Ch 14 The Green Office Economics and the Environment Discussion I need a 3-4 paragraph post for each Learning Activity. The sources I attach are the only ones you can use for citations. I need at least three of the sources for each post. APA Format. For in-text citations it should be, (Author, Publication Year, page number). If there is no page number just exclude it. Make sure that you really show an understanding of the concepts in each learning activity. Also, see attached for the instructor’s notes for this week. It may give you an idea of what is expected.
SOURCES TO BE USED:
Theme 1: Ethical Issues Related to the Environment
The Business Ethics Workshop (2012) Washington, DC: The Saylor Foundation (Citation for chapter 14 SEE ATTACHED)
Chapter 14: The Green Office: Economics and the Environment (pages 627-664)
What is Environmental History
Environmental Ethics?
Perdue Farms Changes Rules for Chicken Care
When some US firms move production overseas, they also offshore their pollution
Fracking Is Dangerous To Your Health — Here’s Why
Global Scarcity: Scramble for Dwindling Natural Resources
The Needs of 7 Billion People
Deforestation: Facts, Causes & Effects
Environmental Racism
Theme 2: Sustainable Business Practices
Stepping Towards Sustainable Business: An Evaluation of Waste Minimization Practices in US Manufacturing
A Corporate Model of Sustainable Business Practices
Environmental Sustainability in Business
Learning Activity # 1
The Environment: To be or not to be protected, that is the question?
In week 1 in considering why it is important to study business ethics, it was noted that there is a divergence of thought between those who believe that the primary role of businesses is to make money (so called Friedman approach) and those who believe businesses also have a societal role in addition to their financial or economic role. There is perhaps no greater societal issue than the environment and the relationship of businesses to this issue.
Using your readings and videos for the week, consider this alternative premise: Businesses have (an) or (no) obligation to protect the environment in conducting their operations. Choose which alternative you believe is the more persuasive and identify and discuss two arguments in support of your position. To balance your discussion, what are two counter-arguments to your position, and how would you refute them? Are there any ethical theories that might be applicable to your position or the counter to your position?
Learning Activity #2
The Operations: To be or not to be outsourced, that is the question?
Platinum Industrial Enterprises (“PIE”), a manufacturing company headquartered in Florida, was faced with a critical decision that affected its long-term survivability. The decision was necessitated by a recent rules promulgation by the EPA which lowered the amount of acceptable discharge in public waterways. The change was the result of enormous political pressure and compelling evidence linking certain discharges to significant health problems for citizens residing near PIE’s plant. Taking effect in 6 months, the new regulations would substantially increase PIE’s operating costs.
Joe Schmo, the CEO, was in deep thought in his office about how he would deliver the bad news to his board of directors when in walked Jerry Easyrider, the executive VP who had just returned from a business trip to MoLand, a country off the coast of Africa. Hearing the news from Joe Schmo caused Jerry to remember that while he was visiting MoLand, he had passed a boarded-up plant and when he asked his driver what it was, he was told it was formerly the home of Spirits Galore, which had closed its operations because of financial difficulties. Based on his previous business travels to MoLand, Jerry understood that the country, particularly in the more depressed areas, had few if any environmental safeguards in place and companies were largely free to operate as they pleased with respect to environmental concerns.
Joe and Jerry agreed that it would be worthwhile for Jerry, along with a team of experts, to return immediately to MoLand to check out the plant firsthand. Upon his return to Florida, Jerry briefed Joe and informed him that with minimal expenditures, the plant would be a good location for the company’s Tavor operations, the division affected by the EPA change, and further that it could be staffed quickly using the displaced workers from the former owner.
When asked about the environmental issues, Jerry indicated that he had been assured by officials at the highest level of the government that if PIE brought jobs to the country, it could do whatever it wanted environmentally. This seemed too good to be true, and Joe asked Jerry if he were sure on the environmental issues because he noticed a bit of uneasiness. Jerry indicated that he was sure about the environmental issues and was only hesitating because the most cost-effective operations would have the plant discharges flowing into waterways that primarily affected nearby impoverished and minority communities.
