Mother Nature Meets Apple’s CEO

Figure 1. A screenshot from the Apple Mother Nature video, with chief sustainability officer Lisa Jackson and CEO Tim Cook in the center.

In 2023, Apple made a five-minute video depicting a meeting of executives with Mother Nature. The video went viral after debuting at the company’s annual new-products keynote, but my guess is that few environmental historians have seen it. That’s a shame, because the video points to a critical gap in our understanding of recent decades, especially in the U.S.

The video begins with Apple CEO Tim Cook and chief sustainability officer Lisa Jackson nervously awaiting their powerful guest. Mother Nature – Academy-Award-winner Octavia Spencer – whirls in. “Let’s cut to the chase,” she says.  “In 2020, you promised to bring Apple’s entire carbon footprint to zero by 2030. Henry David Thoreau over here” – Cook blinks – “said ‘We have a profound opportunity to build a more sustainable future for the planet we share.’” Mother Nature’s assistant interjects that another CEO had said the same thing earlier that day. “They all do,” she replies. “This is my third corporate responsibility gig today, so who wants to disappoint me first?” “Well, we’ve got some updates we’re excited to share with you,” Jackson says, but Mother Nature interrupts to start a checklist of sustainability questions. Materials? A staffer – an actor – responds that Apple is “in the process of eliminating all plastic from our packaging,” and Mother Nature is skeptical. “Let me guess. Fifty years from now when someone else is left holding the bag?” No, by the end of next year.

The sustainability team then tells Mother Nature that the aluminum in the enclosures of MacBooks, Apple TVs, and Apple Watches now is 100-percent recycled. Leather in iPhone cases is being phased out. Apple offices, stores, and data centers run on “clean electricity,” and the offices are “carbon neutral.” That claim prompts another skeptical exchange, when a staffer starts to explain how that’s possible. “You’re seriously explaining carbon neutrality to Mother Nature?” With all the courage they can muster, staffers offer more updates. Apple is shipping more products by ocean rather than air, “which reduces transportation emissions by 95 percent.” It is using vastly less water.  It also is “investing in projects around the world that protect the earth’s soil, plants, and trees.” Mother Nature scoffs: “Everyone says they’re planting trees.” But Jackson runs through the ecosystem projects Apple is supporting in Paraguay, Brazil, Columbia, and Kenya. As Mother Nature signals that the meeting is about to end, Cook says that Apple has “innovated and retooled almost every part of our process to reduce our impact on the planet” but acknowledges that “there’s still more work to do.” Then Jackson shows Mother Nature a display of watches with a logo of green petals – the company’s “first carbon neutral product.” That leads to one last exchange between Mother Nature and Cook. “I want to see you do more of this.” “You will.” “When? “By 2030, all Apple devices will have a net zero climate impact.” “All of them?” “All of them.” “They better.” “They will.” “Ok! Good!  See you next year.” The Apple employees sigh in relief. ¹

Figure 2. The trade publication Ad Age provided a link to Apple’s Mother Nature video, which was widely discussed online. 

That video was unique – and uniquely cringeworthy! – but in one respect it was commonplace. Though no other company dared to imagine getting a commendation from Mother Nature, almost every major corporation in the early 2020s boasted about its efforts to address climate change and protect the environment. Most companies had a chief sustainability officer.  Most reported annually on their progress in meeting sustainability goals. The re-election of President Donald Trump has led some companies to become less forward, but sustainability remains a managerial issue. From the Wall Street Journal to the online site Trellis, the business media reports on sustainability initiatives every day.

For environmental historians, that all is inexplicable. Corporate sustainability efforts are voluntary, yet our standard narrative about business and the environment has no place for voluntary action. It assumes that companies only care about environmental problems when they are forced to care by citizen activism and government regulation. The U.S. version of the standard narrative goes something like this:

For much of American history, businesses treated the environment as a storehouse of commodities and a repository for waste. When people complained about pollution, corporate defenders argued that environmental degradation was the price of progress. Even after the passage of the nation’s pioneering environmental laws in the early 1970s, most companies grudgingly complied with anti-pollution requirements while still hoping that concern about the environment would prove a fad. When President Ronald Reagan tried to undo the 1970s regulatory system in the 1980s, the business community largely cheered. As Samuel Hays argued in a classic history of environmental politics, corporations were environmentalists’ most powerful opponents. That’s still the standard view. ²

But in fact, the story became much more complicated soon after Beauty, Health, and Permanence was published in 1987. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, some corporate executives rethought their approach to environmental issues. They began to do more than the Clean Air and Clean Water acts required. In the language of management, they saw compelling business reasons to go “beyond compliance.” DuPont CEO Edgar Woolard called in 1989 for a new “corporate environmentalism.” A few business leaders even wrote manifestos about greening the economy. ³

