ABSTRACT
Environmental awareness has grown immeasurably among the US general public since the first Earth Day in 1970. The National Wildlife Federation Corporate Conservation Council observed that societal and private-sector benefits arising from investments in business school environmental education would have a significant multiplier effect in terms of positive benefits to society, nationally and internationally. Environmental education has often been criticised for focusing on efforts that are 'doomsday oriented, fear generating, activist and devoid of science teaching'. But formal programmes in environmental education have only reached the periphery of a crucial audience—graduate and undergraduate students in business schools. The argument follows that environmentalists are advocates, often 'issue-driven rather than information-driven' and based on 'emotionalism, myths and misinformation'. The traditional relationship between industrialists, responsible for the continuing flow of goods and services that constitute the material basis of society, and environmentalists, concerned with the inimical effects of the process, has been largely oppositional.
