There are those who seek to put business and the environment at odds in the public consciousness. To portray people who are passionate about the environment as caring more about plants than people, or to assert that businesses are inherently evil is to be trapped in a dangerous distraction. Environmental issues are indeed business issues.

No one particularly enjoys thinking about it and rarely comes up at shareholder meetings, but the current trajectory of our economic model is headed toward the ground. Take global energy trends, population growth, current agricultural practices and water usage as 4 horseman of a kind of coming economic apocalypse. All of 4 these vital economic factors are headed for trouble in the near future.
 

Global Energy Trends
At a time when most of the world’s governments agree that we need to drastically limit greenhouse gases, the world oil supply is poised to go into decline. Experts from the oil and gas industry such as T Boone Pickens and Colin Campbell contend that we have reached or passed peak oil production. While a post carbon future is viewed by some as a good thing, the resulting increases in oil prices threaten the very economic activity needed for us to create the technology to get us there. As was seen during the 2008 US Presidential campaign, high energy prices bolster the argument for greater fossil fuel exploration and threaten to stifle much needed green innovation.

Population Growth
According to the website www.census.gov current global population is 6.7 billion. In 1979 global population was 4.3 billion. In the 30 years since, the total population of the planet has increased by 64%. By 2040 (The next 30 years) the UN Projects have global population reaching as high as 10 billion. If we have trouble effectively dealing with poverty, disease and hunger today, the challenges are significantly greater in the coming years. Population pressure is environmental pressure plain and simple. 
 
Current Agricultural Practices
This past September, Normal Borlag died a the age of 95. He was a 1970 Nobel Prize winner who was the “Father of the Green Revolution”. A deeply caring man who spent more than half a century working in the developing world to help prevent starvation, the increased crop yields of his Green Revolution are credited with saving as many as a billion people from starvation in the latter part of the 20th century. These methods rely on vast quantities of pesticides and water as well as a system that requires that farmers purchase their agricultural inputs, (for example seeds and chemical fertilizer) rather than produce them on the farm. The Green Revolution has also inadvertently led to a situation where most farms are increasingly leveraged each year as a part of normal business. Add to that a global food system that is highly mobile and completely dependent on cheap oil for its reliability.

Water Resources
Access to clean drinking water has been and continues to be an increasing problem for more of the world’s population. At the same time much of the world’s food is grown in regions where natural rainfall alone will not support large scale food growing. The California Central Valley relies on diminishing snow pack in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Grain and meat production in the plain states requires pump irrigation of fossil water. According to the USGS, the tapping of the Ogallala aquifer which was the solution to the Great Dust Bowl, has lowered the water table of an 8 state region an average of 9%. In some parts of Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, the water table has dropped over 100 feet since the 1950s.
 

The future of business and the environment are not at odds, they are inexorably linked. We must all find the opportunities in this crisis for ourselves and our planet. Divisive rhetoric has no place in the conversation to meet these challenges. All of us have benefited from environmental exploitation and degradation, but the time has come for us to tap the strengths of the other side of the aisle to invent new approaches and solutions to these challenges.

The Chinese character for crisis is the same as opportunity. Rather than treat it as some cliché from a motivational seminar, we need to study it.