The March Point Refinery in Anacortes, WA, which must be one of the most beautifully situated refineries on earth. I do research just behind it at the Padilla Bay National Estuarine Reserve, in the shadow of Mt. Baker. Photo: Tesoro

Paraphrasing Jill Baron, ESA President, we, as ecologists, might all feel a … certain way about oil companies, but then we get in our cars and drive away. Or fly to ESA.

So, at what point, or on what level, do we, again, as ecologists, directly engage businesses, including huge multinational corporations that are typically blamed for the environmental destruction we research, in a constructive conversation about maintaining biodiversity? One that doesn’t involve picket signs, or legalese, or inherent distrust?

I fully acknowledge my own visceral sense of distrust, evoked during last Monday’s special session on Biodiversity in Businesses, on the introduction of Maria Hartley, who works on implementing the environmental mission (who knew?) of Chevron (see Inevitable Caveat 1 below). Joining Ms. Hartley on the panel were Albert Straus (of Straus Family Creameries – HUGE fan of the European Style yogurt, totally changed my outlook on yogurt!), and Robbert Snep, who is both an academic and a consultant to businesses seeking to green up and improve sustainability and biodiversity in their practices. The panel benefitted from the experience of a range of company approaches – a huge multinational corporation seemingly anathema to the idea of conservation, a local/regional agricultural operation, where we are much more comfortable thinking about biodiversity and business coexisting, as well as a consultant who works with a range of business entities and has a landscape-level perspective.

One of the species that Chevron works to protect is the Desert Tortoise in the Mojave. Find out more here. Photo: “DesertTortoise” by Wilson44691 – Own work. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

I latched onto the theme of motivation in each of these scenarios: Who are the parties that are motivated to build biodiversity into the business architecture and why? Who wants the business to consider environmental welfare and conservation? The shareholders? The consumers? The executives? The employees? The Public Relations office? What is their relation to the decision-making apparatus for the company? Is the business built in a way that protects sustainability as a priority, even when competing prioritie$ might emerge.

The answers to these questions determine how each business approaches biodiversity, and there is a range of structural solutions. For instance, on the flight (Inevitable Caveat 2) here, I read a short piece in the New Yorker about “B-corporations”, for-profit companies that are certified for high standards in “social and environmental practice” by B-Lab, a non-profit. B-corporations are, evidently, not to be confused with Benefit Corporations, which is hard, because they are both called “B-corps”. A B Corporation is a business incorporation status offered by about half of the states in the country. In both cases, there is an explicit commitment to social or environmental goals and objectives, that are variously controlled or evaluated by outside entities.

Straus was the first non-GMO verified creamery in the country. Find out more here.

Neither Straus nor Chevron is a B-corp, in either sense of the colloquial term, though perhaps the latter goes without saying. Yet they both manage, in their way, to pursue environmental objectives. I got the sense that these objectives were both determined and executed in a very top-down way at Straus, reflecting the vision and mission of the company’s family founders. On the other hand, Chevron states environmental goals, but hires ecologists and lawyers to keep them in compliance. I do wonder whether either of those approaches is structured to protect these values when/if “Corporate Social Responsibility” ever becomes less fashionable.

So, the good news is that there are jobs out there for us ecologists who don’t see the allure in the current unstable academic funding environment. Companies are seeking out science and finding it worth their investment to ask ecologists how to do their business environmentally. How do we get those jobs? Snep noted that, as students, we spend very little time thinking about businesses (except perhaps as a funding opportunity, or an obstacle to our research). He suggests that it would benefit us to wear a businesses hat from time to time, to develop the ability to communicate with business and find ways to apply ecology, to their landscaping, to their sourcing, to their marketing. Straus added that their company is really looking for leaders and managers first, as the content and skills can be added. I have been told that a dual PhD(or MS)/MBA is a formidable combination. I’m not sure I’m quite ready for X years more school, given my current financial situation, and it seems almost laughable how fish-out-of-water I would look in a business school (she says as she looks around the room at ESA).

Inevitable Caveats:

(1)  On a personal note, the distrust was, of course, my own baggage. Ms. Hartley convinced me that she does work from a science-first perspective and believes the role she plays can make a difference in the world of biodiversity.

(2)  Presumably, this plane flew on petroleum – read here for more about conservation biologists and carbon footprint, an irony of which I am fully aware.

August 19, 2014