“Three years ago, this was a pep rally, with everyone waving pom-poms,” said one of my tablemates, speaking, I believe, metaphorically. This was at the GreenBiz Forum, held at the Crown Plaza in Times Square this week. (Yesterday was day one; it concludes today. A half-day of hands-on tutorials took place on Tuesday.) “Now it’s about regulation.” And other more pragmatic and practical matters. This, the fifth year of GreenBiz Fora (there is an East Coast and West Coast version each year, the latter being held next week), certainly saw no waning of zeal for the cause of integrating environmental sustainability and business—and really big business at that. This is an event where chief sustainability officers from Fortune 500 companies, who don’t always have an easy time getting the ear-time of other C-suite execs, sit comfortably next to enthusiastic undergraduate and graduate students who see their own futures potentially impacted by past environmental neglect. Heck, they’ll be running these companies before long, so by all means give them a seat at the table. Indeed, much of the zeal could be the result of the generally youthful attendees; I’d be surprised if more than 20% of the couple hundred attendees were over 40. (At 45, I felt quite the old man. I can’t wait for the next Graph Expo to recapture my sense of youth.) I tell you, the up-and-coming generation(s) of movers and shakers are shaking things in a decidedly sustainable direction. As well they should. Sure, this forum is a self-selected sample, but “sustainability director” or similar title is having increased influence in all companies great and small. Much of this is driven by the twin prongs of increased customer demand and greater impact—positive impact—on the bottom line. Enquiries from investors and stakeholders are also providing the impetus to go green. And as a late afternoon session unveiling the results of the annual Ernst & Young and GreenBiz Group survey on sustainability risk management and reporting showed, the sustainable business leaders are being driven from the top down—it is CEOs and CFOs who are guiding their companies in green directions. (It should come as no surprise that these same companies increasingly, and perhaps for the first time, see government or even multilateral institutions, as being any help at all in guiding sustainability priorities. Disappointment and frustration have been the primary results of any of the past climate conferences.) The opening session, led by GreenBiz chairman and executive editor Joel Makower, and featuring a panel with GreenBiz Group VP and senior analyst John Davies, and Richard Mattison CEO of environmental data analysts Trucost, presented some highlights of the just-released report State of Green Business 2013 (about which I shall post once I have dug into it). One of the interesting findings is that in some ways companies have hit “peak sustainability.” That is, the number of companies saying they have dedicated resources to dealing sustainability seems to have peaked in 2008. The analysts attribute this largely to the recession, which took all sorts of resources out of companies across the board, but is also due to a certain sustainability saturation, that sustainability has already become embedded in so many companies. It can also be a cyclical phenomenon. One interesting theme that arose in a number of sessions was that of water. One of the findings in the Ernst & Young survey was that more and more companies are worried about a “heightened proximity of a natural resource shortage,” with availability of enough water to conduct their primary business a concern. These are geopolitical issues, in addition to being hydrological issues. (If you have manufacturing plants overseas these are not inconsiderable concerns.) And what other businesses are up- or downstream, and what impact do they have on your own supply? And what about the effects of climate change? So “scenario planning” is rapidly becoming a sustainability imperative. And “natural capital” is entering the lexicon. The longer sessions were interspersed with smaller “One Great Idea” presentations: first-person narratives of creative sustainability initiatives, large and small, that ranged from how Microsoft and Sprint have integrated sustainability efforts into their massive corporate enterprises, to Kavita Shukla’s invention of the runaway success Freshpaper (herb- and spice-infused paper that helps stave off food spoilage), to Adam Werbach’s advocacy of the “sharing economy” and his new initiative Yerdle (which launches in NYC next week), to a high-energy talk by NYC educator Stephen Ritz that brought down the house. Ritz spoke passionately and hyperactively about the Green Bronx Machine, an urban garden project that is transforming neighborhoods. He was quite the sight to behold. If we could harness his energy, we could solve many of our power needs. Journalist and educator Simran Sethi spoke about the psychology of sustainability, describing quite effectively how we need to communicate sustainability, that we can’t just depend on facts and data to sway opinion, that we have to personalize our appeals to appeal to specific “green brains.” Also, too: we all have a “finite pool of worry,” or enough things to keep us busy. (Some of us have deeper pools than others, ad are in danger of going off the deep end.) If we are to take on one more thing to add to that pool, it has to be compelling enough to displace something else in that pool. Thus the need to craft individualized “sustainability stories.” The smaller afternoon breakout sessions offered excellent opportunities for interaction between speakers and attendees, and provided venues for CSO’s and their ilk from companies of all sizes and industries to share their experiences, display their battle scars, and get valuable advice and insight. There was also ample opportunity for networking. I encourage all companies who are wrestling with issues of sustainability to check out future GreenBiz Forums. The next one is in San Francisco Feb. 26th–28th.