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Triple Bottom Line

There’s a backdoor reference to this in next week’s Hustle, so I thought it might bear out some explication.

Sometimes written as ‘TBL’ or ‘3BL’, triple bottom line simply stands for

People

Planet

Profit

In the language of sustainability, triple bottom line describes the environmental and social impact of an organization’s activities. The profit, therefore, is seen not in the usual context of being maximized no matter what – the lone and ultimate measure – but in harmony with the other two. Exactly. Sounds antithetical to what we’ve been slipped. The phrase was coined by John Elkington, co-founder of the business consultancy SustainAbility, in his 1998 book Cannibals with Forks: the Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business.

Triple Bottom Line is the acknolwedgement of a very natural limitation to the way business has been “done” for the last couple of hundred years. Absent people and planet there’s really little profit to be realized. How we’ve gotten so far removed from this speaks to many factors but there is little doubt about the institutional contempt in which corporations have held simple traits like honesty, which are fundamental to TBL. It speaks to the way the words are supposedly elevated, eptomized in the way that advertisers tout words like ‘sincerity’, ‘honesty’ or, my favorite, ‘trust’ in their ads like these are some kinds of freakish overlay concepts that come with an embedded voice over. It’s understood that if the business is solid and cutthroat as it should be, these will be nowhere else found.

And yet TBL is all about an honest profit, taking into account the effect of your endeavor on the human and natural capital required by it. In this context, the ‘single bottom line’ is nonsensical, like applying a balance sheet to a landscape. To have a net anything, discounting all transactional and opportunity costs, itself reeks of the finality that is the flipside of sustainable activity.

TBL is not a greenwash, but an accounting practice underpinning how a green business operates and, by extension, how society becomes sustainable.

So, with apologies to Howe Gelb, several cheers for Madame Triple Bottom Line.

Posted on

Triple Bottom Line

There’s a backdoor reference to this in next week’s Hustle, so I thought it might bear out some explication.

Sometimes written as ‘TBL’ or ‘3BL’, triple bottom line simply stands for

People

Planet

Profit

In the language of sustainability, triple bottom line describes the environmental and social impact of an organization’s activities. The profit, therefore, is seen not in the usual context of being maximized no matter what – the lone and ultimate measure – but in harmony with the other two. Exactly. Sounds antithetical to what we’ve been slipped. The phrase was coined by John Elkington, co-founder of the business consultancy SustainAbility, in his 1998 book Cannibals with Forks: the Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business.

Triple Bottom Line is the acknolwedgement of a very natural limitation to the way business has been “done” for the last couple of hundred years. Absent people and planet there’s really little profit to be realized. How we’ve gotten so far removed from this speaks to many factors but there is little doubt about the institutional contempt in which corporations have held simple traits like honesty, which are fundamental to TBL. It speaks to the way the words are supposedly elevated, eptomized in the way that advertisers tout words like ‘sincerity’, ‘honesty’ or, my favorite, ‘trust’ in their ads like these are some kinds of freakish overlay concepts that come with an embedded voice over. It’s understood that if the business is solid and cutthroat as it should be, these will be nowhere else found.

And yet TBL is all about an honest profit, taking into account the effect of your endeavor on the human and natural capital required by it. In this context, the ‘single bottom line’ is nonsensical, like applying a balance sheet to a landscape. To have a net anything, discounting all transactional and opportunity costs, itself reeks of the finality that is the flipside of sustainable activity.

TBL is not a greenwash, but an accounting practice underpinning how a green business operates and, by extension, how society becomes sustainable.

So, with apologies to Howe Gelb, several cheers for Madame Triple Bottom Line.

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Tangled up in Green Blues

I guess Time Magazine is the gorilla canary in our national coal mine. So they, of course, sit right on the curve and ask the question on this day before election, will green progress be stalled by the bad economy?

Let me be as clear about this is as possible, as clear as we all should be: Yes, if all green progress means is a new investment trend. The trend is over before it started, in effect, if it is one that must wait for proper allocation of capital and can be overtaken by events like a stock market crash or a credit crunch. Green, as it were, can and will be pushed to the backseat.

But because the long term condition underlying these events is the inherently unsustainable path on which they have been built, actions taken in the service of Green – that is, sustainability – must overturn this construct. Underlying factors of climate change, fossil fuel depletion and the resulting resource shortages are not going to be put on hold until we can deal with them. They are the events by which economies and societies are being overtaken. We’re just still choosing to see them through the prism of market factors and predictive indices. Green is a word that’s been made into a label, that some of us may think will, given sufficient time, be able to trickle down to and effect great change in the way we live.

We will have missed a great opportunity to change, not least by shunning the mother of invention, if we continue to think this.

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Holisticus

It took a while, but finally I can post one of several upcoming installments of a recent interview with eminent systems ecology theorist and professor, Bernie Patten.

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New Column

The new Flagpole column is out and up, depending of what kind of reading you do.

This was my starting point, but didn’t make it past the first draft:

If you’ve ever had any near-life experiences, you know that forever indelible is the sensation that there was something almost wrong about the very right thing that was happening. If it was beautiful, maybe it was the larger injustice in which the beauty swirled; if was horrifying, maybe it was the fact that others elsewhere in the world were carrying on, completely unbothered and oblivious. Whatever it was, this contradictory awareness, of the within and the without, added to the bite and by elevating the experience, keys us into one of the great dichotomies: destroying what we love.

