Remarks by ELI Board Member Linda Fisher

Linda Fisher, Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer for DuPont Corporation, received the Woman of the Year Award from the Women’s Council on Energy and the Environment (WCEE) at their dinner on February 6, 2008. Her remarks about evolving sustainability strategies in companies, including DuPont, and the roles of markets and governments were as follows:

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Thank you,

I am more used to giving out awards than receiving them, so this is a bit uncomfortable for me, but very special. And when I look at the list of recipients that have gone before me, Katie, Kathryn Fuller, Eileen Claussen, all remarkable women, all remarkable leaders, all totally dedicated to environmental protection done right. I am honored to be in their company.

And a special thank you to WCEE for this recognition. WCEE does many things well, but perhaps its lasting impact will be because of the mentoring work it sponsors for young women practitioners in the fields of energy and the environment. I have been remarkably lucky in my career both in government and at EPA, to have had great mentors. I also want to congratulate you Branko on being the Champion of the Year.

So I encourage each of you to take the mentoring role seriously, whether it is formal, or informal, you really can make a difference in people’s life.

I have been involved in environmental protection in one capacity or another now for years, and I cannot think of a more dynamic time to be involved in this issue.

When I graduated from law school in the early 80s, and headed off to EPA, I remember my older brother, also a lawyer, said to me in that dismissive tone that only older brothers can have with their younger sisters… “the environment, well that will be a nice boutique practice.” We still laugh about that today.

And we laugh about it because who would have thought that back in the 80s during the free for alls over the cleanup standards and joint and several liability under Superfund, that two decades later, four leading environmental groups and eight leading corporations would join together in a new group, USCAP, and call on Congress to pass a comprehensive mandatory approach to addressing climate change — industry asking to be regulated — and the environmental community wanting a cost-effective, market-based approach.

Who would have thought, when the great debates over whether citizens should have a role at the Superfund sites in their neighborhoods that two decades later many companies would seek out environmental activists to sit on advisory panels, or even more remarkably, to review the “buy out” decisions as we saw with the Texas Pacific Group and TXU and ED and NRDC.

And who would have thought that when the great environmental pieces of legislation were written focusing on air, water, waste, pesticides, toxics, that the breadth of the issue would evolve into a much broader, although still ambiguous term called “sustainability.”

I am asked frequently whether or not I think that the push towards sustainability in industry is greenwash, or whether there is a real, meaningful change going on in industry.

As everyone here knows, it is hard to speak of “industry” as if it is one homogenous group that thinks the same, reacts the same, or is motivated by the same things. In fact, for every company that seems to be struggling to get on the sustainability track, we all know of examples of others who might be headed in the other way.

Even at DuPont, as my colleagues who are with me tonight will attest, though our corporate vision and mission statements commit us to sustainable growth, we have tremendously diverse and divergent views on how to approach sustainability.

But, I do think something genuinely transformative is beginning, and I stress beginning, to take shape in industry. And although I think there is greenwash, I believe the push within industry to become more sustainable is real, and lasting.

And I believe this because sustainability is becoming more and more embraced by the business side of the shop, not just the Environmental Safety and Health side of the shop in companies. It is more and more becoming part of the conversation about growth, not just about risk, or regulation or “housekeeping.” And our business leaders are seeing the changing face of the marketplace, where citizens, customers, consumers, in addition to environmental activists are asking about environmental impact and resource implications.

So the center of focus for the addressing sustainability, the environment, natural resource usage is beginning to shift inside of companies. It is moving out of the “boutique” area of environmental law, as my brother so fondly put it, to the businesses. And that is important.

It is important because it changing the way people think about their business model, and their product line. It means integrating concerns about energy source and use, greenhouse gases, toxics exposure, water consumption into the business strategy and product design. It is about the growth strategy and where you put your R&D dollars, not just how you behave at your plants and facilities. And it is about customers setting standards and monitoring, regulating if you will, their suppliers, not the government.

And again, the “business side” of corporations is doing this, because the marketplace is demanding it.

We are seeing a growing demand in the market place, by people like you and me, for more sustainable solutions.

We are all, or many of us, are becoming more aware. Our concerns may be about the cost of gasoline, or heating oil, but the result is the same… we want more energy efficiency. We may be confused about which chemical causes which harm, but we want less exposure, we may not completely correlate our energy use with climate change, but the weird weather episodes are beginning to freak us out, and people are beginning to connect the dots.

Other things are changing, too. In the 1980s, you frequently would hear people in industry say about the environmental community, “I wish they understood business.”

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