Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T03:55:04.133Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Renewing Business History in the Era of the Anthropocene

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 May 2019

Ann-Kristin Bergquist
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

This special issue is concerned with new approaches in business history to exploration of the role of business in both creating and addressing the mounting environmental crisis that has become apparent over the last half century. Two decades have passed since Business History Review published a pioneering special issue on business and the natural environment. The guest editors of that issue, Christine Rosen and Christopher Sellers, called for an “ecocultural approach” to business history and noted that strikingly little attention had been given to the issue of business and the natural environment in the field.

Keywords

sustainabilitybusiness and the environmentgreen businessenvironmental historythe Anthropocene
Type
Introduction
Information
Business History Review , Volume 93 , Issue 1: Business and the Environment Revisited , Spring 2019 , pp. 3 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I would especially like to thank the participants of the conference “Understanding and Overcoming the Roadblocks to Sustainability,” held at the Harvard Business School on June 14, 2018, for thoughtful comments and overall inspiration. I also want to thank the editors of this journal for helpful comments and the contributors to this special issue, from whose work I learned a lot. Special thanks to Geoffrey Jones and Andrew A. King for challenging my thoughts. Financial support from the Swedish Research Council, the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation, and the Division of Research and Faculty Development at the Harvard Business School is gratefully acknowledged.

References

1 Rosen, Christine Meisner and Sellers, Christopher C., “The Nature of the Firm: Towards an Ecocultural History of Business,” Business History Review 73, no. 4 (1999): 577–600CrossRefGoogle Scholar. They urge business historians to draw on terms and modes of analysis that evolved in the field of environmental history and argue that business historians have an opportunity to develop the environmental history enterprise.

2 Berghoff, Hartmut and Rome, Adam, Green Capitalism? Business and the Environment in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The volume contains chapters by both business and environmental historians. Guest editorials in special issues include Christine Rosen, Meisner, “Doing Business History in the Age of Global Climate Change,” Enterprise & Society 8, no. 2 (2007): 221–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Berghoff, Hartmut and Mutz, Mathias “Missing Links? Business History and Environmental Change,” Jahrbuch für Wirtshaftsgeschicte/Economic History Yearbook 59, no. 2 (2009): 9–22Google Scholar; Aggeri, Franck and Cartel, Mélodie, “Le changement climatique et les entreprises: Enjeux, espaces d'action, régulations internationales,” Entreprises et Historie 1, no. 86 (2017): 6–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Smith, Andrew and Geer, Kirsten, “Uniting Business History and Global Environmental History,” Business History 59, no. 7 (2017): 987–1009CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Articles published in Business History Review since the last special issue include Sluyterman, Keetie, “Royal Dutch Shell: Company Strategies for Dealing with Environmental Issues,” Business History Review 84, no. 2 (2010): 203–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bergquist, Ann-Kristin and Söderholm, Kristina, “Green Innovation Systems in Swedish Industry, 1960–1989,” Business History Review 85, no. 4 (2011): 677–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bergquist, Ann-Kristin and Lindmark, Magnus, “Sustainability and Shared Value in the Interwar Swedish Copper Industry,” Business History Review 90, no. 2 (2016): 197–225CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Jones, Geoffrey, Profits and Sustainability: A History of Green Entrepreneurship (Oxford, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Jones, Geoffrey, Varieties of Green Business: Industries, Nations and Time (Northampton, MA, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar;

4 See, for example, Hoffman, Andrew J., From Heresy to Dogma: An Institutional History of Corporate Environmentalism (San Francisco, 1997)Google Scholar; “The Next Phase of Business Sustainability,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2018; Ehrenfeld, John R., “Beyond the Brave New World: Business and Sustainability,” in The Oxford Handbook of Business and the Natural Environment, ed. Bansal, Pratima and Hoffman, Andrew J. (Oxford, 2012), 611–29Google Scholar; and Jones, Profits.

5 Crutzen, Paul and Stoermer, Eugene F., “The Anthropocene,” Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18Google Scholar. In 2016, scientists agreed at the International Geological Congress in Cape Town, South Africa, that the Anthropocene should be officially declared. See Zalasiewicz, Jan, Wasters, Colin N., Summerhayes, Colin P., Wolfe, Alexander P., Barnosky, Antony D., Cearreta, Alejandro, Crutzen, Paul, et al. , “The Working Group on the Anthropocene: Summary of Evidence and Interim Recommendations,” Anthropocene 19 (Sept. 2017): 55–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The Anthropocene ranks among the most ambitious scientific programs of the past fifteen or twenty years, but the exact date at which the Anthropocene starts has been, and still is, debated.

