ABSTRACT

Something new was happening. It came suddenly and things would never be the same. I had been in the environmental •eld for thirty years and never could have envisioned what was occurring. It seemed that everywhere you looked, sustainability was being talked about. Sports Illustrated and Fortune, commercial magazines that had never before covered environmental issues, were suddenly devoting entire feature articles to sustainability. Sports Illustrated coverage included a cover photo with a baseball player standing knee deep in a ¤ooded stadium as a result of global warming. Another article, entitled “Going, Going Green,” discusses the burning of fossil fuels as a root cause of glaciers melting. (Wolff 2007)

I remember having a discussion with my company’s chief environmental executive that went something like this: “Could you ever imagine in your wildest dreams that we would in our careers have the opportunity that we have now?” Today, going green is no longer the right thing to do, but something you have to do. We once shied away from using the term “sustainability,” thinking company executives would give us the deer-in-the-headlights look of perplexity. Now sustainability is commonplace, plastered all throughout reading materials that our management team pays close attention to.