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On September 13, 1970, in a now-classic essay in The New York Times Magazine, Milton Friedman, the lion defender of laissez-faire economics, put forth a defense of self-interested capitalism as forceful as it was plainspoken. "There is one and only one social responsibility of business," Friedman wrote, with characteristic acerbity: "to engage in activities designed to increase its profits." To burden business with wider goals, he argued, was "pure and unadulterated socialism."

Friedman's free-market manifesto tidily summarizes one side of a debate that has raged in the halls of corporations, business schools, and think tanks ever since. In one camp are those corporate leaders and intellectuals who believe that wealth creation is a sufficient social good in its own right (not to mention capitalism's first commandment) and that markets should not be burdened with responsibilities outside their core purpose. Pitted against these purists are those who believe that corporations have pressing obligations to civil society and the planet as a whole that go well beyond the economic sphere.

Seeking to accommodate both camps, many of today's large corporations have tried to adopt both positions simultaneously, resulting in an atrophied détente, with corporate foundations and social responsibility "departments" organizationally walled off from their P&L-driven brethren and sisteren. Rarely working together, the philanthropic "check writers" and the business-unit "check seekers" have developed their own lingo, cultures, rhythms, conferences, gurus, and sensibilities.

As if on cue, however, a suite of new global forces is emerging that will remake the operating environment for global capitalism, obliterate the walls--and the distinctions--between the Friedmanesque Hatfields and the Naderesque McCoys, and inject a "greed is good" mentality into our approach to grand social problems. The clinical, value-neutral capitalism of old is about to follow the recently departed Friedman to the grave.

There are several reasons why this is so, but the first should be obvious to any but the most hardened anti-environmental skeptic: If we don't do something soon, we're screwed. A quick (and necessarily depressing) look at the numbers suggests that supplies of our most basic commodities--potable water, fossil fuels, arable land, clean air--as well as critical industrial commodities such as aluminum, steel, and even silicon, are all under stress.

Water provides a typical example: By 2030, more than one in three human beings will not have enough to drink, or will run the risk of dying by drinking what they've got. Today, the prospect of such scarcity is causing countries to mine so-called fossil water from deep aquifers that were formed millions of years ago. Parts of India are pumping water at twice the recharge rate, causing water tables to fall between one and three meters per year. But there's not much of an alternative: If India gave up groundwater mining, its grain production would likely fall by 25%, leaving it incapable of feeding itself. Nobody knows precisely how long this can continue, but the answer will be measured in decades, not centuries. It's little wonder that the World Bank says freshwater scarcity may well become one of the major factors limiting development in the years ahead.