6 The first stage of the Anthropocene is commonly linked to the Industrial Revolution in England. See, for example, Steffen, Will, Crutzen, Paul J., and McNeill, John R., “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?,” Ambio 36, no. 8 (2007): 614–21CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Steffen, Will, Richardson, Katherine, Rockström, Johan, Cornell, Sarah E., Fetzer, Ingo, Bennett, Elena M., Biggs, Reinette, et al. , “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet,” Science 347, no. 6223 (13 Feb. 2015)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

7 McNeill, John R. and Engelke, Peter, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge, MA, 2014)Google Scholar; Crutzen, Paul J. and Stoermer, Eugene F., “The ‘Anthropocene’” (2000), with commentary by Steffen, Will, in The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change, ed. Robin, Libby, Sörlin, Sverker, and Warde, Paul (New Haven, 2013): 483–90Google Scholar.

8 Friedman, Walter and Jones, Geoffrey, “Business History: Time for Debate,” Business History Review 85, no. 1 (2011): 1–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Heede, Richard, “Tracing Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide and Methane Emissions to Fossil Fuel and Cement Producers, 1854–2010,” Climatic Change 14, no. 122 (2014): 229–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Ann-Kristin Bergquist, “Business and Sustainability,” in Routledge Companion to the Makers of Global Business, ed. Teresa da Silva Lopes, Christina Lubinski, and Heidi Tworek (London, forthcoming).

10 Chandler, Alfred D., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA, 1990)Google Scholar; Chandler, Alfred D., Amatori, Franco, and Hikino, Takeshi, eds., Big Business and the Wealth of Nations (New York, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Chandler, Alfred D., “Industrial Revolutions and Institutional Arrangements,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 33, no. 8 (1980): 33–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Chandler's major concern about fossil fuel lock-in and the need for energy transition was related to future depletion of oil resources and national security. At the same time, Chandler did not consider a shift back to coal as an alternative, because of air pollution and health issues related to coal use. Chandler, “Industrial Revolutions,” 48.

13 Stern, Nicholas, The Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change (Cambridge, MA, 2007), viiiCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Friedman and Jones, “Business History”; Bergquist, “Business and Sustainability.”

15 Warde, Paul, Robin, Libby, and Sörlin, Sverker, The Environment: A History of the Idea (Baltimore, 2018)Google Scholar.

16 See, for example, Palsson, Gisli, Szerszynski, Bronislaw, Sörlin, Sverker, Marks, John, Avril, Bernard, Crumley, Carole, Hackmann, Heide, et al. , “Reconceptualizing the ‘Anthropos’ in the Anthropocene: Integrating the Social Sciences and Humanities in Global Environmental Change Research,” Environmental Science & Policy 28 (Apr. 2018): 3–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 The ambition is, however, to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C. See, for example, Clémencon, Raymond, “Two Sides of the Paris Climate Agreement: Dismal Failure or Historic Breakthrough?,” Journal of Environment and Development 25, no. 1 (2016): 3–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Falkner, Robert, “The Paris Agreement and the New Logic of International Climate Politics,” International Affairs 92, no. 5 (2016): 1107–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 United Nations “Paris Agreement – Status of Ratification” (accessed April 1, 2019) https://unfccc.int/process/the-paris-agreement/status-of-ratification

19 Bansal and Hoffman, Oxford Handbook; Jones, Profits,

20 Climate change, toxic chemical emissions, and other problems are increasingly identified as “wicked problems,” which are difficult or impossible for business to solve, because of complex contractionary requirements not only constrained by internal organizational barriers, but founded in the very rules of the market economy. See, for example, Wright, Christopher and Nyberg, Daniel, “An Inconvenient Truth: How Organizations Translate Climate Change into Business as Usual,” Academy of Management Journal 7, no. 5 (2017): 1633–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Climate Change, Capitalism, and Corporations: Processes of Creative Self-Destruction (Cambridge, UK, 2015).

21 Guha, Ramachandra, Environmentalism: A Global History (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; Klaus Weber and Sara B. Soderstrom, “Social Movements, Business and the Environment,” in Bansal and Hoffman, Oxford Handbook, 248–65; Jones, Profits.

