Respect for people through respect for the environment: the activities of nonprofit companies in the field of environment protection for the "creation of social capital"

The starting point of the research is the observation that the environment is the forgotten stakeholder in the society’s development policies, both in the decisions of public operators and private ones. In the past the richness of natural resources could justify an industrial development where financial capital was considered a scarce resource with the corollary of actions aiming at minimizing its return through actions meant for taking the utmost profit from environment, however after 200 years of industrial development it stands out that the purpose of business cannot be simply the financial dimension of development, but mainly the wellbeing of human persons through a strong defence of what is becoming the actual scarce resource: the environment. Only if the economic equation attributes the right importance to the environmental dimension in the operators’ choices, it is possible to talk of an actual development of the human condition taking into account not only the present generations, but the future ones as well. The extension of the average life span of citizens should place the question of quality of future life at the core of the operators’ system of choices in order to create a network of relationships aiming at the growth of the “social capital” of a community. Based on these premises, the research intends to analyse the development of the organizations operating in the field of environmental protection, both those whose goal is to sensitize to the environmental issues and those whose activities actually regard the protection of environmental, cultural, monumental resources. After singling out the main organizations operating in the areas of highest economic development, the research proposes an analysis of their models of corporate governance, their applied resources, chosen targets and achievements as well as the prospects of the issue of the sustainable development in the present situation of global crisis. In the third part the research aims at pointing out a series of instruments and indicators that permit to internalize efficaciously the environmental variable and the respect for persons in the choices of private and public operators. The thesis underlying this research is that only a revival of values of respect for persons through the respect for environment where persons live, can permit to define a model of sustainable development allowing allow future generation to benefit from the resources that the present generation is using, often in an incorrect way.