Joe Schmo is now torn and does not know what to do. If Joe Schmo consulted you for advice, what would you advise him regarding the move? In your advice to him, identify and discuss the ethical dilemma, related ethical issues, and relevant stakeholders. Would you recommend the move and why or why not? Chapter 14: The Green Office: Economics and the Environment from The Business Ethics
Workshop was adapted by Saylor Academy and is available under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license without attribution as requested by
the work’s original creator or licensor. UMUC has modified this work and it is available under
the original license.
Chapter 14
The Green Office: Economics and the Environment
Chapter Overview
Chapter 14 “The Green Office: Economics and the Environment” explores the multiple relations linking
business, the environment, and environmental protection. The question of animal rights is also
considered.
Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books
Saylor.org
627
14.1 The Environment
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
1.
Consider damage done to the environment in a business context.
2.
Delineate major legal responses to concerns about the environment.
Cancun
Cancun, Mexico, is paradise: warm climate, Caribbean water, white sand beaches, stunning landscapes,
coral reefs, and a unique lagoon. You can sunbathe, snorkel, parasail, shoot around on jet skis, and drink
Corona without getting carded.
Hordes of vacationers fill the narrow, hotel-lined peninsula—so many that the cars on the one main street
snarl in traffic jams running the length of the tourist kilometers. It’s a jarring contrast: on one side the
placid beaches (until the jet skis get geared up), and on the other there’s the single road about a hundred
yards inland. Horns scream, oil-burning cars and trucks belch pollution, tourists fume. Cancun’s problem
is that it can’t handle its own success. There’s not enough room for roads behind the hotels just like there’s
not enough beach in front to keep the noisy jet skiers segregated from those who want to take in the sun
and sea quietly.
The environment hasn’t been able to bear the success either. According to a report,
The tourist industry extensively damaged the lagoon, obliterated sand dunes, led to the
extinction of varying species of animals and fish, and destroyed the rainforest which surrounds
Cancun. The construction of 120 hotels in 20 years has also endangered breeding areas for
marine turtles, as well as causing large numbers of fish and shellfish to be depleted or
disappear just offshore.
[1]
For all its natural beauty, environmentally, Cancun is an ugly place. Those parts of the natural world that
most tourists don’t see (the lagoon, the nearby forest, the fish life near shore) have been sacrificed so a few
executives in suits can make money.
Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books
Saylor.org
628
From its inception, Cancun was a business. The Mexican government built an airport to fly people in, set
up rules to draw investors, and made it (relatively) easy to build hotels on land that only a few coconut
harvesters from the local plantation even knew about. From a business sense, it was a beautiful
proposition: bring people to a place where they can be happy, provide new and more lucrative jobs for the
locals, and build a mountain of profit (mainly for government insiders and friends) along the way.
Everything went according to plan. Those who visit Cancun have a wonderful time (once they finally get
down the road to their hotel). College students live it up during spring break, young couples take their
children to play on the beach, and older couples go down and remember that they do, in fact, love each
other. So fish die, and people get jobs. Forests disappear, and people’s love is kindled. The important
questions about business ethics and the environment are mostly located right at this balance and on these
questions: how many trees may be sacrificed for human jobs? How many animal species can be traded for
people to fall in love?
What Is the Environment?
Harm to the natural world is generally discussed under two terms: the environment and the ecosystem.
The words’ meanings overlap, but one critical aspect of the term ecosystem is the idea of interrelation. An
ecosystem is composed of living and nonliving elements that find a balance allowing for their
continuation. The destruction of the rain forest around Cancun didn’t just put an end to some trees; it also
jeopardized a broader web of life: birds that needed limbs for their nests disappeared when the trees did.
