The Missing Piece
Corporations have power beyond borders. They can move effortlessly across borders, oceans, and populations. No empire in the history of the world has had a reach as extensive as the modern multi-national corporation. Effectively, these corporations have perpetuated free-market captialism to become the most dominant market type on earth. Unfortunately, they have also perpetuated and excellerated the depletion of every kind of natural habit, resource, and element on earth. This presents a problem.
Business itself can be blamed for creating the modern consumer driven culture that we all seem to lazily banter about during politically charged times in America. But business itself can’t be blamed entirely, consumers create the demand for consumption as much as business drives it.
The thought of sustainable economies and commerce troubles me for one reason tonight. Prices. If business is in the business of profit, and economics say that the price you pay is the product of demand versus supply; then why isn’t the destruction of the environment a variable factored into the price of a product?
To me this is where the free-market system is fundamentally flawed. The modern corporation and us normal people that consume the goods that are created by them, are fastly devouring our earth as we know it. Eco-systems are being destroyed, immune systems are slowly degrading, and all species (including humans) are being diversely affected. Some corporations are taking initiative to incorporate sustainable processes into their business, but effectively it’s at a higher cost than doing it the current “normal” and cost effective way. Shouldn’t companies that choose to use sustainable practices pay less for sustainable supplies, such as paper products created from correctly cleared trees? Shouldn’t the price of resources extracted and developed from the earth include a premium for the amount of damage caused to the earth and our ecosystems? Shouldn’t business itself evolve into a fundamentally self-sustaining and effecient system where the waste created goes back into creating the product for consumption?
You can call this an eco-rant or liberal banter all you want. But, shouldn’t the systems that our glorious corporations create mimic the effieciency of the most complex natural systems on earth? Places like rainforests, or any forest, desert, or the entire earth for that matter. The most effective inventions on the planet are those that mimic the movements of the natural worlds around us. Shouldn’t business, as powerful and boundless as it is, look to the natural world in order to sustain the future?
