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 The book is a little outdated, and it is not without its flaws (chiefly the naive optimism the authors display that sustainable business practices are imminent and inevitable), but I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.

This book is decidedly dated in many ways. Written in 1998, Hawken tries his best to present viable options for a Utopian natural capitalist model. With all the doom and gloom surrounding corporate unwillingness to become environmentally sustainable, this book is definitely uplifting. Unfortunately, it's lacking statistics and other numbers that would make it seem like more than an environmentalist's pipe dream. Additionally, some of the ideas, such as the hydrogen fuel cell revolution, have since been pretty well debunked. I'm anxious to see how the rest of the book goes. There are a lot of really solid, attainable goals despite the almost naive optimism.

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!).

This book is a bible. A solutions manual to all the knotty questions that oil addicts, like you and me, have had about how to change society into a creature of sustainability. This book will show you that the only obstacles to a sustainable future are political and societal. Read it and weep with joy.

The Lovins' from the Rocky Mountain Institute and Paul Hawken (author of The Ecology of Commerce) team up for a fantastic and hopeful read on how capitalism can be harnessed and directed to restore our planet and our communities. Far from a utopian vision of the future, the book teems with anecdotes and scalable solutions which are practical and require no further advance in technology. The Lovins' engineering and technical expertise coupled with what is undoubtedly Hawken's prose make for a great non-fiction read.

This book describes a possible move from Industrial Capitalism to Natural Capitalism as a way to move to a more sustainable economic system. One of the many arguments against forcing industry into sustainable practices is that it will "cost too much" or stall the economy. This book gives an alternative, and quite convincing, view to that argument.

I'm through the first chapter- and all I can say so far is that I love optimism.

Most of the case studies are dated but insightful. So much expressed by this book has moved forward except for the contentious climate change debate. So sad.
Highly recommend chapters 1-3 and 13-15 and the notes.
An excellent primer for anyone looking for a vision to save the planet for our future generations.

Perhaps the book that had a bigger impact on my than any other. It's a blend of optimism and pragmatism that's hard to match. It's not the kind of book you'll tear through with reckless abandon because the writing is so beautiful, but it's a very honest take on how we built the world we live in and how we'll have to rebuild it if we plan on surviving the next century.

A good source of reference, full of examples that are still relevant today, how to respect all forms/sources of capital/wealth.

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.

Not quick or easy (nor off-puttingly technical), but this book has a ton of great information about what it means to overhaul society to make it greener and how doing do would make it a less anti-social society.
Best read over tea, and not necessarily in order.
Generally, there is a specter haunting non fiction, namely that the authors take about 35% more pages than they need to expound their ideas. I want to scream "I GET IT! LET'S MOVE ON!" but no one is listening.
I'm sure there were some excellent concepts in the last 100 pages, but I'll probably never see those pages. Let's return to the era of the pamphlet, the broadside.