ABSTRACT
We live in an era of environmental and social crisis. Humanity’s inventiveness has over the past two centuries created unimaginable wealth for a small part of the world’s population; however, this has come at a huge environmental cost in terms of biodiversity loss, ocean acidification and climate change – degrading the very ecosystems upon which we depend as a species. In order to be relevant in the future, business schools need to play a central role in confronting this most critical of issues; however, much of what passes for ‘sustainability’ education remains wedded to a defence of the system that has generated this crisis – free-market capitalism. Naïve best-case scenarios are promoted to justify continuous economic growth and consumption, albeit in a marginally less unsustainable fashion. In this chapter we argue that we are facing a far more profound sustainability challenge.
