As sustainability continues to go mainstream, the smartest companies are incorporating sustainability into their business model. It's profitable, mitigates risk, and fulfills an increasing consumer demand. It's spreading across functions with executives such as the chief financial officer and chief marketing officer actively thinking about how sustainability impacts their roles and business units.

I can't take my eyes off it. Colors swirl seductively like dancers in a sultan's seraglio, inviting me to follow them as they float around the continents, wisping dreamily through millions of acres of forest, thousands of miles of oceans, imposing mountains and crowded cities. This could be a kaleidoscopic LSD trip from the '60s, but it's not. Like so many beautiful things (poison dart frogs, Medusa, the word "carcinoma") this is a vision of death, specifically of the world coming to a dirty, smoking, ignominious end. But maybe it contains a tiny kernel of hope for us as well, …