What’s business if not value creation? Take something that doesn’t cost very much, add value, and sell it for more, creating a profit. It’s only natural that many businesses do so using natural resources like land, trees, water, air, and fossil fuels as their inputs. Those components become the ingredients for the products, or they are the receptacle for waste created in the manufacturing process.

We're excited to announce Jib Ellison will be discussing one of our favorite topics this month at  Fortune Brainstorm: GREEN. He will moderate a panel on What Is Nature Worth? with Jared Diamond and Pavan Sukhdev. Glen Low will be there discussing another favorite topic, Sustainability Indexes: What's the Magic Number? with Dara O'Rourke, Mark Lee and Marc Gunther. Both of these topics were for years squarely in the 'too hard' box, but we now have real world examples of progress on both fronts. If you'll be at the conference, we hope you'll join in the discussion and find time to connect with Glen and Jib.

Join Jib Ellison and Chris Mann, CEO/Chairman of the Gourd of Guayakí Sustainable Rainforest Products, importer and marketer of yerba mate on March 7 at 6:30 PM in Santa Rosa for what promises to be a stimulating discussion on the future of sustainable business.

The Corporate Eco Forum will present a webinar on November 2nd, 12:00pm EDT/9:00am PDT, featuring Blu Skye founder and CEO Jib Ellison. Jib recently co-authored The Big Idea: The Sustainable Economy in the latest Harvard Business Review. Jib was also featured in the recent book Force of Nature by Edward Humes. CEF members can register by emailing Michael Vito (michael@corporateecoforum.com) with your name, title, and organization.

by Yvon Chouinard, Jib Ellison, and Rick Ridgeway                         

No one these days seriously denies the need for sustainable business practices. Even those concerned about only business and not the fate of the planet recognize that the viability of business itself depends on the resources of healthy ecosystems—fresh water, clean air, robust biodiversity, productive land—and on the stability of just societies. Happily, most of us also care about these things directly.