Then, with the sturdy forest gone, Hurricane Gilbert swept through and wiped out much of the lower-level
vegetation. Meanwhile, out in the sea, the disappearance of some small fish meant their predators had
nothing to feed on and they too evaporated. What makes an ecosystem a system is the fact that the various
parts all depend on each other, and damaging one element may also damage and destroy another or many
others.
In the sense that it’s a combination of interdependent elements, the tourist world in Cancun is no
different from the surrounding natural world. As the traffic jams along the peninsula have grown, making
it difficult for people to leave and get back to their hotels, the tourists have started migrating away,
looking elsewhere for their vacation reservations. Of course Cancun isn’t going to disappear, but if you
took that one road completely away, most everything else would go with it. So economic realities can
Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books
Saylor.org
629
resemble environmental ones: once a single part of a functioning system disappears, it’s hard to stop the
effects from falling further down the line.
What Kinds of Damage Can Be Done to the Environment?
Nature is one of nature’s great adversaries. Hurricanes sweeping up through the Caribbean and along the
Eastern Seaboard of the United States wipe out entire ecosystems. Moving inland, warm winters in
northern states like Minnesota can allow some species including deer to reproduce at very high rates,
meaning that the next winter, when conditions return to normal, all available food is eaten rapidly at
winter’s onset and subsequent losses to starvation are massive and extend up the food chain to wolves and
bears. Lengthening the timeline, age-long periods of warming and cooling cause desertification and ice
ages that put ends to giant swaths of habitats and multitudes of species.
While it’s true that damaging the natural world’s ecosystems is one of nature’s great specialties, evidence
also indicates that the human contribution to environmental change has been growing quickly. It’s
impossible to measure everything that has been done, or compare the world today with what would have
been had humans never evolved (or never created an industrialized economy), but one way to get a sense
of the kind of transformations human activity may be imposing on the environment comes from
extinction rates: the speed at which species are disappearing because they no longer find a habitable place
to flourish. According to some studies, the current rate of extinction is around a thousand times higher
than the one derived from examinations of the fossil record, which is to say, before the time parts of the
natural world were being severely trashed by developments like those lining the coast of Cancun,
Mexico.
[2]
In an economics and business context, the kinds of damage our industrialized lifestyles most extensively
wreak include:
Air pollution
Water pollution
Soil pollution
Contamination associated with highly toxic materials
Resource depletion
Air pollution is the emission of harmful chemicals and particulate matter into the
air. Photochemical smog—better known simply as smog—is a cocktail of gases and particles reacting with
Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books
Saylor.org
630
sunlight to make visible and poisonous clouds. Car exhaust is a major contributor to this kind of pollution,
so smog can concentrate in urban centers where traffic jams are constant. In Mexico City on bad days, the
smog is so thick it can be hard to see more than ten blocks down a straight street. Because the urban core
is nestled in a mountain valley that blocks out the wind, pollutants don’t blow away as they do in many
places; they get entirely trapped. During the winter, a brown top forms above the skyline, blocking the
view of the surrounding mountain peaks; the cloud is clearly visible from above to those arriving by plane.
After landing, immediately upon exiting the airport into the streets, many visitors note their eyes tearing
up and their throats drying out. In terms of direct bodily harm, Louisiana State University environmental
chemist Barry Dellinger estimates that breathing the air in Mexico’s capital for a day is about the
equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes.
[3]
This explains why, on the worst days, birds drop out of
the air dead, and one longer-term human effect is increased risk of lung cancer.
Greenhouse gasses, especially carbon dioxide released when oil and coal are burned, absorb and hold heat
from the sun, preventing it from dissipating into space, and thereby creating a greenhouse effect, a
general warming of the environment. Heat is, of course, necessary for life to exist on earth, but fears exist
that the last century of industrialization has raised the levels measurably, and continuing industrial
expansion will speed the process even more. Effects associated with the warming are significant and
include:
Shifts in vegetation, in what grows where
Rising temperatures in lakes, rivers, and oceans, leading to changes in wildlife distribution
Flooding of coastal areas, where many of our cities are located (Cancun could be entirely flooded by only a
small rise in the ocean’s water level.)
