Doing well by doing good.

• Author: Ayres, Ed
• Position: Note From A Worldwatcher - Socially responsible companies can be financially viable for investors

One day in the mid 1960s, in London, I wandered into a used-book store the size of a Victorian mansion. I'd heard that it was the largest bookstore in the world. I forget the name of the place now, but recall making my away around huge pries of the relics of poets and proselytizers now long dead--including stacks of old religious tracts that I couldn't imagine anyone ever wanting to read. But then suddenly, among those stacks, I saw a very large book with a title I knew. It was The Journal of George Fox. To the clerk I approached, this book was probably just another oversized door stop, and he was happy to sell it to me for a couple of pounds. But for me it was a treasure. George Fox had been the founder of Quakerism--the religion I grew up with.

The Quakers strongly affected my views on the issues of violence, overconsumption, and social justice that would subsequently become so central to the work of World Watch. Quakers are stubbornly nonviolent (getting arrested repeatedly for their anti-war protestations); they make an almost ostentatious show of simplicity (not quite to the extreme of the Amish, but not far off); and they have a long tradition of defending the oppressed. In the days of American slavery, for instance, it was mainly Quakers who ran the "Under ground Railroad"--a network of safe-houses and sympathetic whites who secretly sheltered runaway slaves as they fled north to freedom.

In their insistence on material simplicity, the Quakers who followed George Fox anticipated an important element of the modern environmental movement. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they were identifiable by their plain clothes--no jewelry, no frills, no cosmetics. They said "thee" instead of "you," when speaking to individual persons, because "you" was a plural pronoun that had been pretentiously adopted by royalty, and Quakers disapproved of pretentiousness. (My mother called me "thee" all her life, as in "Will thee be coming alone this weekend, or will you both be coming?") Their places of worship--not churches, but "meeting houses"--were simple wood buildings with no steeples, statues, stained glass, or adornment. Worship services included no ritual, no sacraments, no preacher.

But for all this elaborate simplicity and conspicuous non-consumption, the Quakers were far from poor. There was a joke we all knew. The Quakers, it was said, "came to America to do good--and did very well." Over the generations, the Quakers have continued...