Marc Gunther: This is Mark Gunther for Greenbiz.com. I’m here today with Ray Anderson. Ray is one of the pioneers for the corporate sustainability movement. He’s the chairman of Interface Carpet, and he’s the author of a new book. The title is Confessions of a Radical Industrialist. Ray, what’s a radical industrialist? It sounds like an oxymoron to me.

Ray Anderson: Well an industrialist woke up one day to realize he had been doing it all wrong all through the years and that the whole industrial system of which he was a part needed to change and needed to change towards sustainability as opposed to the voracious consuming system that we had, or excuse me, still have.

MG: And still have. Right. Well you started Interface in 1973, am I right?

RA: Right.

MG: And it was about 20 years later that you decided to change course, that you woke up as you put it. What led you to say, "Where are we going?"

RA: It was the summer of 1994, in our 22nd year I guess, and we began to hear a question from our customers that we never heard before especially from interior designers and architects, and the question was, what's your company doing for the environment?

And we had no answers, so we created a task force in our company to bring people from our businesses around the world to see what we were doing and begin to frame some answers for those customers. The organizers for the task force insisted that I had to launch the task force. Give it a kickoff speech with my environmental vision, but I didn't have an environmental vision. I didn't want to make that speech.

I dragged my feet, I hemmed, I hawed. They stayed on my case and finally I relented and agreed to speak. The date was set, August 31, 1994. Come the middle of August I have not a clue as to what to say. I cannot get beyond, "We obey the law. You comply." About that time that propitious moment, Paul Hawkins's book The Ecology of Commerce landed on my desk and I began to read it. It was a spear in the chest, a real revelation, an eye-opening epiphany. I don't know a better word to describe it.

Hawkin made his central point in three parts. One, the living systems and life support systems of the earth in decline. That's the biosphere that supports all of life is in decline, and he presented plenty of evidence to back up that assertion, and then he said the biggest culprit in this decline is the industrial system. It's the way we make stuff, the take make waste industrial system, digging up the earth and converting it into products that end up in landfills and incinerators very quickly, very short-lived.

Then he says there's really only one institution on earth that's large enough and powerful enough and pervasive enough and wealthy enough to really change all that, and it's not government and it's not the church and it's not education. It is the institution of business and industry, the very institution doing the damage, my institution. So I took all that in. I took it very, very seriously. I made that speech to that little task force and challenged them to lead our company to sustainability and beyond to make interface eventually a restorative company, to put back more than we take from the earth and do good for the earth, not just "no harm."

MG: I want to talk about that in a minute, but first it's obviously been a long journey. What would you say is sort of the single most important change that you made? Do you want to talk about the business model a little bit?

RA: Yeah. The business model is certainly what has emerged, but the biggest single fundamental change is in the attitude and the mindset of our people.

We began with a company full of skeptics. Nobody knew what this meant in 1994. I didn't know what it meant really when I challenged that little group to lead our company to sustainability, but in time with a lot of reading, a lot of study, and a lot of conversation and collaboration, a clear view of what sustainability meant for Interface emerged, and one mind at a time our people came aboard.

That's the way it happens, one mind at a time. To get 4,000 people to change their minds over the course of years is a monumental accomplishment really.

MG: So it really has to be a group effort, because otherwise the whole attempt will not be sustainable if it rests in the CEO's office.

RA: Absolutely right. It absolutely has to be top down, but it also has to be bottom up. You sort of have to meet there in the middle on the common ground. This is one Earth. It's the only Earth we have and we'd better take care of it.

Nature undergirds civilization itself, and if we don't take care of nature and nature doesn't take care of us, we won't have an industrial system someday. We don't have a civilization someday. Nature is the goose that lays all the golden eggs and we don't wanna squeeze her to death.