Happy Earth Day!

TD Friends of the Environment Foundation published their first E-Zine today Taking Root.

The feature article is a list of 10 things you can do year-round that will have positive effects on our global environment -Earth Day: 10 ways to make a difference year round.

One of the things that I am frequently asked is if CSR is just about environmental measures.  The simple answer is no.  I recently attended a presentation with Sheila Carruthers and David Finch on CSR and the conversation kept veering towards the "extraction industry" and its reporting.  This is an obvious direction since I am in the heart of Canada's oil & gas industry headquarters. 

Here are my thoughts - we need to start looking beyond the box that we have created around CSR and start looking holistically at corporate citizenship (I have said this before).  Why don't we make this Earth Day the day we, as consumers and providers, decide that not only are we going to look at environmental impacts, but at the social impacts we are having that are tied directly into environmental issues.

Deborah Sword wrote an interesting piece the other day on the way that environmental impacts are influencing the way that we travel and ultimately build society.  Her blog post Travel for Dialogue While we Still Can, addresses some of these impacts that limiting our actions can have on building sustainable communities.  Here's the value question, how do we weigh the societal impacts of peace building and cultural-bridge making against those of the environmental issues of building those social systems?  The values and the way we weigh those values is at the core of generating social capital.