Conversations About The Environment

Howard Burton

• Publisher: Ideas Roadshow
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781771701747
• Topic: Ciencias biológicas
• Subtopic: Calentamiento global y cambio climático

FIVE BOOKS IN ONE! This collection includes the following 5 complete Ideas Roadshow books featuring leading researchers providing fully accessible insights into cutting-edge academic research while revealing the inspirations and personal journeys behind the research. A detailed preface highlights the connections between the different books and all five books are broken into chapters with a detailed introduction and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter: 1.Solar Impact: Climate and the Sun - A Conversation with Joanna Haigh, Professor Emerita of Atmospheric Physics at Imperial College London and Co-Director of the Grantham Institute until her retirement in 2019. After inspiring details about how she got into her field of study and how we can encourage more girls to get more interested in science, the conversation examines her research of the influence of the sun and solar variability on our climate, how energy emitted by the sun in the form of heat, light and ultraviolet radiation warms the earth and drives our climate, how data from satellites and modelling the processes helps us distinguish the warming effects of greenhouse gases from those of natural variations in solar energy, and more.2.Saving the World at Business School (Part 1) - A Conversation with Andy Hoffman, Holcim Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and School of Environment and Sustainability. Topics of this wide-ranging conversation include the notions of "environmental sustainability" and "big business" which sometimes seem as incompatible as oil and water and ways to make a synthesis a reality by seriously reconsidering the way we currently conduct public policy and even some deep aspects of our current societal values.3.Saving the World At Business School (Part 2) is an extensive follow-up conversation discussing Andy Hoffman's research and scholarly insights which are extremely relevant to today's society. Andy Hoffman is passionately committed to encouraging fellow academics to play a much stronger role in communicating knowledge, facts and information to the regular public and politicians which has culminated into his two new books The Engaged Scholar and Management As A Calling.4.Coral Reefs: Science and Survival - A Conversation with Charles Sheppard, Professor of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick. Charles Sheppard has worked extensively for a wide range of UN, governmental and aid agencies in tropical marine and coastal development issues. This conversation explores how Prof. Sheppard is trying to find a way through political shortsightedness, corporate greed and societal indifference to use his experience to make the planet a better place.5.Ocean Enlightenment - A Conversation with Edie Widder, Founder, CEO and Senior Scientist at Ocean Research & Conservation Association (ORCA). After an inspiring story about how Edie Widder became a seagoing marine biologist and deep-sea diver, this conversation covers topics such as bioluminescence which is a fascinating scientific phenomenon that provides us with a deeper understanding of fundamental biological processes and the development of new programs designed to equip a new generation with the tools they need to deal with the environmental devastation we're facing. Howard Burton is the founder and host of all Ideas Roadshow Conversations and was the Founding Executive Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics and an MA in philosophy.

Saving the World at Business School

Part 1

A first conversation with Andy Hoffman

Introduction

Clarity vs. Popularity

A friend of mine has long argued that there is an inverse relationship between the popularity of a word and its meaning. The trendier a word has become, he says, the fuzzier it is, until eventually it’s used everywhere and means nothing.

“Sustainability” seems a perfect example for his theory. Once a word primarily associated with dour environmentalists, it’s hard to think of someone these days who does not avidly chatter away about its merits. Politicians of all stripes routinely vie to outdo one another to demonstrate their sustainability credentials. Corporations now have Chief Sustainability Officers. We are all sustainability advocates now, it would appear. But what, in fact, are we actually talking about?

Not much, in fact.

Into this yawning semantic void steps Andy Hoffman. A popular professor at one of America’s elite business schools, Hoffman might seem an odd choice to be the driving force for a fundamental re-interpretation of the green lexicon.

But a closer examination shows that he’s spent the majority of his career searching for constructive and practical ways to develop mutually beneficial common ground between the forces of capitalism and environmentalism. He is, after all, the Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan.

There’s that word again.

But Andy, to his credit, keeps pushing our understanding of what it actually means.

