People in the corporate world kid Mike Brown about the surfing--at 55 years old, he surfs two or three days a week--but it was his surfing that landed him the job that would shape the rest of his career and reshape how the rest of us do business. Brown was among the first people in the country to hold the title vice president of sustainability in a big company--14 years ago, at Patagonia.

Brown and Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia and a renowned surfer, used the same surfboard maker, Greg Liddle. Liddle thought the two men should meet, and one day, out of the blue, Brown got a call from Patagonia's CEO, inviting him to a daylong consulting gig. Brown was then working for the city of Irvine as an environmental manager. Among the things he did during his first visit to Patagonia headquarters--a visit that turned into an impromptu job interview--was to step away from a day of meetings, wriggle into a wet suit, and go surfing with Chouinard.

Ever since, Brown has made it his business to help companies see sustainability not as philanthropic but as savvy, even essential, resource management. He left Patagonia in 1999 to go into business for himself. He doesn't have the profile of visionaries like Amory Lovins or Paul Hawken or Bill McDonough. But in the gritty day-to-day business of figuring out what toxins are involved in your manufacturing process, of choosing the least harmful materials for shampoo bottles, no one is better than Mike Brown.

"Deriving a solution is one thing," says Larry Rogero, managing director of sustainability at FedEx Kinko's, who uses Brown's small firm. "Mike's as good as those other folks at that. But implementing the solution in the political context of a corporation--that's something else. He's always trying to make sure you have the folks on board that you're going to need downstream on a project."

Brown and his partner, Eric Wilmanns, are the principals of Brown & Wilmanns Environmental, a consulting firm based in Santa Barbara. They work for Nike and Timberland, for FedEx Kinko's, Aveda, Ben & Jerry's. Its edge, besides experience, is technical expertise--Brown has a Ph.D. from Cornell, Wilmanns joined Brown at Patagonia from Los Alamos National Laboratory. And they bring a determined realpolitik approach to corporate sustainability. "I've sat in the seat of the people we work with," Brown says.

Dominique Conseil, president of Aveda, the natural beauty-products company owned by Estée Lauder, uses Brown as both a one-on-one adviser and a corporate consultant. "Mike is one of those rare sustainability people who understand all aspects of the business," Conseil says, "one of those people who are masters of their own specialty but also understand the underlying reality."

Reality, of course, is what can be hard to pin down in the world of sustainability. It turns out that even simple environmental questions--the corporate equivalent of "paper or plastic?"--have many environmental ripples. The analysis requires the tenacity of a detective and the sophistication of a scientist.