Another group of chemicals, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), threaten to break down the ozone layer in the
earth’s stratosphere. Currently, that layer blocks harmful ultraviolet radiation from getting through to the
earth’s surface where it could cause skin cancer and disrupt ocean life. Effective international treaties
have limited (though not eliminated) CFC emissions.
Coal-burning plants—many of which produce electricity—release sulfur compounds into the air, which
later mix into water vapor and rain down as sulfuric acid, commonly known as acid rain. Lakes see their
pH level changed with subsequent effects on vegetation and fish. Soil may also be poisoned.
Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books
Saylor.org
631
Air pollution is the most immediate form of environmental poison for most of us, but not the only
significant one. In China, more than 25 percent of surface water is too polluted for swimming or fishing.
[4]
Some of those lakes may have been ruined in the same way as Onondaga Lake near Syracuse, New York.
Over a century ago, resorts were built and a fish hatchery flourished on one side of the long lake. The
other side received waste flushed by the surrounding cities and factories. Problems began around 1900
when the fish hatchery could no longer reproduce fish. Soon after, it was necessary to ban ice harvesting
from the lake. In 1940, swimming was banned because of dangerous bacteria, and in 1970, fishing had to
be stopped because of mercury and PCB contamination. The lake was effectively dead. To cite one
example, a single chemical company dumped eighty tons of mercury into the water during its run on the
coast. Recently, the New York state health department loosened restrictions slightly, and people are
advised that they may once again eat fish caught in the lake. Just as long as it’s not more than one per
month. Those who do eat more risk breakdown of their nervous system, collapse of their liver, and teeth
falling out.
[5]
Like liquid poisons, solid waste can be dangerous. Paper bags degrade fairly rapidly and cleanly, but
plastic containers remain where they’re left into the indefinite future. The metal of a battery tossed into a
landfill will break down eventually, but not before dropping out poisons including cadmium. Cadmium
weakens the bones in low doses and, if exposure is high, causes death.
At the industrial waste extreme, there are toxins so poisonous they require special packaging to prevent
even minimal exposure more or less forever. The waste from nuclear power plants qualifies. So noxious
are the spent fuel rods that it’s a matter of national debate in America and elsewhere as to where they
should be stored. When the Chernobyl nuclear plant broke open in 1986, it emitted a radioactive cloud
that killed hundreds and forced the permanent evacuation of the closest town, Pripyat. Area wildlife
destruction would require an entire book to document, but as a single example, the surrounding pine
forest turned red and died after absorbing the radiation storm.
Finally, all the environmental damage listed so far has resulted from ruinous substance additions to
natural ecosystems, but environmental damage also runs in the other direction as depletion. Our cars and
factories are sapping the earth of its petroleum reserves. Minerals, including copper, are being mined
toward the point where it will become too expensive to continue digging the small amount that remains
from the ground. The United Nations estimates that fifty thousand square miles of forest are disappearing
Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books
Saylor.org
632
each year, lost to logging, conversion to agriculture, fuel wood collection by rural poor, and forest
[6]
fires. Of course, most of those tree losses can be replanted. On the other hand, species that are driven
out of existence can’t be brought back. As already noted, current rates of extinction are running far above
“background extinction” rates, which are an approximation of how many species, would disappear each
year were the rules of nature left unperturbed.
Conclusion. Technically, there’s no such thing as preserving the environment because left to its own
devices the natural world does an excellent job of wreaking havoc on itself. Disruptions including floods,
combined with wildlife battling for territory and food sources, all that continually sweeps away parts of
nature and makes room for new species and ecosystems. Still, changes wrought by the natural world tend
to be gradual and balanced, and the worry is that our industrialized lifestyle has become so powerful that
nature, at least in certain areas, will no longer be able to compensate and restore any kind of balance. That
concerns has led to both legal efforts, and ethical arguments, in favor of protecting the environment.
