Business history has never paid much attention to the environment. Brushing aside the firm's reliance and impact on the natural world, early business historians zeroed in on the role of the entrepreneur in big business's rise. They found it easy to truncate, marginalize or altogether ignore the physical processes by which the stuff of nature raw materials was carved or coaxed out of mountains, forests, and deserts, channeled into factories and squeezed and cajoled into commodities. They scarcely considered the ever­changing varieties of waste generated by businesses and customers, which so often infiltrated, polluted, and otherwise altered the world beyond factory and office. They devoted equally little attention to the effects of resource extraction and use on plants, animals, land, air, or water, much less entire ecosystems and climate.Business has always depended on and had an impact on the natural world. But the development of the relationship between business and the environment from the extraction of raw materials to the management of resources to the generation of waste has long been neglected by business historians. This excerpt from a special issue of Business History Review tells why a new historical approach to "Business and the Environment" is called for today.