22 See, for example, Uekötter, Frank, The Age of Smoke: Environmental Policy in Germany and the United States, 1880–1970 (Pittsburgh, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Divergent Responses to Identical Problems: Businessmen and the Smoke Nuisance in Germany and the United States, 1880–1917,” Business History Review 73, no. 4 (1999): 641–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rosen, Christine Meisner, “Businessmen against Pollution in Late Nineteenth Century Chicago,” Business History Review 69, no. 3 (1995): 351–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “‘Knowing’ Industrial Pollution: Nuisance Law and the Power of Tradition in a Time of Rapid Economic Change, 1840–1864,” Environmental History 8, no. 4 (2003): 565–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mutz, Mattias, “Managing Resources: Water and Wood in the German Pulp and Paper Industry 1870s–1930s,” Jahrbuch für Wirtshaftsgeschiticthe/Economic History Yearbook 59, no. 2 (2009): 45–68Google Scholar; and Bergquist and Lindmark, “Sustainability.”

23 See, for example, Lytle, Mark Hamilton, The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement (Oxford, 2007)Google Scholar; Weale, Albert, The New Politics of Pollution (Manchester, 1992)Google Scholar; Shabecoff, Philip, Earth Rising: American Environmentalism in the 21st Century (Washington, DC, 2000)Google Scholar; and Jones, Profits.

24 Bergquist and Söderholm, “Green Innovation”; Bergquist, and Söderholm, , “Transition to Greener Pulp: Regulation, Industry Responses and Path Dependency,” Business History 57, no. 6 (2015): 862–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jones, Geoffrey and Lubinski, Christina, “Making ‘Green Giants’: Environmental Sustainability in the German Chemical Industry, 1950s–1980s,” Business History 56, no. 4 (2014): 623–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lindmark, Magnus and Bergquist, Ann-Kristin, “Expansion for Pollution Reduction? Environmental Adaptation of a Swedish and a Canadian Metal Smelter, 1960–2005,” Business History 50 no. 4 (2008): 530–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hartmut Berghoff, “Shades of Green: A Business-History Perspective on Eco-Capitalism,” in Berghoff and Rome, Green Capitalism?, 13–31. On how environmental pressures impacted the waste industry, see Stokes, Raymond, Köster, Roman, and Sambrook, Stephen C., The Business of Waste: Great Britain and Germany, 1945 to the Present (Cambridge, UK, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 See, for example, Sluyterman, “Royal Dutch Shell”; Bergquist and Söderholm, “Transition”; and Ann-Kristin Bergquist, “Dilemmas of Going Green: Environmental Strategies in the Swedish Mining Company Boliden, 1960–2005,” in Berghoff and Rome, Green Capitalism?, 147–71.

26 Jones, Profits; Varieties; Case, Andrew N., The Organic Profit: Rodale and the Making of Marketplace Environmentalism (Seattle, 2018)Google Scholar.

27 Jones, Profits; Bergquist, Business.

28 Bansal and Hoffman, Oxford Handbook. See also Bergels, Stephanie and Bowen, Frances, “Taking Stock, Looking Ahead: Editor's Introduction to the Inaugural Organization & Environment Review Issue,” Organization & Environment 28, no 1 (2015): 3–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 McNeill, John R., “The State of the Field of Environmental History,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 35 (2010): 345–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Isenberg, Andrew C., ed., The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History (Oxford, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 The framework is based on scientific evidence that human actions since the Industrial Revolution have become the main driver of global environmental change. Johan Rockström, Will Steffen, Kevin Noone, Åsa Persson, F. Stuart Chapin III, Eric F. Lambin, Timothy M. Lenton, et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461 (24 Sept. 2009): 472–75; Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries”; Whiteman, Gail, Walker, Brian, and Perego, Paolo, “Planetary Boundaries: Ecological Foundations for Corporate Sustainability,” Journal of Management Studies 50, no. 2 (2013): 307–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 See, for example, Vogel, David, The Market for Virtue: The Potential and Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility (Washington, DC, 2005)Google Scholar; The Politics of Precaution: Regulating Health, Safety and Environmental Risks in Europe and the United States (Princeton, 2012); Andrews, Richard N. L.. Managing the Environment, Managing Ourselves: A History of American Environmental Policy, 2nd ed. (New Haven and London, 2006)Google Scholar; and Steinzor, Rena I., “Reinventing Environmental Regulation: The Dangerous Journey from Command to Self-Regulation,” Harvard Environmental Law Review 22, no. 1 (1998): 103–202Google Scholar.

