The Meaning of Social-Environmental Sustainability - Economics and Ecology: United for a Sustainable World - page 120

profits. Nevertheless, businesses—especially global corporations—are, and
should be, on the front lines.
There are few easy answers to this blueprint of superficiality and social
conflict. Our best response is that we need to assist moving the triple bot-
tom-line from conceptual incubation into the arena of practical application.
Rather than simply debate and admire the philosophical elegance of the
three pillars (ecological integrity, social equity, and economic stability), we
need to spell them out in operational detail and, in any way we can, to test
what they mean and how they work in the practical, real world. We turn now
to that task.
Ecological Integrity
Most people speak of stewardship when it comes to the health and biophysi-
cal integrity of our local, regional, national, and global environment. We
think the concept of a living trust is preferable, because stewardship does not
have a legally recognized beneficiary beyond the immediate owner—some-
one who directly benefits from the proceeds of one's decisions, actions, and
the outcomes they produce.
Stewardship , therefore, is a much more restrictive term than living trust ,
because the fiduciary responsibility is only to the immediate “shareholders,”
whereas the fiduciary responsibility of a “living trust” is to all beneficiaries,
many of whom need not be current physical shareholders—such as genera-
tions yet unborn. This more closely mirrors our concept of social-environ-
mental-economic sustainability.
Biological Living Trust as a Management Tool
The concept of a biological living trust can effectively serve as a management
tool for incorporating the functional aspects of ecological integrity into the
triple bottom-line system. However, the notion still sounds somewhat eso-
teric. If, therefore, the concept of a biological living trust is to work, specific
principles must be set out as guidelines:
• Everything, including humans and nonhumans, is an interactive
and interdependent part of a systemic whole.
• Although parts within a living system differ in structure, their func-
tions within the system are complementary (not competitive) and thus
benefit the system as a whole.
• The ecological integrity and social-environmental sustainability of the
system are the necessary measures of its economic health and stability.
• The integrity of biophysical processes has primacy over valuation of
the economic conversion potential of a system's components.