Let me begin by saying that I bleed blue. Not Yankee blue or horseshoe crab copper — IBM Blue. I was raised on a corporate paycheck and through all the years my mother worked for the computing giant (and the months I spent in sales internships with them) I never once shook an unfriendly hand or doubted a coworker’s ethics. We were all good people, selling a good product that we believed in — that I still believe in.

 

But we were also part of corporate America, hard at work building the fortunes of the 1 percent.

 

How can I reconcile what I know about the personhood of employees with the faceless and troubling power that big business wields on Wall Street and Capitol Hill?

 

On my cynical days — or perhaps, my most realistic ones — I think that perhaps everything can be explained by self-interest and the limits of our moral compass, shaped by millennia of small-group interactions. For example, many of us, including my coworkers at IBM, buy some organic fruit and bike to work in good weather for personal health and environmental reasons. We care — depending on our age and childrearing status — about the world we’ll leave our descendants. Occasionally we spare a thought for the citizens of Pacific atolls drowning under rising sea levels. Rarely do we pen a letter to our congressman about these or other issues.

 

It’s not that we explicitly claim our personal health and safety are more valuable than any other’s. It’s just that in the back-of-the-envelope cost-benefit analysis accompanying any one of our actions, proximity (both spatial and emotional) matters. A lot.

 

Now take this logic to the corporate boardroom, where suited men several tiers removed from entry-level employees (and even more distant from those whose land they might be clearing or whose oceans they might be drilling) are safeguarding their own wealth and the business model of a company that may be decades older than their careers. They steer businesses formed by the economics of the bottom line, businesses that are neither compelled by their stakeholders nor reminded by their neighbors to take the environmental high road.

 

Of course, most companies don’t start out that way. They begin with a novel vision, a principled strategy for enacting it and a few founding employees who, above all, believe. As I clearly remember from my days as Employee No. 12 at biotech startup Ginkgo BioWorks, belief — and the mobility of a small size — will take you far. The founders were fearless, willing to turn the company on a dime and keenly aware of both business and environmental issues.

 

What is it that separates Ginkgo — the quiet engineer of oil spill cleanups and alternative energy sources — from Exxon Mobil, which spending millions annually to preserve its tax breaks and run pro-fossil fuel ad campaigns? What are the “risk factors” for environmental irresponsibility?

 

First: size and its consorts, inertia and wealth. Second: importance — to individuals and other industries. Finally: reliance on nonrenewable resources. Combined with immobility born of size, this is the deciding factor separating the businesses which will go down fighting to strip the world bare from those that will turn with the market to greener pastures.

 

Today, it’s our job to remind big businesses that, though they may wield wealth and power that the 99 percent cannot, they rest on the shoulders of principled, hard-working, environmentally conscious individuals. It’s our job to demand an equal voice. It’s simply human nature.

 

Holly knows that today’s column strayed a little bit from her usual roots, but she hopes you enjoyed it! Email her at [email protected] with any comments.