Observers noted the shift. Fortune published a cover story about “the new crusade” in 1990 – one of many media reports on the corporate environmental awakening. BusinessWeek sponsored a Symposium on the Environment, and the Economist added an environmental editor to its staff. A pioneering analyst of green business, Joel Makower, launched a newsletter devoted to the subject in 1991. Management professors wrote texts about environmental strategy. Publishers brought out specialized books covering everything from green accounting to “how to communicate your company’s environmental commitment.” ⁴

The rise of corporate interest in sustainability went hand-in-hand with a profound shift in the environmental movement.  In the 1970s, activists rarely engaged directly with corporations. Instead, they lobbied for legislation that would force industry to limit pollution. I call that strategy plan A. Then the Reagan-era attack on regulation forced a reconsideration. Though activists successfully defended the landmark anti-pollution laws of the 1970s, Reagan changed the terms of political debate.  He made government the problem, not the solution.  Passing regulatory legislation to address environmental problems became unlikely. As a result, many environmentalists in the late 1980s and early 1990s sought alternative ways to accomplish their goals. Three plan B strategies became prominent – and all involved engagement with business.

One strategy was targeting the practices of specific companies. The trendsetter was a campaign in the mid and late 1980s by the newly formed Rainforest Action Network that forced Burger King to stop buying beef from Central America, where ranching was a major cause of deforestation. Targets since then have run the gamut from industrial conglomerates to banks that finance environmentally destructive development. Those campaigns usually rely on media shaming but sometimes seek to mobilize consumers or investors. ⁵

Another strategy was partnering with corporations to lessen their environmental impact. In the first high-profile partnership, the Environmental Defense Fund worked with McDonald’s from 1989 to 1991 to reduce wasteful packaging. Though initially anathema to many activists, collaborating with companies has become routine for many environmental organizations, and the goals have become more ambitious. Many partnerships now aim to help retailers or manufacturers green their supply chains. ⁶

The third strategy was creating eco-friendly mechanisms for guiding market behavior, especially certification systems. The Forest Stewardship Council provided a template in 1993. Activists and timber traders both sought a way to recognize wood from sustainably managed forests, and they created the not-for-profit council to set standards and certify suppliers who complied. The Marine Stewardship Council was formed four years later. Now, several hundred certification systems shape the markets for dozens of commodities and products. Though not one-on-one partnerships, those efforts all involve collaboration between environmental organizations and businesses. ⁷

Taken together, the shifts in management and environmentalist thinking circa 1990 were a turning point in environmental history. Voluntary corporate action – encouraged by not-for-profit organizations – is now a basic strategy for trying to green the economy. Though I have written elsewhere about both shifts, my initial work appeared in journals that few environmental historians read, so I hope this essay will encourage Germinate readers to look at those earlier articles. But I can say a bit more here about the historiographic gap. ⁸

To the best of my knowledge, only one history of the environmental movement discusses business and sustainability, and that is Ellen Griffith Spears’ excellent text. Spears mostly is dismissive. She suggests that corporate greenwashing is common.  She also suggests that many environmental groups have formed partnerships with corporations as a way to raise money. I understand why those arguments are tempting: They aren’t entirely wrong, and they are the only way to fit the story I’m telling into the standard narrative. But they are too cynical. ⁹

To be sure, companies claim to be greener than they are. Especially in the early 2020s, corporate sustainability pledges often were performative. That’s a premise of the Apple video! Mother Nature is so snarky because a lot of businesses are blowing smoke, and the point is to convince you that Apple is exceptional. But – no surprise – the video puts the best possible spin on the company’s efforts. The most aggressive claims are debatable. Carbon neutrality depends on the purchase of offsets – the ecosystem projects that Jackson cites are supposed to sequester climate emissions – and offsets can be spurious. Apple’s “carbon neutral” watches have faced legal challenges in both Europe and the U.S. The video also doesn’t mention the environmental destructiveness of Apple’s business model: The annual introduction of new iPhones speeds up the wasteful cycle of discard and replacement. ¹⁰

The same logic explains why many environmental organizations have chosen to engage directly with corporations, especially in partnerships. In the business world, change can come with a speed almost inconceivable in the political realm. It also can be at global scale. As a Greenpeace leader argued, multinationals can be “extraordinarily dynamic, powerful, and swift allies.” A World Wildlife Fund executive used Coca-Cola as an example. Because the company bought so much aluminum, sugar cane, glass, citrus fruit, and coffee, it could decide not “to purchase anything that isn’t grown or produced in a certain way – and the whole global supply chain changes overnight. And that in a nutshell is why we’re in a partnership.” ¹¹

Of course, Coca-Cola still is far from sustainable, and so is Apple. Because of flaws in the market, very few businesses can profit by doing everything possible to be greener. Instead, companies have incentive to improve in some ways while continuing to damage the environment in other ways. As a result, the plan B strategies of environmentalists have serious limits. But the limits on what companies will do voluntarily – encouraged by not-for-profits – don’t mean that nothing fundamentally has changed since the late 1980s and early 1990s. We need to update our standard narrative about business and sustainability. ¹²

