An Interview with Linda Fisher
With a career that has taken her to the top levels of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the global company DuPont, RFF Board Member Linda Fisher has worked to progress corporate environmental performance from within and without. Resources recently sat down with Fisher, currently the vice president of DuPont Safety, Health, and Environment and the company’s chief sustainability officer, to explore business and government perspectives on some of the major environmental issues of our time.
Resources: How has your time in government influenced how you approach your current job at DuPont?
Linda Fisher: I would say it’s influenced me in three significant ways. Probably the most obvious is that I have a very keen appreciation of why people at EPA make the decisions they do. I understand the flexibility or inflexibility of the laws and regulations they have to administer and make decisions by. I understand the resource challenges, public pressure, and public perceptions that influence how they might approach public policy issues—or a company like DuPont. This helps me think through how DuPont can best engage and interact with the agency.
Second, because EPA is a government agency, by definition I had to listen carefully to the opinions and information people bring from all sides of an issue. That includes other government agencies, Congress, the NGO community, and a whole range of civil society that has a stake in decisionmaking. I have been able to bring a sensitivity to all those perspectives into DuPont, engaging the company to reach out to constituencies it otherwise might not have realized were important.
A third influence from my time in government is that I have a strong sense of how a company like DuPont can innovate to bring market solutions to the environmental challenges that EPA is grappling with.
Resources: What are some of these innovations, and what business opportunities does DuPont see in the future green economy, if you envision one?
FISHER: The green economy offers huge opportunities for science and innovation-based companies. If you are investing as an industry in new, disruptive technologies, then a carbon-constrained world or a green economy creates the opportunity to grow businesses that might not have been envisioned just a few years ago. But greening the economy does not necessarily offer growth opportunities for companies that are not investing in innovation. This difference in approaches helps explain the tension in how corporate America views green energy, carbon pricing, and other environmental innovations and regulations.
At DuPont, where we pride ourselves on our science and innovation, we see green energy as an opportunity. We are investing in advanced biofuels, improved longevity and efficiency of solar technology, and reduced use of petroleum through improved energy efficiency, to name a few areas.
Resources: The push for a greener economy is being driven by not just regulatory strategies in the United States but markets all across the world. How has being a global company affected DuPont’s environmental strategies?
Fisher: We are tracking what I will call “sustainability trends.” For instance, what are the issues and pressures around water in the countries in which we want to operate? What are the pushes for energy efficiency or more regulation around toxic substances in the past several years? What are the changing trends in product regulation? Many trends have not hit in the United States yet or are hitting in fits and starts—for example, the push for zero waste to landfills. DuPont’s sustainability, product regulatory, and product stewardship teams are the eyes and ears for these kinds of practices, and they bring them back and work with our businesses on them.
We also track regulation as it evolves globally. Around the world, many governments are talking about strict regulation of different technologies, but the question is, when will they act? What will the regulations look like?
DuPont is feeling more market pressure around some of the sustainability metrics, such as the greenhouse gas footprint of our manufacturing process and our water use. We are constantly surveyed by hundreds of companies for the absence or presence of certain chemicals in our products. These are pressures—beyond just regulation— that we face as a corporate producer and seller of goods into the global marketplace.
