Starting close to home, over 200 states and localities around the country are developing their own indicators of well-being. Such steps could affect the context in which the corporation operates. Eventually the corporation must change internally, through new forms of ownership which embody environmental concerns so they don't have to be injected from without. One example is local ownership along the lines of the Green Bay Packers football team, owned entirely by residents of Green Bay, Wisconsin. There is no guarantee, but at least the decision takes on a personal dimension that is lacking now in the abstracted Wall Street calculus.
Employee ownership can work in similar fashion, especially regarding workplace environmental issues.
There also should be new corporate structures offering tax breaks and other advantages in exchange for high levels of environmental performance. The law offers special privileges for people who want to assemble a real estate investment empire. There's also a need to revive the corporate charter as a genuine agreement between the institution and society. Today it is little more than a permissive carte blanche for management, and that won't change as long as states must grovel to attract corporate charter business. Early in the century, President Taft proposed federal chartering for very large corporations.