32 Krier, James E. and Ursin, Edmund, Pollution and Policy: A Case Essay on California Federal Experience with Motor Vehicle Air Pollution 1940–1975 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1977)Google Scholar; McCarthy, Tom, Automania: Cars, Consumers and the Environment (New Haven, 2007)Google Scholar; Brian C. Black. “Driving Change: The Winding Road to Greener Automobiles,” in Berghoff and Rome, Green Capitalism?; Rüdiger K. W. Wurtzel, Environmental Policy Making in Britain, Germany and the European Union: The Europeanisation of Air and Water Pollution Control (Manchester, 2002).

33 One exception is Mira Wilkins, who noted that the U.S. government in the 1970s imposed new standards for safety, emission control and mile-per-gallon performance on cars sold in the United States, and the cost burden imposed on the domestic automobile industry by these regulations, especially by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975. See Wilkins, “Multinational Automobile Enterprises and Regulation: An Historical Overview,” in Government, Technology, and the Future of the Automobile, ed. Douglas H. Ginsburg and William Abernathy (New York, 1980), 221–58.

34 The contradictory requirements of fuel efficiency and control of NOx emissions was one of the key reasons driving the so-called Dieselgate scandal. Brand, Christian, “Beyond ‘Dieselgate’: Implications of Unaccounted and Future Air Pollutant Emissions and Energy Use for the United Kingdom,” Energy Policy 97 (Oct. 2016): 1–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Jones, Geoffrey, Renewing Unilever: Transformation and Tradition (Oxford, 2005), 342–47Google Scholar; Keetie Sluyterman, Keeping Competitive in Turbulent Markets, 1973–2007, vol. 3 of A History of Royal Dutch Shell (Oxford, 2007); “Royal Dutch Shell”; Elmore, Bartow J., Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism (New York, 2015)Google Scholar.

36 Aggeri and Cartel, “Le changement climatique.”

37 Levy, David L. and Newell, Peter L., introduction to The Business of Global Environmental Governance, ed. Levy, David L. and Newell, Peter L. (Cambridge, MA, 2005)Google Scholar.

38 Coen, David, “The European Business Interest and the Nation State: Large-Firm Lobbying in the European Union and Member States,” Journal of Public Policy 18, no. 1 (1998): 75–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Coen, David, “The Evolution of the Large Firm as a Political Actor in the European Union,” Journal of European Public Policy 4, no. 1 (1997): 91–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Environmental and Business Lobbying Alliances in Europe: Learning from Washington?,” in Levy and Newell, Business, 197–222; Jones, Geoffrey and Miskell, Peter, “European Integration and Corporate Restructuring: The Strategy of Unilever, c.1957–c.1990,” Economic History Review 58, no. 1 (2005): 113–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schepers, David, “Business-Government Relations: Beyond Lobbying,” Corporate Governance: The International Journal of Business in Society 10, no. 4 (2010): 475–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 See, for example, Falkner, Robert, “Business Conflicts and US International Environmental Policy: Ozone Depletion, Climate and Biodiversity,” in The Environment, International Relations and U.S. Foreign Policy, ed. Harris, P. G. (Washington, DC, 2001), 157–77Google Scholar; and Robert Falkner “The Business of Ozone Layer Protection: Corporate Power in Regime Evolution,” in Levy and Newell, Business, 105–34.

40 Cartel, Mélodie, Aggeri, Franck, and Cansill, Jean-Yves, “L'histoire méconnue du marché européen du carbone: Archéologie du secteur électrique,” Entreprises et Historie 1, no. 6 (2017): 54–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hugh Gorman, “The Role of Business in Constructing Systems for Environmental Governance,” in Berghoff and Rome, Green Capitalism?, 33–54.

41 See, for example, Chrun, Elizabeth, Dolsak, Nives, and Prakash, Aseem, “Corporate Environmentalism: Motivations and Mechanisms,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 41 (2016): 341–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lyon, Thomas P. and Maxwell, John W., Corporate Environmentalism and Public Policy (New York, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hoffman, Heresy.

