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Gordon Gekko's words, although spoken by a fictitious Hollywood character, captures the spirit of a very real age: the Age of Greed. This was an age that, in my view, began when the first financial derivatives were traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in 1972 and ended (we hope) with Lehman Brothers' collapse in 2008. It was a time when ‘greed is good’ and ‘bigger is better’ were the dual-mottos that seemed to underpin the American Dream. The invisible hand of the market went unquestioned. Incentives – like Wall Street profits and traders’ bonuses – were perverse, leading not only to unbelievable wealth in the hands of a few speculators, but ultimately to global financial catastrophe.

The ‘Transition Town’ (TT) movement pioneered by Rob Hopkins initially in Kinsale (Ireland) and Totnes (United Kingdom) has become the fastest growing environmental movement in the global north (Hopkins, 2008). With over 30 official TT initiatives in the United Kingdom, the concept is now spreading into New Zealand, Canada, and many more countries.¹ The movement starts from two premises: (i) the reality and implications of rapid and potentially catastrophic climate change; (ii) the reality of ‘peak oil’ – an imminent, permanent short fall in oil supply, increasing year on year with massive geo-political, economic and social consequences.² Whilst supporting national and multilateral efforts to reduce emissions and to develop new energy technologies and infrastructures, TT leaves climate change protest to environmental campaigning groups, NGOs and activists oriented towards a global civil society. Acknowledging the need for ‘government and business responses [to climate change and peak oil] at all levels’, the role of TT is to ‘create [a] sense of anticipation, elation and a collective call to adventure’ and that this grass-roots bottom-up, local activism could potentially prepare the way for more directly political action at the level of national government (Hopkins, 2008, p. 15).

This chapter aims to help redirect Business and Society (BAS) scholarship to embrace the unprecedented challenges of the Anthropocene era including climate collapse and ecological breakdown. The existential risk presented by the new reality of the Anthropocene requires a radical rethinking of the purpose of business and its dominating working models. This chapter discusses the main problems of efficiency and growth and shows that business efficiency often results in aggregate ecological overshot. It is argued with Herman Daly that frugality, that is, substantial reduction of the material throughput, should precede business efficiency for achieving ecological sustainability. This chapter suggests new directions for BAS scholarship by highlighting three major issues, namely the scale of business activities relative to the ecosystem of the planet, short termism that is the discrepancy between the time horizon of business decisions and that of ecological processes, and inequality which is the result of current business models that are all about accumulation of wealth and not paying enough attention to distribution of wealth. The chapter concludes that the Anthropocene era represents a clear disjuncture and discontinuity from the past and business needs to find a new realignment to achieve a sustainable world. That realignment requires a drastic modification of business-nature relations.

Sustainability is recognised as an important objective in business planning and is of equal relevance to policy makers. It is equally accepted, almost universally, that the resources of the planet are finite and are being overconsumed on an annual basis. The prognosis therefore is that resources are being depleted and competition for access to remaining resources must ensue, increasing the transaction costs of business activity. Given that there are no further resources available to the world, then attention must be paid to the best way of utilising those resources, implying possibly different ways of organising or collaboration. This involves strategic decisions at both local and global levels, and Game theory is recognised as a key strategic tool by policy makers and by business decision-makers. Surprisingly therefore, although it has been recognised that Game theory has relevance to addressing the problems of manufacturing due to resource depletion, no detailed work has been done in this area.

The goals of this chapter are three-fold: (1) to outline some broad empirical regularities concerning how drug problems evolve over time, (2) to sketch some plausible mechanisms for ways in which aspects of that variation might be endogenous, and (3) to review two classes of dynamic models of drug use that have implications for how policy should vary over a drug epidemic.