The New Corporate Environmentalism and The Ecology of Commerce

This article identifies Paul Hawken's The Ecology of Commerce (TEoC) as a foundational work for scholars interested in the greening of business, sustainable enterprise, and environmental policy. TEoC was published in the early 1990s and was instrumental in launching and amplifying a social movement we refer to as the New Corporate Environmentalism (NCE). It also influenced research on organizations and the natural environment, which today is a vibrant field addressing major themes in business strategy, organizational change and development, organizational sociology, and other timely areas of study. In addition, TEoC provokes thinking about one of the most debated environmental questions of our time: How far can we go with green capitalism? Hawken sets his sights on ending industrialism as we know it and on developing a restorative economy based on technological innovation, sweeping structural reform, and radical process redesign. Although TEoC is replete with reverence for nature, in concert with other sympathetic critics of green capitalism, we raise a question about the balance it strikes between environmental ethics and ecological economics.