John Elkington speaks to the New Yorker on business and climate change

25 Feb 2008 – SA in the News

From the article:
“We have to be careful not to rush from denial to despair,” John Elkington told me, when I visited him not long ago at his offices at SustainAbility, the London-based environmental consulting firm he helped found more than two decades ago. He believes there is a danger that people will feel engulfed by the challenge, and ultimately helpless to address it.

“We are in an era of creative destruction,” he said. A thin, easygoing man with the look of an Oxford don, Elkington has long been one of the most articulate of those who seek to marry economic prosperity with environmental protection. “What happens when you go into one of these periods is that before you get to the point of reconstruction things have to fall apart. Detroit will fall apart. I think Ford”—a company that Elkington has advised for years—“will fall apart. They have just made too many bets on the wrong things. A bunch of the institutions that we rely on currently will, to some degree, decompose. I believe that much of what we count as democratic politics today will fall apart, because we are simply not going to be able to deal with the scale of change that we are about to face. It will profoundly disable much of the current political class.”

He sat back and smiled softly. He didn’t look worried. “I wrote my first report on climate change in 1978, for Herman Kahn, at the Hudson Institute,” he explained. “He did not at all like what I was saying, and he told me, ‘The trouble with you environmentalists is that you see a problem coming and you slam your foot on the brakes and try and steer away from the chasm. The problem is that it often doesn’t work. Maybe the thing to do is jam your foot on the pedal and see if you can just jump across.’ At the time, I thought he was crazy, but as I get older I realize what he was talking about. The whole green movement in technology is in that space. It is an attempt to jump across the chasm.”

Read the full article in The New Yorker.