The Law
Legal efforts to protect the environment in the United States intensified between 1960 and 1970.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was established in 1970 to monitor and report on the state of
the environment while establishing and enforcing specific regulations. Well known to most car buyers as
the providers of the mile-per-gallon estimates displayed on the window sticker, the EPA is a large agency
and employs a workforce compatible with its mission, including scientists, legal staffers, and
communications experts.
Other important legal milestones in the field of environmental protection include:
The Clean Air Act of 1963 and its many amendments regulate emissions from industrial plants and
monitor air quality. One measure extends to citizens the right to sue companies for damages if they aren’t
complying with existing regulations: it effectively citizenries’ law enforcement in this area of
environmental protection.
The Clean Water Act, along with other, related legislation, regulates the quality of water in the geographic
world (lakes and rivers), as well as the water we drink and use for industrial purposes. Chemical
composition is important, and temperature also. Thermal pollution occurs when factories pour heated
water back into natural waterways at a rate sufficient to affect the ecosystem.
Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books
Saylor.org
633
The Wilderness Act, along with other legislation, establishes areas of land as protected from development.
Some zones, including the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota, are reserved for minimal
human interaction (no motors are allowed); other areas are more accessible. All wilderness and national
park areas are regulated to protect natural ecosystems.
The Endangered Species Act and related measures take steps to ensure the survival of species pressed to
near extinction, especially by human intrusion. One example is the bald eagle. Subjected to hunting, loss
of habitat, and poisoning by the pesticide DDT (which caused eagle eggs to crack prematurely), a once
common species was reduced to only a few hundred pairs in the lower forty-eight states. Placed on the
endangered species list in 1967, penalties for hunting were increased significantly. Also, DDT was banned,
and subsequently the eagle made a strong comeback. It is no longer listed as endangered.
The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 requires that an environmental impact statement be
prepared for many major projects. The word environment in this case means not only the natural world
but also the human one. When a new building is erected in a busy downtown, the environmental impact
statement reports on the effect the building will have on both the natural world (how much new air
pollution will be released from increased traffic, how much water will be necessary for the building’s
plumbing, how much electricity will be used to keep the place cool in the summer) and also the civilized
one (whether there’s enough parking in the area for all the cars that will arrive, whether nearby highways
can handle the traffic and similar). Staying with the natural factors, the statement should consider
impacts—positive and negative—on the local ecosystem as well as strategies for minimizing those impacts
and some consideration of alternatives to the project. The writing and evaluation of these statements can
become sites of conflict between developers on one side and environmental protection organizations on
the other.
Two major additional points about legal approaches to the natural world should be added. First, they can
be expensive; nearly all environmental protection laws impose costs on business and, consequently, make
life for everyone more costly. When developers of downtown buildings have to create a budget for their
environmental impact statements, the expenses get passed on to the people who buy condos in the
building. There’s no doubt that banning the pesticide DDT was good for the eagle, but it made farming—
and therefore the food we eat—more expensive. Further, clean water and air stipulations don’t only affect
consumers by making products more expensive; the environmental responsibility also costs Americans
Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books
Saylor.org
634
jobs every time a factory gets moved to China or some other relatively low-regulation country. Of course,
it’s also true that, as noted earlier, around 25 percent of China’s surface water is poisonous, but for laid-off
workers in the States, it may be hard to worry so much about that.
Second, these American laws, regulations, and agencies don’t make a bit of difference in Cancun, Mexico.
Even though Cancun and America wash back and forth over each other (Cancun’s hotels were
constructed, chiefly, to host American visitors), the rights and responsibilities of legal dominion over the
environment stop and start at places where people need to show their passports. This is representative of
a larger reality: more than most issues in business ethics, arguments pitting economic and human
interests against the natural world are international in nature. The greenhouse gases emitted by cars
caught in Cancun traffic are no different, as far as the earth is concerned, from those gases produced along
clogged Los Angeles freeways.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Ecosystems are natural webs of life in which the parts depend on each other for their continued survival.
…
Purchase answer to see full
attachment