Here's a shocking revelation: The economy trumps the environment on the majority of Americans' priority lists, according to recent polls by CNN/Opinion Research and Gallup.
Actually, the real surprise (for me, anyway) is that this is a new state of affairs. It's only the second time that economy has beat environment since 1984, when Gallup started asking the question. The first time was last year.
But as water blogger Eric Eckl points out in a recent post on his site, maybe the environment-vs.-economy question is a misleading one. He cites evidence that "everyday citizens actually reject the basic premise of that question."
Not only that, but more and more businesses are realizing that investing in sustainability can burnish not just their image but also their bottom line. As Gil Friend, CEO of sustainability consultancy Natural Logic, states on the cover of his book The Truth About Green Business, you don’t have to choose between making money and making sense.
Eckl's post is well worth a read. In the meantime, I'll leave you with this graph from a 2005 Yale University survey he cites.