Introduction

Imagine a world where you can fulfill immediately all the needs and wants you have in any quantity without making too much effort and without paying any price. All resources are in abundance and you only need to pick them up and direct them to whatever purpose you wish. Unfortunately, the real world is no ‘land of plenty’. The fundamental economic problem since mankind has existed has been that of ‘scarcity’. All resources are scarce, our needs, wants and necessities are not. Therefore, we are forced to deal with our scarce resources economically. Human activities have influenced the earth’s ecosystem for many thousands of years. While prior civilizations believed they inhabited a world with endless resources beyond the horizon, current generations are faced with the impacts of human activity from past generations. The limits to the natural environment are now restricting the uncontrolled use and destruction of precious resources. While every person carries an individual responsibility for the state of the planet, businesses can be cited as possible black sheep but also as providers of long-term solutions and innovations that are able to redress the negative imbalances in nature and society. In some spheres of business it almost seems as if companies have been operating as rogue entities since the Industrial Revolution, tarnishing with the same brush everything and everyone on the path towards profit accumulation. Fortunately, examples in our past do exist of entrepreneurs realizing the importance of investing in the well-being of their employees, such as the English eighteenth-century mill owner Robert Owen, who went on to become the renowned social reformer. Traditional cultures knew about conservation and were careful never to exceed the ecological limits in the regions they inhabited.