Re-thinking business structures – how to encourage sustainability through conscious design choices

In this week's chapter from Fleeing Vesuvius, Patrick Andrews argues that business could be the most powerful force in the world in achieving higher levels of sustainability and resilience. Unfortunately, its potential is blocked by laws and by hierarchical structures that mean that shareholders’ interests are put before those of society and the planet. Some firms, however, are adopting new structures that free them to place proper emphasis on social and environmental concerns.

Sharing the Land – an idea whose time has come

Even with a Site Value Tax covering developed land and a Land Value Tax covering all the rest, access to land is important. The taxes recognise land as a commons shared by all but resilience requires that its use is widely spread amongst the population. Distributed landownership is needed to protect against large landowners lobbying to remove the LVT and also to spread the knowledge of carbon building, biodiversity protecting, sustainable food growing methods amongst the widest groups of people. Here is an interesting article in shareable.net about emerging land share systems in the US and UK.