Green Organizations

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Is Sustainability an Ethical Responsibility of I-O and Consulting Psychologists?

Rodney L. Lowman

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.

—Native American proverb

When I was an undergraduate student studying psychology at the University of Oklahoma in the early 1970s, a biology professor who taught my introductory zoology course was a staunch advocate of sustainability. Only then it was not called sustainability. The popular term then as I recall was “ecology” but the concerns about what even then were our misuse of resources and the threat to our collective environment raised similar, if less comprehensive, issues as now.

Almost 40 years later, the pace of acceleration of our environmental degradation ...