Archive for the 'Business papers & presentations' Category

Conservation industry: published article


Here is an article I recently co-authored with CSIRO researchers, entitled “A conservation industry for sustaining natural capital and ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes’, which appear in the February 2010 issue of ‘Ecological Economics’.  It is a broad survey of the literature pertaining the the conditions needed for a conservation industry to evolve.  The abstract [...]

Posted by: Geoff Wells on Monday, 8th Feb, 2010

Wendell Berry in modern times


Wendell Berry is a native of Kentucky who has written, elegantly and powerfully, for more than four decades on themes relating to sustainable agriculture.  He is, as a commentator recently said, the most passionate advocate for the family farm and homestead.  The principles he developed, however, go beyond agriculture: they bear on the whole question [...]

Posted by: Geoff Wells on Friday, 27th Mar, 2009

Wendell Berry in modern times (part 3)


Although Wendell Berry was writing here some decades ago, the central principles he establishes have continued to be his main themes in more or less unaltered form. At the time of writing global warming was just beginning to be spoken of in public scientific discourse. Wendell Berry seems to have had early intuitions of the [...]

Posted by: Geoff Wells on Tuesday, 24th Mar, 2009

Wendell Berry in modern times (part 2)


The system of agriculture–Wendell Berry would say, pattern–proposed as the alternative to agribusiness is idiosyncratic, but persuasively argued. It is built on fundamental principles, so that the recommendations derived from them are inter-dependent and consistent. And not simply argued, but documented. Wendell Berry is at his best when he is reporting on the various agricultures [...]

Posted by: Geoff Wells on Friday, 13th Mar, 2009

Wendell Berry in modern times (part 1)


The recent article by Wendell Berry in the New York Times, written with his long-time associate Wes Jackson, on the loss of Iowa’s soil under the extreme storm events increasingly generated by climate change (see my January 14 post), sent me back to his writings, and to a rediscovered pleasure, and inspiration. There is much [...]

Posted by: Geoff Wells on Thursday, 26th Feb, 2009

Local government business and climate change


I delivered a paper to the “2008 Beyond Carbon: Local Government Climate Change Summit” in Adelaide on June 5, 2008.  The title of my presentation was”Conducting council business under radical uncertainty.”  ‘Radical uncertainty’ is not a flight of rhetoric, but a technical term from uncertainty and decision analysis which refers to situations where you don’t [...]

Posted by: Geoff Wells on Friday, 6th Jun, 2008

Social marketing and domestic greenhouse behaviour


In recent years the potential value of applying professional marketing techniques to producing social and environmental behaviour change has been explored, largely in the US and Canada.  This initiative has given rise to the new discipline of social marketing, which has been defined as “the application of commercial marketing technologies to the analysis, planning, execution [...]

Posted by: Geoff Wells on Tuesday, 19th Jun, 2007

Integrated sustainability management


Here’s an article I wrote for Ethical Investor on whole-of-business sustainability management.  The main thrust of the article is to point out that sustainability, as a business issue, has moved from the periphery–compliance and cost–to the centre: it is now a major strategic issue.  Sustainability factors now impact all parts of the business, including finance [...]

Posted by: Geoff Wells on Tuesday, 19th Jun, 2007

Melbourne Centre for Financial Studies presentation


Here is a presentation I made to a Forum of the Melbourne Centre for Financial Studies on May 17, 2007 on measuring Carbon Value-at-Risk/ Value-of-Gain. This builds on the material presented to the Melbourne Financial Services Symposium in March 2007 (see Business Papers post). It lays out the sequence of steps by which the carbon [...]

Posted by: Geoff Wells on Thursday, 24th May, 2007

The EU Social Charter and Business


This is the text of a presentation I gave to the research seminar of an Australian university. In it I outline the historical development of social thinking in the European Union, embedded in its Social Charter. The implications for business of the Social Charter are profound, bearing on employment and labour and the idea of [...]

Posted by: Geoff Wells on Thursday, 19th Apr, 2007

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