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1. The script of the video was on the Apple website in September 2025: https://www.apple.com/environment/mother-nature/. In December 2025, however, that link defaulted to the company’s Environment homepage. Tim Cook posted about the video on X on September 12, 2023: https://x.com/tim_cook/status/1701732427897491578?lang=en. The video also has been posted by Ad Age, in media stories, and on many YouTube sites. The Ad Age link is the easiest way to see it: https://adage.com/video/2030-status-mother-nature-apple/.[↩]
2. Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 (Cambridge University Press, 1987), 307.[↩]
3. Bruce Smart, editor, Beyond Compliance: A New Industry View of the Environment (World Resources Institute, 1992). Edgar S. Woolard Jr., “Environmental Stewardship,” Chemical and Engineering News 67 (29 May 1989), 12-15. Manifestos: Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability (HarperBusiness, 1993); Stephan Schmidheimy with the Business Council for Sustainable Development, Changing Course: A Global Business Perspective on Development and the Environment (MIT Press, 1992).[↩]
4. David Kirkpatrick, “Environmentalism: The New Crusade,” Fortune (February 12, 1990): 44-55.  BusinessWeek and World Resources Institute, The Environment: Corporate Stewardship and Business Opportunity in the Decade of Global Awakening (Journal Graphics, 1991). The Economist: Frances Cairncross, Costing the Earth: The Challenge for Governments, the Opportunities for Business (Harvard Business School Press, 1993), xxv.  The media: Deborah L. Jacobs, “Business Takes on a Green Hue,” New York Times (September 2, 1990). “Business’s Green Revolution,” U.S. News & World Report (February 19, 1990), 45-48. “The Greening of Corporate America,” BusinessWeek (April 23, 1990), 96-103. Newsletter: Joel Makower, The E-Factor: The Bottom-Line Approach to Environmentally Responsible Business (Times Books, 1993), 294. Texts and Guides: Rogene A. Buchholz, Alfred A. Marcus, and James E. Post, Managing Environmental Issues: A Casebook (Prentice Hall, 1992). Forest L. Reinhardt and Richard H. K. Vietor, Business Management and the Natural Environment: Cases & Text (South-Western College Publishing, 1996). W. Edward Stead and Jean Garner Stead, Management for a Small Planet: Strategic Decision Making and the Environment (Sage, 1992). Accounting: Daniel Blake Rubinstein, Environmental Accounting for the Sustainable Corporation: Strategies and Techniques (Quorum Books, 1994). PR: E. Bruce Harrison, Going Green: How to Communicate Your Company’s Environmental Commitment (Business One Irwin, 1993).[↩]
5. Katrina Lacher, “Where’s the Beef … From? Boycotting Burger King to Protect Central American Rainforests,” in Shopping for Change: Consumer Activism and the Possibilities of Purchasing Power, ed. Louis Hyman and Joseph Tohill (Cornell University Press, 2017), 231-42.[↩]
6. Reinhardt and Vietor, Business Management and the Natural Environment, 3: 92-101 and 5: 27-32.[↩]
7. For the proliferation of certification systems, see Scott Poynton, Beyond Certification (Routledge, 2017), 19.[↩]
8. I discuss the shifts in corporate and environmentalist practice at greater length in Adam Rome, “Beyond Compliance: The Origins of Corporate Interest in Sustainability,” Enterprise & Society 22 (June 2021): 409-37; Adam Rome, “Plan C for Greening Business,” Stanford Social Innovation Review online edition (posted June 2024).[↩]
9. Ellen Griffith Spears, Rethinking the American Environmental Movement Post-1945 (Routledge, 2020), 171-73.[↩]
10. The best discussion of Apple’s aim in making the video is Jason Aten, “I Can’t Stop Thinking about How Awkward Apple’s ‘Mother Nature’ Ad Was, and I Finally Figured Out Why,” Inc. (September 17, 2023). Legal challenges: Joan Aimuengheuwa, “German Court Bans Apple from Advertising Watch as ‘Carbon Neutral,’” TechEconomy (August 26, 2025); James Darley, “Apple Faces Greenwashing Lawsuit over Carbon Neutral Claims,” Sustainability Magazine (May 22, 2025). Apple’s discard-and-replace business model: Adam Rome, “Fashion Forward?  Reflections on the Environmental History of Style,” Environmental History 23 (July 2018): 556-57.[↩]
11. The Greenpeace and WWF arguments are quoted in Peter Dauvergne and Jane Lister, Eco-Business: A Big-Brand Takeover of Sustainability (MIT Press, 2013), 20. For a less sanguine view of Coca-Cola’s sustainability efforts, see Bartow J. Elmore, Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism (W. W. Norton and Company, 2015), 190-92, 224-61, 292-96.[↩]
12. For a more detailed analysis of the limits of corporate and environmentalist efforts to make business sustainable, see Rome, “Beyond Compliance”; Rome, “Plan B”.[↩]