However vague it might be, he told me, our widespread invocation of “sustainability” is clearly a good thing. Once rejected from a position at a top-tier business school for being “too focused on the environment”, he has witnessed first-hand the evolution of the environmental movement as “sustainability” has moved into the mainstream.

But for Andy, that journey is only just beginning.

“Now it’s time to discover ‘Sustainability 2.0’. Where do we have to go next? There’s been change to a certain point. But the problems continue to get worse and even more radical shifts are called for.”

A radical shift is exactly what you might call the recent work he co-authored with his mentor John Ehrenfeld, Flourishing: A Frank Conversation About Sustainability.

The book is a dialogue between the two experts, beginning with an analysis of the issues at play and concluding with a final chapter, Reasons to be Hopeful.

Throughout the conversation, Hoffman plays the straight man to Ehrenfeld’s more radical declarations. What is needed, Ehrenfeld avers, is not simply incremental improvements to help us preserve our status quo, but nothing less than a redefinition of our core values, a collective societal shift away from perpetual consumerism towards a deeper understanding of our place in the world.

To that end, a new definition of that oh-so-troubling word is presented. “Sustainability”, we are told, “is the possibility that humans and other life will flourish on the Earth forever.”

As each aspect of this quasi-utopian announcement is examined, scrutinized and dissected in the cold light of day, I felt myself increasingly at sea. Being confronted by an unabashedly idealistic tract that boldly announces a clear road map for societal progress is one thing—we all need to be inspired from time to time.

But what on earth is the world coming to when these sorts of things are being written by two engineers, one of whom is a faculty member at a major American business school? What’s next? Disarmament pamphlets from the NRA? Vegetarian cookbooks by the French? Scandinavian samba videos?

The truth is that I’ve never had a clear understanding of what happens inside business schools anyway. I knew that fees were high, and that their shiny, modern buildings were often populated with people with PhDs wearing suits, which has always struck me as vaguely oxymoronic. And, in stark contrast to the atmosphere pervading physics or philosophy departments, say, most business students seemed convinced that time spent there might well lead to an actual job.

That was about it.

And then there was the fact, of course, that all business students were superficial, morally-depraved, mindlessly-consuming sell-outs who were largely responsible for driving the planet to the brink of ecological destruction.

But this last point, I discovered when I had the chance to sit down and chat with Andy, needed a bit of a rethink.

“Well, there’s definitely a demographic you describe, but more and more students are coming into business schools because they want to make a positive change in the world and they see that business has the power base to do it. They see the potential opportunities.

“When I first got into this, I wanted to try to teach students to go into companies and help them to see environmental issues as strategic opportunities. Now we have more and more students coming out and saying, ‘I don’t want to go into a company and teach them, I want to do it myself. Increasingly, young people are motivated by the idea of creating a company that can try to address social and environmental issues.

“There’s also a focus now on the ‘hybrid organization’, the sort of organization that lives in the blurry space between the for-profit and nonprofit world. We’re seeing more and more students who want to do that. They want to make a positive impact on the world and they see a business as a way to do it.”

All very smoothly delivered—he is a business professor, after all. But Andy Hoffman is clearly no ordinary guy in a suit. Before returning to do his PhD at MIT, he took 5 years off to become a carpenter and home builder, a story he detailed in his award-winning memoir Builder’s Apprentice.

And while it’s worth emphasizing that virtually all of the truly radical things offered up in Flourishing clearly spring from Ehrenfeld rather than his erstwhile student, it’s equally obvious that Andy’s strong resonance with his mentor’s views was a prime motivating force for the book’s creation in the first place.

“I see John as a visionary. I see him as looking much further out than most of us can see. He’s a very deep thinker, he’s been thinking about these issues for a long time and he’s very philosophical.

“What he’s pointing out is where we need to go for the long term, that some things we’re focusing on now are not going to take us where we need to go. Yes, you can buy a compact fluorescent light bulb and screw it in. That’s great, you’re reducing your energy load. But there are still a lot of materials that went into that: you’re just making the production of light less bad. How do we shift from there to actually making our technological society better?

“He makes the really powerful point that all our efforts right now are reducing unsustainability, which is a fundamentally differen...