(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Hello and welcome to Community and University, the
MSU Center for Community and Economic Development podcast
aimed at providing outreach to both community members
and students throughout the state of Michigan.
I'm Heather Mahoney and I'm the producer for
Community and University.
Today in our podcast we have Terry Link,
a past author of an REI co-learning
plan on the triple bottom line, a business
theory with a focus on sustainability.
Good afternoon, we're here for another podcast here
at the Center for Community and Economic Development
at Michigan State University and I'm Rex LaMoure,
director of the center here.
And joining us today is our guest Terry
Link, who is the founding director of the
Michigan State University Office of Campus Sustainability.
He's also the executive director of the Peace
Education Center here in the Greater Lansing community.
He's been an active community leader in our
community, one of the founding members of Local
First here in mid-Michigan.
Also a professor emeritus of our faculty board
of advisors with the Center for Community and
Economic Development and also an author of one
of our regional economic innovation co-learning plans
on triple bottom line businesses.
So welcome Terry to CCED podcast.
Always good to be here, Rex.
Look forward to chatting with you.
Also joining me today is Ms. Shelby Kurlan,
who is a research assistant here with us
in the Center and helping us with a
number of projects related to our domicology work,
but also other activities that the Center is
involved in.
Ms. Kurlan.
Good to be here.
So Terry, tell us a little bit about
your vision of the triple bottom line community.
What does that involve and why should economic
developers be concerned with triple bottom line businesses?
Well, Rex, this is almost the last day
of March of 2018.
And my vision of the world, which is
not too errant from a good portion of
educated people, is that we have two fundamental
human challenges.
One is climate destabilization and the other is
increasing income inequality.
So I see all solutions need to be
driven to dealing with both at the same
time.
Thereby looking for an example of a framework
that could help us think through that process
as we try to come to solutions for
all the things that challenges us.
So fairly uniquely, all the nations of the
United Nations two years ago came together and
agreed on these sustainable development goals that all
countries would pursue in the hopes that they
could meet these goals by 2030.
There are 17 goals.
They include things like gender equality, climate change,
clean water and sanitation, education, income equality, democracy,
peace.
I won't go through all of them, but
we tend to work at things in bits
and pieces and we don't think holistically.
And then the typical dominant economic paradigm that
you and I have grown up in, assuming
that we've grown up, we've aged, that's for
sure, is this notion that the economy is
the driver of everything.
And if we get everything out of the
way, the economy just by natural forces will
bring wealth and prosperity to all.
And we know it's a lie.
Even if it was initially good intention, it's
been deformed so much that, you know, greed
wins and things trickle down.
And the fact that we have climate destabilization,
growing income inequality should be enough signal that
we need to change the system.
So I look at businesses as being a
partner in that and businesses that are designed
from the outset, not simply to make profit,
but to profit the entire community and not
just the living community, but those that are
coming afterwards.
Because it's the fear that the young people
in this room are going to be dealing
with things that we don't have to deal
with, will be long gone.
And whether it's increasing inequality or it's climate
destabilization or any of the offspring that come
from that.
So it just makes good sense, if you
care about anything other than your short term
self, to look at enterprises, whether they're for
profit or not for profit, that are working
on all of those goals at the same
time, or at least focused on those two
basic challenges, income inequality and climate destabilization.
You're a deep thinker, a well read man,
you run a blog, I know, and there's
quite a few people that follow your blog.
So why is there so much resistance and
so little progress in achieving action in the
triple bottom line world?
I don't think there's an easy answer to
this.
If there was, somebody would have had it
long before myself.
I think it's complicated.
I think there's lots of factors.
Part of it is the overriding culture of
how we measure success.
And so if you look at Maslow's theory
of self actualization, you know, once you have
your food and shelter taken care of, then
you can kind of go up a little
bit and start thinking about the bigger issues,
which I've been fortunate to be in a
position where I've been able to do that,
but lots of people can't get past that.
And if you structure the rules of the
game, so that winning is everything, winning for
yourself is everything, then that's the outcome that
you might expect.
If you structure the rules differently, then you
might get a different outcome.
But the rules are set up so that,
you know, wealth begets wealth, it doesn't necessarily
get distributed, and that power is still involved
at the point where wealth is controlled.
So and the myth that you hear from
almost everybody about economic growth, well you can't
have continued growth on a finite planet.
We're already past the point.
Our ecological footprint is now absorbing more than
the planet can produce and or absorb in
terms of waste.
And we have more people coming onto the
planet and a lot of people who are
not up at our level.
So there's got to be a redistribution quick
or there's going to be real disaster.
If we think things are bad now, I'm
sure they're going to be worse.
Very few elected officials or candidates for elected
office run on any platform that even resembles
these kinds of concepts and practices.
What do you, how do, how do we
reconcile that they aren't articulating this as those
who are seeking to be our leaders in
the public realm and the need for these
kinds of actions to be taken in the
public realm?
I think politicians will come last or close
to last.
This is why you see going back to
the triple bottom line businesses, the B corporations
for example, they're not waiting, they're not being
driven by government or policy to decide that
they want their enterprise to be concerned with
more than just their personal profit.
I mean they're purposely, each of these organizations
may be taking a different twist and a
different emphasis on what areas within that triple
bottom line they're really going to emphasize, but
they're doing this because they believe it.
I'm kind of surprised in our culture that
just, you know, the dominant Christian culture that
the churches haven't called out more for this
and been against this.
The Moral Mondays movement is an example of
one that is.
Pope Francis is another example from that faith
community that's doing it, but in the past
a lot of the drive to what we
might consider progressive values have come in large
part from people who have a theological, whatever
their theology is, that their theological doctrine is,
they believe in this community of life and
stuff that we need to share and until
some of that happens, I don't know, I
don't really know.