42 On self-regulation, see King, Andrew A. and Lenox, Michael J., “Industry Self-Regulation without Sanctions: The Chemical Industry's Responsible Care Program,” Academy of Management Journal 43, no. 4 (2000): 698–716Google Scholar. See also various chapters in Bansal and Hoffman, Oxford Handbook.

43 Chrun, Dolsak, and Prakash, “Corporate Environmentalism.”

44 Jones, Profits, 233–62.

45 Prakash, Aseem and Potoski, Matthew, The Voluntary Environmentalists: Green Clubs, ISO 14001, and Voluntary Environmental Regulations (Cambridge, UK, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the development of other voluntary programs, see also Morgenstern, Richard D. and Pizer, William A., eds., Reality Check: The Nature and Performance of Voluntary Environmental Programs in the United States, Europe, and Japan (Washington, DC, 2007)Google Scholar.

46 During the Reagan years, virtually all environmental protection policies enacted during the 1970s were to be reevaluated as a part of the new president's larger agenda of reducing the scope of governmental participation and expanding that of the private sector. See Gunningham, Neil, “Environmental Law, Regulation and Governance: Shifting Architectures,” Journal of International Law 21, no. 2 (2009): 179–212Google Scholar.

47 Hoffman, Heresy, 87–140.

48 The management scholar Andrew J. Hoffman has suggested a periodization of the history of corporate environmentalism as a movement along an evolutionary adaptive learning process since the 1960s, with a proactive, strategic mode of corporate environmentalism developing from the 1980s. Hoffman, Heresy.

49 Jones, Profits, 359–60.

50 See Jones, Profits.

51 Elkington, John, “Towards the Sustainable Corporation: Win-Win-Win Business Strategies for Sustainable Development,” California Management Review 36, no. 2 (1994): 90–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Elkington, John, “Enter the Triple Bottom Line,” in Triple Bottom Line: Does It All Add Up?, ed. Henriques, Adrian and Richardson, Julie (London, 2004), 1–16Google Scholar; and “25 Years Ago I Coined the Phrase ‘Triple Bottom Line’: Here's Why It's Time to Rethink It,” Harvard Business Review, 25 June 2018.

52 Elkington “25 Years Ago.”

53 Scholars have debated and provided frameworks to predict the “next” industrial revolution; for example, Hawken, Paul, Lovins, Amory B., and Lovins, L. Hunter, Natural Capitalism: The Next Industrial Revolution (London, 1999)Google Scholar.

54 Jones, Profits. The key role of financial markets in contributing to a low-carbon economy is stressed in the recent special issue on Finance for Environmental Transition in Organization & Environment. Celine Louche, Timo Busch, Patricia Crifo, and Marcus, Alfred, “Financial Markets and the Transition to a Low-Carbon Economy: Challenging the Dominant Logics,” Organization & Environment 32, no. 1 (2019): 3–17Google Scholar.

55 John Ehrenfeld has argued that virtually everything business has done in the name of environmental management, greening, eco-efficiency, and sustainability refers to reducing unsustainability. Ehrenfeld, Beyond the Brave; Ehrenfeld and Hoffman, Andrew J., Flourishing: A Frank Conversation about Sustainability (Stanford, 2013)Google Scholar.

56 World Commission on the Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford, 1987).

57 Warde, Paul, “The Invention of Sustainability,” Modern Intellectual History 8, no. 1 (2011): 153–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Jones, Profits, chap. 9. For historical research about the intellectual history of sustainability, see Warde, Paul, The Invention of Sustainability: Nature and Destiny, c.1500–1870 (Cambridge, UK, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pisani, Jacobus A., “Sustainable Development – Historical Roots of the Concept,” Environmental Sciences 3, no. 2 (2006): 83–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robinson, John, “Squaring the Circle? Some Thoughts on the Idea of Sustainable Development,” Ecological Economics 48, no. 4 (2004): 369–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 Chandler, Scale and Scope; Whitley, Richard, European Business Systems: Firms and Markets in Their National Contexts (London, 1992)Google Scholar; Whitley, Richard, Competing Capitalisms: Institutions and Economics (Cheltenham, 2002)Google Scholar.

60 Frank Uekötter, among others, has criticized the environmental historians for their monolithic view of capitalism. See Uekötter, , “Confronting the Pitfalls of Current Environmental History: An Argument for an Organisational Approach,” Environment and History 4, no. 1 (1998): 37Google Scholar.

