What do Environmentalists Want from Business?

Business is much better off trying to work with environmental NGOs rather than trying to fight them. But working with together requires finding areas of agreement and that can only happen if business knows what environmentalists want.

The first panel discussion at Fortune Magazine's Brainstorm Green Conference was designed to do just that. Conference organizer Marc Gunther interviewed

• Frances Beinecke, President, Natural Resources Defense Council
• Michael Brune, Executive Director, Sierra Club
• Fred Krupp, President, Environmental Defense Fund
• Mark Tercek, President and CEO, The Nature Conservancy

About the only thing they could all agree on that they wanted was comprehensive climate legislation, which the group handicapped the chances of getting it by this time next year at 50 percent.

Tercek talked more than the others about the opportunities for businesses. "The smart companies we're working with understand the need for comprehensive climate legislation," said Tercek who also noted that "there is a significant role for the private sector" in combating climate change.

One of the significant themes of the panel was the lack of success that the environmental community has had at convincing the public to support climate change policy. Tercek said that the decline in public support reflects the poor communication by environmental groups. Brune said that environmentalists need to improve their story telling. After a few tweets on the subject, I got a question:

I've been doing some thinking about this over the past few weeks and will try to do a little more following Brainstorm Green. In the meantime, do any readers have an opinion? Who in the environmental movement do you think is good at story telling?