The Editors would like to thank Ann-Kristin Bergquist who served as guest editor for this special issue of Business History Review. This issue revisits the theme of “Business and the Environment” that was explored in our 1999 special issue edited by Christine Rosen and Christopher Sellers. That issue represented an early engagement with an emerging field. The editors hoped it would “impress upon business historians the richness, relevance, and importance of questions about business's interface with the natural environment” and encourage business historians to take advantage of a moment when they saw “an unprecedented opportunity for collaboration” between environmental history and business history. This issue provides a survey of a more mature field—though as the introduction points out, one with great potential to grow—that has evolved from that collaboration and also incorporated insights from many other fields.
Dr. Bergquist organized this special issue, which includes papers by Charles Halvorson, Simone Müller, Adam Rome, and Marten Boon. She also co-organized with Amy Edmondson and Geoffrey Jones the conference that brought together several of its contributors. “Roadblocks to Sustainability” was convened by the Business History Initiative and the Business and Environment Initiative at Harvard Business School on June 14, 2018. The issue includes a collaborative article by Dr. Bergquist, Shawn A. Cole, John Ehrenfeld, Andrew A. King, and Auden Schendler that addresses the major themes that emerged from discussions at the conference on voluntary business actions to advance sustainability. Ann-Kristin Bergquist also wrote an introduction to this special issue of Business History Review that surveys major contributions to the field of business and environmental history and places the issue's articles in scholarly perspective.
