Last night (actually this morning around 1 a.m.), I returned to Nashville after a delayed connection on my way back from an excellent conference at Seattle Pacific University. The conference was hosted by SPU's Center for Integrity in Business.

I was only in Seattle for about 48 hours, but the trip was well worth it. As I have mentioned before, there isn’t a good substitute for meeting people in person. Seattle Pacific University gathered an excellent, diverse group of practitioners and academics from various disciplines to discuss topics at the intersection of faith and social enterprise. I may write more about the conference later, but am pretty wiped out right now after limited sleep, catching up, and teaching today.  

While I seem to always get at least one delayed flight when I travel, I do not mind traveling because I love the quiet time on the plane or the car. (With an 18-month old son at home "quiet" is relatively rare in my life.) Almost always, I can finish at least one full book on the airplane on a trip like this one. This time I read Paul Collier’s The Plundered Planet. I might write more on the book later, but for now I will just provide an excerpt from the opening pages:

Environmentalists and economists have been cat and dog. Environmentalists see economists as the mercenaries of a culture of greed, the cheerleaders of an affluence that is unsustainable. Economoists see environmentalists as romantic reactionaries, wanting to apply the brakes to an economic engine that is at last reducing global poverty.

 

The argument of this book is that environmentalists and economists need each other. They need each other because they are on the same side of a war that is being lost. The natural world is being depleted and natural liabilities accumulated in a manner that both environmentalists and economists would judge to be unethical. But the need for an alliance runs deeper than the practical necessities of preventing defeat. Environmentalists and economists need each other intellectually. (pg. 9)

Paul Collier is a good person to write a book about the intersection of economics and environmentalism; he is an economics professor at Oxford University and his wife is an environmental historian.

This conference at Seattle Pacific University not only brought together economists and environmentalists, but also professors in finance, marketing, management, accounting, political science, geography, psychology, theology, and law. A number of business and legal practitioners, including Bill Clark (the primary drafter of the Model Benefit Corporation Legislation) and multiple business owners, were also part of the group. The conversation was rich, in large part because we all brought different perspectives on the issue from our own areas.