It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out than any business model dependent upon consistent annual growth cannot be sustained forever. The planet will only feed and hold so many consumers and once that threshold is met, (some say it has already happened), the threads start to unravel. As a consequence of the growing schism between environmental and economic interests the once hallowed capitalist free market system is being challenged in the search for solutions to today’s social and environmental problems.
Some new business models including, in some states, a new “B Corp registration (the “B” stands for “benefit”) allows a company to subordinate profits to social and environmental goals” have lead to innovative new ways to structure business.
This, in turn, leads to an emphasis on institutions whose priorities are broader than those that typically flow from the corporate emphasis on the bottom line. At the cutting edge of experimentation are the growing number of egalitarian, and often green, worker-owned cooperatives. Hundreds of “social enterprises” that use profits for environmental, social or community-serving goals are also expanding rapidly. In many communities urban agricultural efforts have made common cause with groups concerned about healthy nonprocessed food. And all this is to say nothing of 1.6 million nonprofit corporations that often cross over into economic activity.
For-profits have developed alternatives as well. There are, for example, more than 11,000 companies owned entirely or in significant part by some 13.6 million employees. Most have adopted Employee Stock Ownership Plans; these so-called ESOPs democratize ownership, though only some of them involve participatory management. W.L. Gore, maker of Gore-Tex and many other products, is a leading example: the company has some 9,000 employee-owners at forty-five locations worldwide and generates annual sales of $2.5 billion. Litecontrol, which manufactures high-efficiency, high-performance architectural lighting fixtures, operates as a less typical ESOP; the Massachusetts-based company is entirely owned by roughly 200 employees and fully unionized with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
Some of the most successful corporations in the world are socially responsible and share their wealth with their suppliers and their employees. Stonyfield Yogurt is one and CE-Yo, Gary Hirschberg, author of Stirring It Up: How to Make Money and Save the World
Coos County will have to embrace this ‘new-economy’ and structure some creative business plans of its own or continue to wither away like a dessicated fly. Better to be a leader than a follower.
