Banging a Drum
#52 en-route downtown for lunch and banking.
EPCOR is an electricity and water service provider headquartered here in Edmonton. They haven't produced a corporate social responsibility report since 2000 and have decided that resuming the practice of publishing this annual report card is overdue. EPCOR's manager of environmental affairs is planning to interview four Alberta environmental groups in preparation for this project: Pembina Institute, Greenpeace, [Group X (can't recall)], and the Toxics Watch Society.
I spent 80 minutes on the phone with the fellow this morning giving my opinions on EPCOR's performance in the areas of environment, economy, product responsibility, human rights, labour, and 'transparency'; as well as my rankings of each topic in terms of perceived importance. Of course, I was biased towards environmental matters, but 'risk of utilizing child or forced labour' caught my attention as being and interesting performance indicator.
I spent yesterday in a strategic planning meeting with representatives of government and industry working on the objectives of our provincial air quality management organization and provided my interpretation of the phrase, "optimize economic efficiency" as being "where the means of producing goods and services satisfies human needs with the minimum of internalized and externalized costs". Over the picnic lunch break (we were meeting at Edmonton's heritage park, Fort Edmonton), one of my colleagues said,
"When you said 'means of production', I thought you were going on some kind of Marxist rant..."
The phrase has a distinct leftist flavor. Is the right-wing equivalent 'human and capital assets'?
In the course of my interview, I told EPCOR that the indicators included in their report outline wouldn't be sufficient to qualify the company as a sustainability organization in my view. I guess I'm on the record as saying:
"An environmentally responsible company is…
…One that has two epiphanies: 1) the dominant social
institution epiphany where it realizes that corporations
have become more powerful than nations, and
therefore it has a responsibility to society; 2) the
environmental epiphany where it realizes that its
purpose is sustainability. As an engine of society, an
environmentally responsible company aligns its
business with ecological principles. Its business is to
help society achieve sustainability."
ENGO interview respondent
http://corporate.pembina.org/pub/200
EPCOR is an electricity and water service provider headquartered here in Edmonton. They haven't produced a corporate social responsibility report since 2000 and have decided that resuming the practice of publishing this annual report card is overdue. EPCOR's manager of environmental affairs is planning to interview four Alberta environmental groups in preparation for this project: Pembina Institute, Greenpeace, [Group X (can't recall)], and the Toxics Watch Society.
I spent 80 minutes on the phone with the fellow this morning giving my opinions on EPCOR's performance in the areas of environment, economy, product responsibility, human rights, labour, and 'transparency'; as well as my rankings of each topic in terms of perceived importance. Of course, I was biased towards environmental matters, but 'risk of utilizing child or forced labour' caught my attention as being and interesting performance indicator.
I spent yesterday in a strategic planning meeting with representatives of government and industry working on the objectives of our provincial air quality management organization and provided my interpretation of the phrase, "optimize economic efficiency" as being "where the means of producing goods and services satisfies human needs with the minimum of internalized and externalized costs". Over the picnic lunch break (we were meeting at Edmonton's heritage park, Fort Edmonton), one of my colleagues said,
"When you said 'means of production', I thought you were going on some kind of Marxist rant..."
The phrase has a distinct leftist flavor. Is the right-wing equivalent 'human and capital assets'?
In the course of my interview, I told EPCOR that the indicators included in their report outline wouldn't be sufficient to qualify the company as a sustainability organization in my view. I guess I'm on the record as saying:
"An environmentally responsible company is…
…One that has two epiphanies: 1) the dominant social
institution epiphany where it realizes that corporations
have become more powerful than nations, and
therefore it has a responsibility to society; 2) the
environmental epiphany where it realizes that its
purpose is sustainability. As an engine of society, an
environmentally responsible company aligns its
business with ecological principles. Its business is to
help society achieve sustainability."
ENGO interview respondent
http://corporate.pembina.org/pub/200