summary for reading 4Whither ecology?

The triple bottom line (TBL), the global

reporting initiative (GRI), and corporate sustainability reporting(CSR)
Introduction
There is a growing debate about what and how business leaders, managers and decision
makers can contributed to a transition to ecologically sustainable society. Based on this
debate, this paper firstly discuss the meaning of sustainability reporting and then explores
the role of TBL and GRI in contributing to the sustaining of earth s ecology.
Previous literature has done some researches about an ecologically sustainable society,
and this paper will interpret the role of international business and how to promote
sustainable development.
Key point
Facing the growing discourse of business and sustainability, the authors offer alternative
ways how businesses may begin to get beyond their TBL in arguing for alternative
processes grounded in organisational ecological literacy, which will mainly discuss
following question:
1. the understanding about sustainability
Sustainability is still a abstract concept and posts some challenges for businesses and
their decision makers, such as the question of wether business decision makers operating
within the constraints of a capitalist system are capable of sacrificing profits to protect
resources and ecosystems.
2.how business has made a sense of sustainability with the idea of TBL
3. what the TBL need
TBL refers to the economic, the social and the environmental, which differs from traditional
reporting, since it includes the concept of ecological and social measurement. However it
is hard to balance equal achievement in these three elements and provide information in
the same extent.
4. how business associations and institutions have encouraged and institutionalised a
particular view of TBL
Four fairly distinctive: multi-agency, consultancies, accounting professions and business
associations.
5. about TBL report
6. what an ecological literacy would demand
Win-win and eco-efficiency. Ecological footprint is more practical, and that means reducing
the size of footprints may lead to improvements in environmental quality.

Interesting findings and conclusions

1. The notion of TBL still need to developed, when including the ecological.
2. The concept of sustainability is at a system level rather than a organisational level, while
the way that business is organised is inherently unsustainable, therefore, it may difficult to
combining the corporate sustainable and the TBL. Moreover, because nature and ecology
know nothing of our businesses and institution and they cannot adjust themselves to match
modern institutional lines, the only approach is that we learn to reconfigure our way.

Motivation and Contributions

Besides introducing the understanding of sustainability, I think the authors motivation was
to improve and promote the TBL reporting and examine the real demand for unsustainable
international business, contributing to promote sustainable development. Also, this paper
can be helpful for those businesses and decision makers.
Question and challenge
When authors divided discussion part into six sections and examined one question for
each sections, but I fell quite confused about how they proved, because actually I did not
understand the causality between what they wanted to examine and the process they
examine(such as section2).