I made it about 3/4 of the way through this book. It's one of those books that once you get the gist of it, you're not necessarily motivated to read all the way to the end. I wish someone could lead this country through the next industrial revolution using this book for the recipe. Then I would feel proud to be a part of American culture.

This book contains many flaws. Unfortunately, a better book concerning similar subjects is so hard to find.

Pretty cruicial reading for anyone interested in the current green/sustainable movements in corporate operations, philantropy, architecture, design, industrial operations, process engineering, et cetera.

Important for anyone who wants to start/run/manage a business, as well.

Kind of dry reading at times, but can be thrilling if you believe in the movement.

This book is almost 15 years old, and paints a picture of an aligned system of natural and financial capital. Not just theory – lots of detail and case studies (and lived experience of the 3 authors – another sort of capital!).

I'm still in the middle of this one and although it's become a little dated (it was written in the mid 1990's), it's still a great way to help readers get the big picture of how capitalism needs to change in order to support sustainability efforts. I am a firm believer in capitalism as a way for us to get out of this mess - innovation and customer demand being two of its strong points. Some think it is too positive - utopian even - but I appreciate the positivity given the increasingly dire nature of the news about the planet's decline these days.

Slow read but if you're interested in where the future of business- local to international- MUST go then you should read this. The book is almost ten years old but the issues are still very much a hot topic.

Will probably read it again to focus on any parts pertaining to green building, manufacturing etc.

This is one of the best books of the type that I have ever read. It gives a clear blueprint to how we can save the world from ecological disaster. I think often of sending this book to Congresspeople, legislators and company boards. I am disappointed that more people don't read it and that it isn't mentioned in the news more often.

Very optimistic overview of what could happen if businesses committed themselves to a triple bottom line philosophy (economic, social, and environmental). Good general coverage of several industries and issues (automobile industry, moving to zero waste). Will probably frustrate anyone with specific technical knowledge of any of the industries they cover. Great introduction to Green Business ideas.

If you are already advanced in the process of looking for information about what's going on with the environment and what kind of solutions can and/or should be put in place - or should I say: if you already are a more open-minded, wiser and better person who cares about the outside world? - there is no need to read this book. It will likely state the obvious to you.
Rather, with some of its passages demonstrating how good can be accomplished in the world, I wish there were an english version of 80 Hommes pour changer le monde Entreprendre pour la planète (lit. 80 men to change the world), a French book that presents amazing initiatives that help, little at a time, to make things better, around the world.

On the other hand, if you are at the beginning of the path that leads to environmental knowledge (what's going on, what are the solutions, who is involved, and so on), then you should read this book. It will give you a clean picture of the situation, as of 1999, and incentives to read further on the subjects, or even better to start introspective reflexion about your actions as a human being part of an ecosystem and their consequences.

I'd then recommend Ray Anderson's Mid-Course Correction Toward a Sustainable Enterprise The Interface Model as a more hands-on application of the principles presented in the book.

“I don't want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.”— John Davison Rockefeller. John D. Rockefeller was an American business tycoon and industrialist. I quoted him to illustrate that how capitalism really works, and this book serves as a cornerstone to refute the claim that exploiting capital will sustainably maximize wealth without posing any threat in the long term.

Even after 19 years of its publication, “Natural Capitalism: Creating the next Industrial Revolution” co-authored by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins, is still so opportune and meaningful. The book is full of ideas of innovation and revolutionary examples which businesses or entrepreneurs can take inspiration from. Authors tried to distinguish Natural Capitalism from Capitalism, but, I believe, an integral part of the economic system called capitalism, is natural capital which has been ignored from the very beginning by not taking into account the environmental footprint or irreversible repercussions of the industrial actions into the cost of production. This is high time we got out of the short-term wealth maximization mentality for environment is where all the economic activities take place and we have been granted only one earth. “First, many of the services we receive from living systems have no known substitutes at any price; for example, oxygen production by green plants. This was demonstrated memorably in 1991-93 when scientists operating the $200 million Biosphere 2 experiment in Arizona discovered that it was unable to maintain life-supporting oxygen levels for the eight people living inside. Biosphere 1, a.k.a Planet Earth performs this task daily at no charge for 6 billion people.” We have been exploiting nature— clean air, water, fertile soil, rainfall, ecological systems etc. as if it were free: Has any grain producing company tried to determine the value of 1mm of rainfall and to incorporate it in the "Liabilities" section of Balance Sheet or in the cost of goods sold? Poorly-designed business processes, population growth and wasteful consumption (both by individuals and businesses) are the main causes of depletion of natural resources and obstacles towards sustainable economy.

Automobile transportation is one of the biggest industries of the world and in the chapter 2 of the book, the authors talk about how a transformation in the energy source and material can prevent the destruction of natural capital. Polymer composites instead of steel to make the body of car and hydrogen fuel cell to produce electricity in the cleanest and most efficient way are the two most game-changing ideas, but sadly yet to be put into effect in a commercial way. Coupled with sensible design of cities that limits use of car, Hypercar could reverse the erosion of natural capital.
Chapter 3 is eye-opening exposing the amount of waste we produce (in 1999) because we fail to “close the loop” or recycle like biological systems do. “Two quarts of gasoline and a thousand quarts of water are required to produce a quart of Florida orange juice. One ton of paper requires the use of 98 tons of various resources.” “Total annual wastes in the United States, excluding wastewater, now exceed 50 trillion pounds a year. (A trillion is a large number: To count to 50 trillion at the rate of 1 per second would require the entire lifetimes of 24,000 people.” We also waste human capital. Rikers Island (in the US) is the world’s largest penal colony which needs an annual budget of $860 (in 2015) million with an average daily population of 10,000 inmates. Isn’t there something profoundly wrong with the design of the society that incarcerates so many people at an overwhelming cost to the society itself?

