt:

Sustainability—which natural scientists define as the capacity of healthy ecosystems to continue functioning indefinitely—has become a clarion call for business. Consider General Electric’s ambitious Ecomagination project, Coca-Cola’s efforts to protect water quality, Wal-Mart’s attempt to reduce packaging waste, and Nike’s removal of toxic chemicals from its shoes. These and other laudable efforts are steps on a road described by the aluminum giant Alcan in its 2002 corporate sustainability report: “Sustainability is not a destination. It is a continuing journey of learning and change.”

Unfortunately, Alcan had it wrong. At best, the view of sustainability as an endless journey of incremental steps does a disservice to managers seeking to square economy with ecology sooner rather than later. At worst, it serves as an excuse for inaction when it comes to building a truly sustainable business.

I believe that sustainability should be not a distant, foggy goal but, rather, a real destination. This view has emerged from a search begun in the 1980s, when I was an environmental consultant hired to help clean up the toxic messes of Fortune 500 companies. That work inspired me to launch a long effort to discover the true basis for sustainability. After conducting hundreds of interviews with managers, scientists, engineers, academics, designers, and architects, I came to the simple conclusion that we already know exactly what sustainability on planet Earth looks like.

A perfect model, refined through billions of years of trial and error, is our planet’s biosphere—defined in 1875 by the geologist Eduard Suess as “the place on earth’s surface where life dwells.” Researchers have only recently begun to explore how nature’s technology can be emulated in the service of sustainable manufacturing and commerce. Earth’s complex, self-regulating biosphere is, in essence, a brilliant operating system that has fashioned prolific life without interruption for more than 3.5 billion years. By studying the interdependent principles that collectively account for Earth’s sustainability, managers can learn how to build ecologically friendly products that reduce manufacturing costs and prove highly attractive to consumers. Moreover, companies do not need to wait for a green technological revolution to implement manufacturing practices that are both sustainable and profitable. They can apply the biosphere’s lessons to industrial technology today.

Read the full article online or in the latest edition of Harvard Business Review. You can also read Professor Unruh’s frequent posts on Harvard Business Review’s new sustainability Web site HBRGreen.