'Green' ambitions change lawyer stereotype

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As stereotypes go, lawyers run at a deficit when it comes to empathy and morals. They're generally lampooned as being at the same level as used car salespeople - forked-tongue devils whose interest is more in winning or selling than in ethical responsibility.

However, students at the University of Oregon's School of Law are trying to level those interests as they promote the idea of making money through environmental law and sustainable business law. Last Friday the Law Students for Sustainable Business held the first Sustainable Business Symposium, focusing on renewable energy, carbon policy and sustainable development and investment.

By promoting a hybrid of environmental law and sustainable entrepreneurship, the LSSB envisions an environment in which lawyers champion sustainable policy and locally owned used car lots sell zero-emissions vehicles. This idea will be awkward for some, as we can hardly imagine a world in which the stereotypes of lawyers and salespeople that we make fun of open their mouths and start speaking of environmental and social responsibility rather than slick rhetoric and half-truth pitches.

While the LSSB's efforts are positioned to be extremely successful, as policy and investment are core driving factors to any economy, this movement will encounter resistance from within another branch of the sustainability movement, which holds fast to the mantra that lawyers and people with products to sell or money to invest cannot be trusted, or even considered by some to be the manifestation of pure evil.

What is required to overcome this combative atmosphere is a hybrid. "Green" activists need to merge with the green of capital investment. Isolationist activism in and of itself is not sustainable, as it in the end needs to have energy, products, modes of transportation and places to live like everyone else. The principle, then, must be one of growing, one of falling dominoes and world domination of sustainable economies and business practices.

Sustainability activists should actually consider this move by the LSSB, or even just the existence of the LSSB, as a huge success as social activism is helping inform business models. Sustainable ideals require a partnership with sustainable materiality, and co-opting the business world as it is already structured is much more efficient than creating a parallel economy that would seek to destroy and replace the old order. Reduce, reuse, recycle - stick to the basic principles.

In the end, or at this point anyhow, it comes down to a question of motivation. We are becoming more motivated through negative re-enforcement - that is we are told that if we do not change our lifestyle and sources of that lifestyle that we will die. However, we need to encourage good old positive re-enforcement of cash and material benefit. This is what "the masses" respond to and this is what business responds to as well. This is the hybrid motivation - good for our environment and good for the bottom line - that necessitates and implies a hybrid between ideological hippie crunchies and entrepreneurial suits.

Selling this idea itself is going to be the first step. Trust has to be realized in the no-man's land between conservationists and developers. The suits will have little trouble, once old streams dry up, adapting to new cash-flow streams and rivers of capital. A basic business principle is that one grows or dies, and if sustainable markets, manufacturing and marketing represent the new streams, capitalist boats will put afloat in them.

This may strike some idealists as shameless opportunism and trigger accusations of "greenwashing" in order to move the same old products. Those who advocate individually isolationist sustainability over mass-marketed sustainability may hold an ideal in which invasive barges of capitalist exploitation and extraction are banned from trafficking the idealistic streams of sustainability. This ideal is as unsustainable and outdated as the petrol-heavy import-export model that they are critiquing.

Not only accepting, but deliberately pirating and exploiting the willingness of capital ventures to populate new areas of the economy is the hybrid model that sustainability advocates have to embrace.

The movement of goods and services will not stop and isolationist pockets of sustainability are futile in a reality in which the action of the world's masses determines global fate. World economy and world conquest needs to be the ultimate goal for the sustainability movement, whether the agents are crunchy idealists or business suits.

The world will go "green" when the best and most affordable products and services are sustainable and activists should try on this perspective where the market drives the movement rather than the movement tries to derail the market. So co-opt the market, give it good returns, and in the spirit of this move, let's hear it for the lawyers.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

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