The authors emphasized the fact that the society that wastes its resources wastes its people and vice versa by providing statistics of unemployment and disemployment rates which are rising faster than employment rate globally. Companies are downsizing to increase the profit one more percent; but greater gains can come not from eliminating people, but from eliminating those wasted energy used by ACs to keep the temperature exceedingly lower in summer days, those extra barrels of oil that were mishandled and those wasted papers to produce hundreds copies of reports which could easily be e-mailed.

The book is also filled with lots of examples of how businesses benefitted from small and smart changes in design and process making the system more efficient and cost-effective by wringing more service from a given artifact. Remanufacturing and recycling are essentially closing the loop and “saving energy equivalent to the output of five giant power stations”. For example, big companies like Xerox and IBM employ “Dedistributing” where products come back from customers for remanufacture.

Chapter 5 and 14 are my personal favorite where in chapter 5 authors underscores the importance of building self-sufficient green buildings as oppose to just laying out some concrete blocks. Because we spend ninety percent of our time in them (nowadays it should be more than ninety five percent) and “one-third of our total energy and two-thirds of out electricity” are consumed by them. Also billions of tons of raw materials are being used annually to construct them and a major part of it goes wasted instead of going into the building because of improper planning. ncorporation of natural air and light handling, solar design, strong sense of community etc. would contribute to astonishing energy savings as well as to an increment of quality and value of human lives. One solution could be paying compensation to designers and architects on the basis of what they save in terms of energy consumption by the building, instead of paying them a percentage of the cost of the building. There are also various examples of innovations in the book, for example, photovoltaic power generation, superwindows, which could make buildings more efficient optimizing passive solar heat gains and passive cooling.

The highlight of chapter 14 is how Curitiba, an archetypal Brazilian city with chaos, poverty, unemployment and pollution at its center of existence, became a standard in sustainable urban planning by being the greenest city or the most innovative city in the world in only three decades. Combining entrepreneurship, good governance and vital leadership, Jaime Lerner, an architect and also the mayor of the city by treating all its citizens not as burden but as its resource. If someone is intrigued by the book, but does not want to read the whole book, she or he may go through this one chapter.

Industrialization of farming may seem to be a triumph of technology, but actually it uncomfortably worsens the situation. Despite improving efficiencies, “….farming still uses ten times as much fossil-fueled energy in producing food as it returns in food energy. Our food, as ecologist Howard Odum remarked, is made wholly of oil with oil left over.” Industrial agriculture destroys soil’s organic richness and most civilizations collapsed because they destroyed their topsoil. It also uses about two-thirds of all water drawn from the world’s rivers, lakes and aquifers. One-third of world’s cereal are being fed to livestock which turns only 10-45% of grain inputs into meat. Organic farming, Biointensive minifarming could be the answer.

There is a chapter dedicated to fresh water usage and designs to minimize water waste. Charging households for their actual use rather than a flat rate combined with education and awareness program usually saves up to a third of water usage. Harvesting rainwater, using of graywater for flushing toilets, biological treatment plants in neighborhoods are proving to be pioneering.

The economic viability of the businesses who not only want workers, but also thinkers suggesting and designing innovative ways incorporating the value of natural and human capital should be considered by businesses.The simple proposition of this great work is that all capital be valued. If it is not practically possible to attach a value to a hundred years old tree, one may ask how much it would cost to make a new one. How much would it cost to make a new atmosphere after we are done destroying this, a new culture, a new Earth?

this was wild. ahaha like what

This book is an attempt to craft a new economics that incorporate environmental issues, needs for deindustrializing the economy away from traditional wasteful models, and efforts to craft new designs for products and their uses that will improve the prospects of global self-sufficiency. It is a big set of claims that if even partially supportable provide strong promise for addressing a whole raft of global political and economic problems.

The book is in its third decade and it continues to arose much interest. It seemed like a good start to see how issues of environmental sustainability can be meshed with a panoply of social and economic problems in some manner that might prove feasible.

I tried; I really did. My rating is likely too high but I did not want to err towards suggesting that this is a poorly done effort. I am just not persuaded by the case or its presentation and sufficient time has passed to strengthen my doubts. While a lot of made of the economic basis of the book, it is not really an economic theory or program. It is much more oriented towards expert guidance towards the future rather than a market that helps participants sort out what they know from what they do not know.

The importance of natural resources and the huge issue of negative externalities in macro economic life are also well known. Performing some clever renamings to identify “natural capital” and how to manage and invest with it do not solve the problem - they just change the words. The same can be said about new design principles and their promise for greatly reducing waste and energy consumption in capitalist production.

As I read the book, an issue that continually arose for me was who the decision maker of interest was. In capitalism, for example, the individual economic actor makes the decision - except inn this argument since information is imperfect and not well circulated, monopoly is king, and regulation disturbs market activity. So the individual decision maker cannot behave as planned. If that is the case, then who is the decision maker? The argument tends to emphasize senior governmental or political actors who can improve upon the market as a tool. But … in many of the examples provided in the book, the focal point is local and it is smaller communities or regions that take control of their own futures and solve problems comprehensively. OK, but that is very hard, takes lots of time, and is not consistent with a clear overall program. So how does this program get put into practice if we cannot be clear about who the decision maker is or how the decision maker gets things done.

The problem for me is that promise in the future is different from realization in the present and without a candid realization of that, an argument like the one in this book quickly becomes and exercise in redefining the problem in the form of a solution. After 20+ years, I do not see the bandwagon gaining momentum in any significance. There has been great progress in some areas, electric cars for example, but making the core transition happen is a future rather than a present event and success is far from guaranteed.

I am hopeful. This book is suggestive and capably done. We are still not there yet and I await further developments along these tracks.