As an environmental educator and concerned citizen, I’m frequently disheartened about our seemingly conscious destruction of our planet. This it was a truly exciting eye-opener to read this missive from three leading thinkers about how industry, which many of us think of as the bane of the earth, can reverse course and make the change we need. All you have to do is read the daily paper to know that politicians won’t do it! The book is full of dozens of creative and inspiring examples of people reinventing our world. I know that this presentation, like many others, has its critics among the environmental movement – that’s too bad. We can’t afford to form our firing squad into a circle. Even if you think industry should just go away, read this book and reconsider.

As an author, I learned something else from this book: get as many friends and critics as possible to review your work. Page after page of small print, naming so many people who helped make this book a reality reminded me that no matter how thoroughly I thought I had reviewed my work, I should always have someone (or many someones) to review it.

Brilliant, practical, and inspiring.

A cool compromise between capitalism and our need to fix the environment we’ve taken advantage of. Lots of cool ideas for the future and examples of people/companies making this happen today.

This is definitely a dense read, but it was the kind of book that throughout the time I was reading it, I kept telling people about things I found interesting. I really appreciate the approach to systems that incorporates natural and human capital and environmental considerations. It only frustrates me that this book is 20 years old and so many of our systems haven't changed.

Old favorite.

A detailed review of all the ways that consumers and small business can upgrade their use of technology to be less environmentally harmful.

This is a book that I wish every business leader and policy maker would read. The book is a little outdated, and it is not without its flaws (chiefly the naive optimism the authors display that sustainable business practices are imminent and inevitable), but I thought the authors did an incredible job of outlining the structural deficiencies in the traditional capitalist system to address ongoing environmental degradation and depletion issues AND identifying major sources of systemic waste and potential remedies.

The structural deficiency I mentioned is the absence of any value assigned to "Natural Capital", arguably the most valuable source of wealth that exists. Economic and accounting practices don't assign any value to the natural materials mined to produce the myriad disposable products we use briefly, not to mention the soils that feed agriculture, the wetlands that clean our water and prevent floods, the forests that clean our air and prevent erosion. In the absence of any value given to Natural Capital, the indicators that we use to gauge the health of an economy, such as GDP, evaluate processes that liquidate this Natural Capital to produce financial capital as income! Economic indicators will continue to be positive, even as we deplete the most valuable source of wealth we have, unless some economic way to account for the central, irreplaceable role that environmental processes play in industry is devised and implemented. The authors treat this idea of accounting for natural capital as inevitable - at some point the governments of the world will wake up and natural capital as a free, inexhaustible resource (the way it is treated today), will end. This massive reorganization of the competitive landscape will realign the winners and losers, and a good portion of this book is dedicated to outlining strategies for those seeking a competitive edge in a world where natural resources are scarce and expensive.

The authors provide 4 central strategies for any company or government seeking to gain this competitive advantage:

1. Radical Resource Productivity: "Using resources more efficiently has 3 significant benefits: it slows resource depletion at one end of the value chain, lowers pollution on the other end, and provides a basis to increase worldwide employment with meaningful jobs."

2. Biomimicry: "Reducing the wasteful throughput of materials - indeed, eliminating the very idea of waste - can be accomplished by redesigning industrial systems on biological lines that change the nature of industrial processes and materials, enabling the constant reuse of materials in continuous closed cycles, and often the elimination of toxicity."

3. Service and Flow Economy: "This calls for a fundamental shift in the relationship between producer and consumer, a shift from an economy of goods and purchase to one of services and flow. The benefits are twofold - less production of goods that eventually turn to waste, and more employment for people providing the services that used to be performed by disposable goods. This will restructure the economy to better focus on meeting customers' changing value needs and to reward automatically both resource productivity and closed-loop cycles of materials use."

4. Investing in Natural Capital: "This works towards reversing world wide planetary destruction though reinvestments in sustaining, restoring, and expanding stocks of natural capital, so that the biosphere can produce more abundant ecosystem services and natural resources."

These strategies are woven through a number of industries that the authors investigate, identifying major sources of waste and feasible solutions to those problems.

There is so much more I could say about this book, and it has inspired a lot of further reading I intend to do. If you have any interest in sustainability from a business perspective, this is a great place to start.

Not terribly easy to read, but full of vision and inspiring tales of companies that are both economically and environmentally sustainable.

For a preview (or the whole book, if you're a cheap student) you can download pdf's chapter by chapter at [http://www.natcap.org/].

It’s an interesting and very important piece of environmental literacy, especially for its time. However, the structure of the book is very hard to follow as each chapter is too long and filled with just too much information for a normal reader to digest. Despite, I picked up great insights from it, especially regarding the manufacturing sector and material.

This is an economics book- expect it to be at least a little dry and hard to get thru. BUT i would recommend it to anyone with any interest in environmental and social concerns. it presents some very interesting and original solutions to problems, and a new thought process for evaluating business and government.

Although this book is full of good ideas and practices it gives a lot of somewhat outdated examples that become tiresome. I'm only halfway through but feel as if I've heard it all before in Cradle to Cradle.

Only got to page 291 because someone else had a hold it. Thinking of leaving a note in it for the next reader because I enjoyed it so much. Who knew there were so many alternative options available? We should be utilizing all of the examples mentioned.