Business organizations are often seen as being in conflict with the need to protect the natural ecology.
It is very easy for critics of commercial organizations to point to cases where greed and mismanagement have created long-lasting or permanent ecological damage.
Have rainforests been destroyed partly by our greed for more hardwood furniture?
More locally,is our impatience for getting to our destination quickly the reason why many natural habitats have been lost to new road developments?
Only a few years ago, most business organizations in Western developed economies could have dismissed ecological concerns as something that only fanatical, minority groups in the population were concerned about.
In the 1970s and 1980s, 'environmentalists' might have been ridiculed and associated with unrealistic dreams of the 'good life'.
Today, the situation is very different, and just about all business organizations need to take the ecological environment seriously.
There are many good reasons why the ecological environment is rising up the agenda of business organizations.
At its simplest, many organization face segments of customers who prefer to make purchases that they believe to be ecologically responsible.