Sustainable Development: What is it, Why Care, and How can Korean businesses Profit from it?
2007-11
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Sustainable Development: What is it, Why Care, and How can Korean businesses Profit from it?
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2007-11
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Pusan National University published this in South Korea, in Korean language, but I do not know where
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Sustainable Development:
What is it, why care, and how can Korean businesses profit from it?
Prepared for Pusan National University, Republic of Korea, November, 2007
By Michael Andregg, University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
mmandregg@stthomas.edu
(This text accompanies a Power Point of 26 slides, or it can stand alone.)
Sustainable Development means growing things, including wealth, in the natural way,
for the long term, efficiently, without destroying natural resources, realizing profits without consuming your natural and human capital. But what do those things mean? The best book I know on these topics is “Natural Capitalism” by Paul Hawken, Amory and L. Hunter Lovins (1). So we will begin by discussing natural capital, human capital, and how they relate to growing wealth.
All businesses are familiar with financial capital and how money helps businesses grow. Enlightened businesses are also familiar with human capital, the qualitative aspects of one’s workforce in terms of knowledge, skills, enthusiasm, loyalty, hard work ethics, and so forth. Although business routinely uses human capital to transform natural resources into the products that they sell, relatively few businesses are familiar with natural capital, the accumulated stock of resources and living systems that provide essential services to our earth, like turning carbon dioxide into oxygen and fixed carbon, or purifying the water we all depend on for life, and so forth. Because those services are taken for granted in today’s world, they have no established price or value. Until, for example, previously free, clean water becomes unavailable. After that, clean water can be sold at prices higher than oil, because humans can live without oil, but we cannot live without water. Hawken and the Lovins couple concluded that:
“Actually, an economy needs four types of capital to function properly:
-- human capital, in the form of labor and intelligence, culture and organization,
-- financial capital, consisting of cash, investments, and monetary instruments,
-- manufactured capital, including infrastructure, machines, tools, and factories,
-- natural capital, made up of resources, living systems, and ecosystem services.”
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I was invited to South Korea three times over six years, each time for a week of lectures at Pusan NU and several other universities. The theme this visit was sustainable economic development, so both this paper and its accompanying PowerPoint presentation developed that theme. The paper is 11, single spaced pages and the PowerPoint 26 slides. It impresses me that we made one huge mistake on this item, because "Peak Oil" was a bigger theme in 2007 than, for example, "Climate Change" which I would have emphasized much more if writing this today. Peak Oil has been overrun by fracking technologies, but the climate and environmental consequences of reckless burning of fossil fuels have become even worse than predicted a few decades ago.
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Busan National University in South Korea. Back then, they spelled both city and university "Pusan," but the economic issues are eternal and central to whether we will create a truly sustainable global economy, or kill each other in endless wars over scarce resources.
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Andregg, Michael M.. (2007). Sustainable Development: What is it, Why Care, and How can Korean businesses Profit from it?. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/210222.
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