The poetry of the cutting room floor.

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New Column

The new Flagpole column is out and up, depending of what kind of reading you do.

This was my starting point, but didn’t make it past the first draft:

If you’ve ever had any near-life experiences, you know that forever indelible is the sensation that there was something almost wrong about the very right thing that was happening. If it was beautiful, maybe it was the larger injustice in which the beauty swirled; if was horrifying, maybe it was the fact that others elsewhere in the world were carrying on, completely unbothered and oblivious. Whatever it was, this contradictory awareness, of the within and the without, added to the bite and by elevating the experience, keys us into one of the great dichotomies: destroying what we love.

The poetry of the cutting room floor.

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On a scale from Noble to Bitter

There are some forms of optimism that make pessimism redundant.

Oil companies engaging in a charm offensive ahead of announcements of record profits would be one of these; another would be the way we calculate, and revere, GDP even though we count some negatives and costs as positives for growth. Go figure.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s multi-billion dollar Superfund Clean-up Program of waste and toxic sites will take over 3 decades to complete, during which time the economic activity generated and expenditure for the clean-up will be added to the GDP. The initial economic activity used to generate the waste was added to the GDP, the ensuing clean-up will again add to the GDP. Thus, polluting the environment is seen as an economic benefit through the prism of GDP.

Information pollution is not a little connected to this problem. And yet power laws and fractal geometry tell us that non-local, indirect effects are the most common, most powerful, and most problematic for us. Understanding the dynamics of our economic networks, or any networks, is crucial to acting rationally within them. We consult and consort with bogus information (Consumer Price Index, anyone?) at our peril, but it’s not the case that it helps no one. Historical knowledge is a prerequisite to present understanding. Developing a true relationship to complexity, its costs and benefits, is fundamental to problem-solving in sutainable societies. To the extent that we want to become one, leveling with ourselves becomes more or less important.

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Crazy distortions

Along the lines of James Fallows’ subversive panda, consider the (still) evolving love affair between money and feeling. How we spend/invest is tied to our general mental well-being, and realizing this is simply a part of becoming cognizant about the world. This extends to how we feel about the world and what we are doing to it. Theodore Roszak’s The Voice of the Earth concerns the state of the psychology needed to support our mental-eco-state:

What the modern cultural environment has required of us is an enormous extroversion of attention and energy for the purpose of reshaping the Earth into a global industrial economy. For two centuries we have been subordinating the planet and our deepest personal needs to that project. This great act of collective alienation, I have suggested, lies at the root of both the environmental crisis and individual neurosis. In some way, at some point, a change of direction, a therapeutic turning inward, had to take place within a culture as maniacally driven as ours has been by the need to achieve and conquer.

Many artists and writers have touched on this, from Adorno to Tarkovsky, who was very explicit about how there is in fact no freedom except internal freedom – it’s just that no one is interested in that kind. We’ve gotten ourselves to a place where we lavish a string of empty experiences on ourselves and call them riches; then find ourselves foraging in the most unlikely places for some meaning beyond these so-called riches. Most fools could see that these aren’t riches at all. Poverty is not about what you have or do not have, but about social status. The lack of civilizing elements to our daily life is poverty that cannot be overcome with a million shopping sprees. Civilize your mind, find solace in the power of knowledge to liberate your impulses from feeding among the merest desires to soaring among the highest and most noble. You might notice that these will conform not to buying and excess but, oddly, a kind of conservation that can save more than just the planet.

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That graph in figure 4.1

The National Academy of Engineering charged some of their leading thinkers to come up with the top 20 engineering achievements of the 20th century. Among them:

1. Electrification

2. Automobile

4. Water supply and distribution

11. Highways

12. Spacecraft

13. Internet

19. Nuclear technologies

20. High-performance materials

They have also taken up the mantle of identifying the grand challenges for engineering in the future.

Foremost among the challenges are those that must be met to ensure the future itself. The Earth is a planet of finite resources, and its growing population currently consumes them at a rate that cannot be sustained. Widely reported warnings have emphasized the need to develop new sources of energy, at the same time as preventing or reversing the degradation of the environment.

Among these are making solar energy economical, managing the nitrogen cycle, reverse-engineering the brain, enhancing virtual reality and advancing health informatics. Notice how, though they will utilize technology, unlike the earlier list, they are not about inventing new things. They are about figuring out the really hard stuff. It’s almost as if we’ve already tackled a lot of the easy stuff and now, what’s left? Exactly. The complex systems. What is the nitrogen cycle? One of the most important nutrient cycles in the terrestial ecosystems, one which human activity has significantly altered by introducing more N in the form of fertilizers than the system can remotely accept, much less use. But a familiarity with these challenges is for more than tomorrow’s engineering. And we shouldn’t even be counting on them.

Colleagues tell me that implicit in bringing up these challenges is the NAE saying that, as presently construed, they can’t meet these challenges either. They know they to need to change the way they approach problem solving (choose your own word to emphasize), from relying on mere calculations to mustering a systems approach to the complexity, venturing out past where the laws and theorems apply. And to repeat once again, you don’t need to run out and buy a pocket protector, but they = we.