If I had the magic answer I probably
wouldn't be sitting here, I'd be out broadcasting
to save the world.
So triple bottom line businesses, what are the
advantages of a community that might target triple
bottom line businesses as an economic development strategy?
Well I think one of the things from
the little study that we did for you
just a few years ago was that triple
bottom line businesses are community businesses.
Even if they have operations in more than
one place, they're committed to the communities that
they're in.
They're committed to their employees and they want
good employees, so they want a community for
their employees to prosper in as well and
feel good about and not leave because some
other grass is greener on the other side.
So there's this orientation that way and as
well they're looking at, if they're looking specifically
at the environmental side in terms of reducing
their footprint, oftentimes despite an initial capital investment,
the paybacks and savings, because they don't have
to deal with the waste in some way
or another, whether it's hazardous waste or non
-hazardous waste, it's a cost savings.
So there's efficiencies to be found in there
and if you like good puzzles and a
lot of, I think, entrepreneurial folks like puzzles
and figuring things out, then trying to figure
out how to do things in a way
that's lighter on the environment and better for
people is kind of a fun way to
go as opposed to how much money can
I rake in tomorrow, which is, you know,
in our environment and what our business schools
teach a lot of, that's a relatively easy
game.
Everybody's playing that game.
If you change the rules of the game,
you know, and do it yourself and succeed
even within that board game that you're playing,
it's more fun, it's more satisfying.
So communities and societies and nations across the
planet have identified some important values that they
want to achieve, sustainable development goals.
Can you share with us your perspective on
those and what you think of those?
Well, again, since it's one of those really
rare events that the community of nations in
the world could come together and agree on
something, I think the world should pause and
say, well, maybe there's something here worth us
doing, and they have done this so well.
Not only did they have the 17 goals,
but they have like 169 specific targets within
those goals and they have another 239, I
don't remember exactly, or something like that, indicators
that the nation states are to measure.
So as we measure, we can see how
we're moving towards that progress at the goal
of 2030.
Now, I don't think anybody's under the illusion
that all nations will make all those goals,
and there isn't a nation that is already
meeting all of those goals.
So everybody has work to do, but it
also puts us in this fabric of thinking
of us all as one, sharing a single
planet and a single future that's a common
future.
So what's really interesting to me is that
both the business sector and the higher ed
sector now is starting to look at those
goals as templates to measure their own performance.
Can you give us a couple examples of
those that they are using?
I could send you the links to them.
I would not articulate them well, but I've
been noticing in the literature and examples.
So for example, in the American higher education
sector, they've been using this program called STARS,
which is a triple bottom line designed for
higher education.
Well, they are relooking at STARS as they
do from time to time and seeing how
well they align with those sustainable development goals.
And I assume that in doing that, they'll
refine some of those targets and indicators so
that they can respond to how they're doing.
One would assume that if the global community
could come together on these goals, I should
say one might assume, one could assume, that
the incentives might develop to help move things
that way, in which case those who are
early adopters will be in better shape to
take advantage of those incentives.
And I think that really holds some promise.
The book by Christian Felber, the Austrian economist
called Change Everything, Building an Economy for the
Public Good, gets at the kind of incentives
that if you change the rules of the
game, the triple bottom line companies would prosper
and communities would prosper as a result.
And so a lot of this is rule
changing, but it's going to be rule changing
both at the local community level and come
up to the state level and the nation
state level.
And then maybe at some point we'll have
some agree upon things that transcend all borders.
So as a local economic development professional, what
might be the first step that I could
take to try to help my community move
forward in the 21st century?
I would bring people's attention to the sustainable
development goals and tell them to start looking
at their own performance that way.
You know, are they bringing in and supporting
the kinds of things that address the needs
and the challenges that these goals say that
we should?
I mean, take for example one of the
organizations that we did in the paper that
we did for you a couple years ago,
Aqua Clara out on the west side.
They are doing water sanitation work.
This is one of the big goals, one
of the big goals.
They're doing the research and design here and
they're building teams that go around the planet
to show people how to make these tools
that help their water sanitation there using things
they have there.
They're not producing them and selling them and
yet they are a company that is making,
it's working on a triple bottom line basis
and it's still prospering.
Last I heard they have more employees now
than when we interviewed them a couple years
ago and they're doing work that's important and
that's the kind of example that the kind
of things that one could conceive of doing.
So I think the possibilities are endless.
You bring enough creativity people to the room
and you have these 17 goals and how
do we fix all 17 at the same
time?
Some people feel embracing UN development goals threatens
national sovereignty and our independence as a nation.
How might you respond to those people who
believe that?
Well, there's no legal requirement on these goals.
It's an agreed upon direction that we've decided
to take.
Just like the climate agreement in Paris, nations
can pull out and even there nations can
decide to set their own targets of what
they're going to do in terms of that.
That's the point of it.
It's still driven but it's done in conjunction
with an agreed upon direction that the world
should move.
I think otherwise the United States will be
an outlier.
Then the businesses here, especially those who want
to do business overseas, will find that the
policy disincentives from having been laggards will hurt
them as opposed to helping them.
I'd like to thank Mr. Link for joining
us here today in our podcast and I
encourage our podcast listeners to visit our webpage
at the Center for Community and Economic Development
to learn more about these and other topics
related to community and economic development in our
state and nation.
Thank you, Mr. Link.
Appreciate your help.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks again to our guest Terry Link and
thank you for listening.
Stay tuned for more episodes of Community and
University from the MSU Center for Community and
Economic Development on other innovative economic community and
university work.