Brian Nattrass and Mary Altomare wrote The Natural Step for Business to express their concern for what they see as the increasing impairment of our global ecosystem and to offer a solution to that continued impairment: the Natural Step framework for business practices. The book is an explanation of the industrial and natural processes affecting the global ecosystem with specific, detailed examples of companies that have implemented the Natural Step framework as one means of addressing our environmental responsibilities.
The authors begin with the position that the natural world provides "ecosystem services" such as oxygen production, climate regulation, detoxification and recycling of human waste, regulation of the chemical composition of the earth and the oceans, and other such services free of charge (1999, p. 4). However, they contend that these are not services that human beings can reproduce technologically, yet human beings are altering these services, perhaps irrevocably, thereby placing both the global ecosystem and human existence at risk.
Somewhat implicit in the authors' initial discussion is the belief that business motivations for impairing and altering the natural world are based on profit. But Nattrass & Altomare maintain that businesses need not compromise their commercial profits for environmental health (1999, p. 4). Rather, the authors reveal that the motivation for their book is to argue for the Natural Step framework, a business practices model that devises a means of aligning the business economy and the global ecology in a way that will produce sustainable development (Nattrass & Altomare, 1999, pp. 4-5).
The fundamental assumptions underlying the authors' advocacy of the Natural Step framework is that the continued degradation of our environment's future capacity to support life is ethically wrong and humans cannot infinitely survive such continued degradation (Nattrass & Altomare, 1999, p. 31). Th...