Chapter 2 The Role of Business Leaders in Community Sustainability Coalitions: A Historical Perspective Christine Meisner Rosen The environmentalist Paul Hawken recently published an article in Orion Magazine in which he lauded the hundreds of thousands of organizations in the USA and coun- tries around the globe that are working to find solutions to an array of increasingly serious environmental, economic, and social justice problems. These groups come from all parts of civil society, including business. As Hawken puts it, they include “research institutes, community development agencies, village- and citizen-based C.M. Rosen (B ) Haas Business School, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA e-mail: crosen@haas.berkeley.edu 13 W.W. Clark II (ed.), Sustainable Communities, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-0219-1_2, C Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010