61 Scholars have suggested that U.S. companies in the coal, oil, automobile, utility, and chemical industries lobbied politicians, challenging the science of climate, while European industry, by contrast, was far less aggressive in responding to the issue. See, for example, Levy, David L. and Kolk, A., “Strategic Responses to Climate Change: Conflicting Pressures on Multinationals in the Oil Industry,” Business and Politics 4, no. 3 (2002): 275–300CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levy, David L. and Newell, Peter L., “Oceans Apart? Business Responses to the Environment in Europe and North America,” Environment 42, no. 9 (2000): 8–20Google Scholar; and Skjaerseth, John Bierger and Skodvin, Tora, “Climate Change and the Oil Industry: Common Problems, Different Strategies,” Global Environmental Politics 1, no. 4 (2001): 43–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 Uekötter, Age of Smoke. On diverging patterns, see also Bergquist and Söderholm, “Transition”; and Jones and Lubinski, “Making ‘Green Giants.’”

63 Jones, Varieties; Jones, Geoffrey and Mowatt, Simon, “National Image as a Competitive Disadvantage: The Case of the New Zealand Organic Food Industry,” Business History 58, no. 8 (2016): 1262–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64 Vogel, David, “Why Businessmen Distrust the State: The Political Consciousness of American Corporate Executives,” British Journal of Political Science 8, no. 1 (1978): 45–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; National Styles of Regulation: Environmental Policy in Great Britain and the United States (Ithaca, 1986); Gunningham, “Environmental Law”; Wallace, David, Environmental Policy and Industrial Innovation: Strategies in Europe, the US and Japan (London, 1995)Google Scholar.

65 Austin, Gareth, Dávila, Carlos, and Jones, Geoffrey, “The Alternative Business History: Business History in Emerging Markets,” Business History Review 91, no. 3 (2017): 537–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 Latin American and other countries were transformed into specialists on particular crops or commodities, creating monocultural agricultures that destroyed traditional ecological systems, with long-term consequences. Infrastructural projects by Western engineering firms, such as the draining of Mexico City, had catastrophic ecological results. Miller, Shawn W., An Environmental History of Latin America (Cambridge, UK, 2017)Google Scholar; “Latin America in Global Environmental History,” in A Companion to Global Environmental History, ed. J. R. McNeill and Erin Stewart Mauldin (London, 2012), 116–31; Cushman, Gregory T., Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History (Cambridge, UK, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tortolero, Alejandro, “Transforming the Central Mexican Waterscape: Lake Drainage and Its Consequences during the Porfiriato (1877–1911),” in Territories, Commodities and Knowledges: Latin American Environmental History in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Brannstrom, Christian (London, 2004), 121–47Google Scholar.

67 EDGAR – Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Research (CO2 time series 1990–2015 per region/country; accessed 5 Mar. 2019), http://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/overview.php?v=CO2ts1990-2015&sort=des9.

68 Hochstetler, Kathryn and Keck, Margaret E., Greening Brazil: Environmental Activism in State and Society (Durham, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 Jones, Profits, 73–74, 199–201, 202–3; Geoffrey Jones and Ricardo Reisen de Pinho, “Natura: Global Beauty Made in Brazil” (Harvard Business School Case 807-029, Aug. 2006, rev. Oct. 2012); Jones, Geoffrey and Spadafora, Andrew, “Creating Ecotourism in Costa Rica, 1970–2000,” Enterprise & Society 18, no. 1 (2017): 146–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 “Understanding and Overcoming the Roadblocks to Sustainability,” Faculty and Research, Harvard Business School website, accessed 5 Mar. 2019, https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/conferences/2018-understanding-and-overcoming-roadblocks-to-sustainability/Pages/default.aspx.

71 Although the Anthropocene is generally traced back to the Industrial Revolution, many argue that it is best seen as arising in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with the stratigraphic trace of the anthropogenic rift to be found in fallout of radionuclides from nuclear weapons testing. More, Jason W., introduction to Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. More, Jason W. (Oakland, 2016), 1-13Google Scholar; Lewis, Simon L. and Maslin, Mark L., “Defining the Anthropocene,” Science 519 (12 Mar. 2015): 171–80Google ScholarPubMed.

72 More, introduction, 5.

73 Hoffman, Andrew J. and Jennings, P. Devereaux, Re-engaging with Sustainability in the Anthropocene Era (Cambridge, UK, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.