ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a business history perspective on environmental sustainability. For a long time, business historians were focused on how business enterprises innovated and created wealth. However, recently, a compelling stream of research emerged focusing on the environmental consequences of economic growth. The earliest theme to be explored is how and why polluting firms sought to reduce their environmental impact. Researchers have dated this phenomenon back to the late nineteenth century and showed that it gained momentum from the 1960s onwards. A more recent research theme is focused on how entrepreneurs have sought to create sustainability by for-profit businesses, and developed new product categories such as organic food and wind and solar energy. This process has also been traced back to the nineteenth century. However, in the 1990s these two historical trends met as the concept of sustainable development got widely spread to large conventional corporations and green firms scaled or were acquired by conventional big businesses. Sustainability, with climate change as the grandest challenge facing humanity, is now a mainstream topic in the management literature and other related disciplines, and the chapter concludes that future business history research needs to be fully integrated with these debates.
