Since the late 1980s, sustainability, or going green (i.e., becoming environmentally friendly), has become a goal for many businesses. This has occurred for several reasons. For example, some businesses have realized that their operations result in negative environmental impacts while some view increased efficiency in energy and resource use as a way to increase profits and improve public image.

Still, others see going green as a means of staying ahead of regulatory pressures and avoiding legal hassles. Companies use a variety of principles, tools, and certification schemes designed to increase workplace or manufacturing efficiency, improve corporate social responsibility, decrease waste, and save money.

Although intended to help companies become greener than they were previously or than their competitors, many of them are not based on ecological principles or on a clear understanding of how natural systems work or what they require in order to maintain ecological integrity. As a result, some of the methods used to green companies could result in exacerbating ecological problems over time.

Concurrently, there is a tendency in many disciplines to learn from and model nature in human design, organization, and activity. Systems theorist Margaret Wheatley discusses the importance of learning from the principles of chaos theory, self-organizing systems, and quantum mechanics in how we humans organize ourselves and work together.

Science writer Janine Benyus talks of the extraordinary models that nature provides for human design, from the leaf that generates its own energy using free, solar income to the tiny cell, which somehow manages to store data and function using spirals of efficiently organized information. In the business arena, corporate systems consultant and founder/director of MIT’s Sloan School of Management Peter Senge proposes that businesses are really living systems that have the capacity to learn and evolve just like natural organisms do; this understanding, he proposes, should and can create the basis for a new and profound change in the way that businesses organize and learn.

Ray Anderson, CEO of a global, multi-billion-dollar company, writes of the need for humans to consider their impacts upon nature in their business operations and to model their business systems after natural ones. Entrepreneur Paul Hawken and efficiency experts Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins discuss the wealth inherent in nature, which they refer to as "natural capital," and offer examples as to how businesses can increase their own wealth and productivity through new technologies and practices that work with and support natural systems.

This section sets out to explain the reasons why companies seek to go green and examine the principles, tools, and certification schemes that they use toward that end. It also offers a critique of these principles, tools, and schemes, stating that they fail to offer a holistic, systems-based view that would help companies to achieve global ecological sustainability.

Finally, it makes the argument for the development of a holistic set of principles, tools, and measures that would help companies to design more ecologically benign or regenerative goals, operations, and activities throughout their entire life cycles. Such a holistic methodology, which I refer to as business ecology, would be based upon an understanding of a company’s global context, accounting for the needs and boundaries of both global and local systems.

Thus, it would further integrate the work being done by those involved in understanding and protecting the integrity of natural systems as well as those seeking to ensure that their businesses follow the Hippocratic corollary by doing no harm.