Today economists and politicians debate with confident ease in the name of economic efficiency, productivity and growth – as if those values were self-explanatory – while hesitating to speak of justice, fairness and rights.

We evidently want something more than growth, but our politicians cannot find the words, and economists have long declined to supply them. So it’s time to cry and to laugh but, most of all, it’s time to talk again of what matters.

Though claiming to be value-free, conventional economic theory cannot escape the fact that value is embedded at its heart: it is wrapped up with the idea of utility, which is defined as a person’s satisfaction or happiness gained from consuming a particular bundle of goods.

That’s the essence of the fifth business response: be generous by creating an enterprise that is regenerative by design, giving back to the living systems of which we are a part. More than an action on a to-do checklist, it is a way of being in the world that embraces biosphere stewardship and recognises that we have a responsibility to leave the

When the living metrics for business match the ambition of Janine Benyus’s Ecological Performance Standards for cities, then companies will ask themselves not simply ‘how we can do no harm’ but ‘how can our enterprise be as generative as a giant redwood forest?’ And with that leap of ambition – among businesses, among cities, and among nations – we

The most comprehensive survey yet of research into the impacts of payments to promote ecological conservation – whether to collect more litter and plant more trees or harvest less timber and catch fewer fish – finds that most of the schemes studied were unintentionally crowding out, rather than crowding in, people’s intrinsic motivation to act.

This shift in perspective – from pyramid to web, from pinnacle to participant – also invites us to move beyond anthropocentric values and to recognise and respect the intrinsic value of the living world.

Power is always at play between a firm’s waged workers and its shareholding owners because of the vast inequalities between them,

Taxes, quotas and tiered pricing can clearly help to ease humanity’s pressure on Earth’s sources and sinks, but here’s the trouble with believing that they will do the whole job. In practice they fall short because they are rarely set to the level required: corporations lobby hard to delay their introduction, to lower the tax rate, to increase the