HOW WOULD NATURE DO BUSINESS?
One of the most challenging concepts I believe we need to address is in finding answers to the question: “How would nature do business”?
The deeper question I think we need to think about is not only about how the wider community should benefit from the minerals boom of Australia, by a minerals tax or whatever, as well as the corporations involved, but that nature should also benefit.
We are totally dependent on nature to sustain us, yet our actions suggest otherwise. It is as though we think we own nature and can control it at our will. This attitude has the result of actions being taken as if we are in opposition to nature. This paradox was well articulated by Jerry Mandler (‘Eleven inherent rules of corporate behaviour’) who wrote “Though individuals who work for corporations may personally love nature, corporations themselves, and corporate societies, are intrinsically committed to intervening in, altering and transforming nature”.