We find ourselves immersed in simultaneous economic crisis and environmental crisis, with crumbling financial institutions and melting polar ice both making higher ground look mighty good. While conservation and care for creation often have been treated by business and industry as luxuries or outright attacks on the bottom line, more and more people are coming to understand that an economy that requires the degradation of the environment and injury to people is untenable. There are other ways to generate prosperity without slowly killing the planet and the people on it.
In the framework of a green economy, things like creating renewable energy sources, making buildings and processes more energy-efficient, cleaning up the industrial messes we’ve made, and doing urban forestry projects are recognized as profitable on multiple levels.
Companies profit financially as they ride new waves of innovation and demand for environment-friendly goods and services and create business models that are sustainable in all senses of the word. People in poverty profit, as they receive training for jobs that both provide a living wage and a vocation with a future. In some cases, those same workers benefit as their new jobs help clean up environmental hazards that had been imposed on them and their families. We all win, as the cumulative changes in energy use and production generated by green businesses help to reduce the amount of carbon we pump into the atmosphere.
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