Jain Spirit 2002 10 No 12

Author(s): Jain Spirit UK
Publisher: UK Young Jains

Page 49

don't know which is worse!"
As later events proved, she was closer to the mark with pantheism. I am glad to see that Jainism recognises that all living beings have souls. When environmentalism hit in the late 1960s, I felt this was a movement made for me. Indeed, in 1961 I had persuaded all the boys at my school in England to give their two weeks' pocket money to the fledgling World Wildlife Fund (WWF), launched that same year. After a couple of years' doing anything. to avoid the necessity to get a grownup job, I returned to university to study urban and regional planning.
It was my great good fortune to walk straight from that postgraduate course at University College London into a small consultancy, based in London's Covent Garden (ironically, named after a long-gone convent). In 1975, the consultancy project I was doing in Egypt hit a brick wall and I faced a moral dilemma. Consultants are not meant to challenge their clients publicly, but the trajectory of the massive development projects I had been advising on was going horribly wrong: the Delta's largest lake, Manzala, was being chopped up by development experts in a way that was totally unsustainable. After trying hard but failing to get the Egyptians to wake up, I returned to London and phoned the magazine New Scientist and was commissioned to write a four-page article. As luck would have it, this helped persuade the authorities to reframe the various studies to address the entire Manzala ecosystem.
I learned both the importance of transparency and of listening to your conscience. After many years of working for major corporate and government clients, several of us formed a new company, Sustainability. In 1988 we published a book, The Green Consumer Guide, which sold around a million copies and helped launch a new social movement. Companies came under intense market pressure in relation to such issues as CFC aerosol propellants, lead in
Carry Your Values With Your Laptop
petrol, mercury in batteries, chlorine in paper production, and so on.
I learned another lesson. If you are prepared to pay for the consequences, you can take a principled stand on key issues and rather than losing clients you can attract a different set who have an appetite for real change. But you have to be careful not to let success go to your head. In 1996, we formed an independent Council to challenge our thinking and priorities. Given that some members come from the NGO world, some of our clients were deeply uneasy but they too now recognise the value of such diversity.
Periodically, we have done things that current or potential future clients
Nature has its own way of revealing the truth are uncomfortable with. Examples have included our promotion of corporate environmental auditing from 1989, stakeholder engagement from 1990, corporate environmental reporting from 1991, the 'triple bottom line of sustainable development (focusing on economic, social and environmental values added or destroyed) from 1995 and integrity in corporate lobbying from 2000. But we often find new market opportunities arising as a result.
As the agenda becomes more complex, however, our work moves towards board level. One key reason: if the challenges are simply technical or professional, professionals and technicians can handle them. But as issues like environment, human rights and corporate governance become
increasingly inter-linked, the political implications mean that the necessary choices are best made strategically, which often means at board level.
In the midst of all of this, there is much about Jainism I aspire to but cannot hope to reach. For example, cycling through London on my way to and from our office at Hyde Park Corner, it is hard to remain calm as motorists and truck drivers threaten life and limb. Twice I have been left unconscious, once with three cracked ribs. Non-violence in the face of continuous and sometimes simply careless threats has left me with a slightly less utopian view of the human nature!
Still, at heart I remain an optimist. Within limits, we can make a difference. Business and trade are potentially hugely important mechanisms for making such changes, if operated in the right way. Sustainability is 15 years old this year, which means that we are looking back a decade and a half to test what we have achieved and then looking forward to a similar time-span to get a sense of where we should be headed. Our road map for the future is laid out in a new book, The Chrysalis Economy.
The tension between values and value creation is eternal, but if we recognise the challenge and work to address it in the right way, real progress is possible. Done right, consultancy and education help catalyse right thinking and right action. Our thinking in this area can be found at www.sustainability.com. If you have comments on what we do or what we don't, we would love to hear from you.
John Elkington is Chair of The Environment Foundation, and of SustainAbility, based in London and New York. He is the author of 16 books, the latest of which is The Chrysalis Economy: How Citizen CEOs and Corporations Can Fuse Values and Value Creation (Capstone/John Wiley, 2001).
September-November 2002 Jain Spirit
47