I was reading the latest issue of Forbes for inspiration for the blog. I was ready to throw it aside when I reached the last page, which is entitled, "Thoughts on Business Life." Only here did I see anything that caught my eye. After pages and pages of articles on big business, the last page contains thoughts from various famous individuals on how business and the environment intersect. One author, Jose Ortega Y Gasset wrote, "I am I plus my surroundings and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself." The photo in the article shows some beautiful swans in a lake before a set of smokestacks. The message I took from the article was that we are trying so hard in our business life to make a division that does not truly exist. We cannot simply see business as what we do during the week and nature and environmental preservation as something we can appreciate during a weekend hike. In the generation of power and use of this power in our corporate world, we often forget that there are environmental repercussions with our business goals. It is easy to talk about utility or steel companies in Wall Street terms and more difficult to think about the environmental price that is caused by these companies' activities. Obviously, we need power, steel and many other products of highly polluting industries. Yet, we need to face up to the fact that there are by-products of creating these products that are harming our surroundings. If we ignore the world we live in, we are encroaching upon our own ability to thrive in the world, given how dependent we are on the earth's natural resources. Too often, it seems that we do not respect the earth that gives us all of the tools for our big money industries. We prefer to punish rather than protect the earth sometimes. If we just put a little more thought into taking care of our earth as we grow our economy, our future could remain bright. For instance, if we really push renewable energy sources that reap the resources of the sun and wind, we are taking advantage of what the world gives us without harming the world in the process. Given that countries like Spain use more wind power than the United States, surely we could be doing more to use what gifts we have without hurting our surroundings. What excuse do we have for pushing for more dirty coal plants when we are not even coming close to using the alternative energy sources that are around us?

I found this issue of Fortune telling in the postioning of this article, at the very back of the issue. Just as we often forget about preserving our earth on a day-to-day basis by being caught up in making money, this issue seemed so caught up in discussing big business ventures that anything pertaining to the environment was more of an afterthought.