At a Net Impact panel last week in San Francisco, Levi Straus VP Michael Kobori, GreenBiz.com chairman Joel Makower, BluSkye Principal Glen Low, and Insitute for the Future visionary Jamais Cascio threw down the gauntlet repeatedly (in fact batted it back and forth across the room!): 

How can we move beyond the "less bad" version of sustainable to something truly regenerative - doing business in ways that absorb carbon, clean the air, build the soil, &c? 

Here are a few snippets from my tweetstream, to give you a flavor of the thinking that these gentlemen - and we here at Natural Logic - have been doing (it's striking how convergent so many of us are):

Cascio: "Sustainable" is woefully insufficient. Business itself - not just specific businesses - is unsustainable. 

Low: Companies have fiduciary duty to deliver long term benefit, and to do it for both shareholders and stakeholders.

Cascio: If your idea would have made sense 30 years ago,  it's nowhere near enough for the challenges we face. This calls for revolutionary change,  & even the best companies aren't even close.

Makower: What if energy becomes not only decarbonized, but so abundant as to be almost free? (As we've seen with computing power.) 

Kobori: HOW to do sustainability depends on your particular company and situation. WHAT to do doesn't. Start with an LCA of a key product, get a picture of you "cradle to cradle" impacts. THAT will tell you where to focus.

Low: LCAs? Maybe not. You don't need all that much data to make the right decision. 

Me: You need courage.

Makower: "We" don't have a vision of what happens if we get things right. We need that. Nobody knows how. 

(Not true, says I. See Declaration of Leadership for Sustainable Business.)

Cascio: There's a reason that most futurists are on anti-depressants. But pessimism is a luxury of good times; in difficult times it's deadly.