This book was full of amazing examples of business foresight that is driving the green revolution. This book lays out a blueprint for the next inevitable industrial revolution that will shock both liberal and conservative ideology and economics. I highly recommend it, but it's a little old now (1999). I'm looking into how things have gone since then, and I'm finding more updated books on the topic.

I abandoned this book after a few chapters due to the fact that it didn't make much sense. Initially it promises to describe how, without any effort, the whole economy can - and in fact will - change to become sustainable. In fact, a sustainable economy is actually more efficient and more profitable than the one we have now, it promises.

Already there is a significant problem with this promise. If it's more profitable, and we can put our faith in the market, why isn't it already happening? This is especially pertinent given that this book was written over ten years ago and none of the predictions I read have come to pass.

The book says that it will explain how the market will provide all of these solutions but the two chapters that follow don't explain it at all. Instead they abandon economics altogether in favour of propagating half-truths about engineering and science that seem to contradict the thesis of the book.

At that point I gave up.

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.

This is the most optimistic book I have read on the capacity of humankind to redirect the train of civilization onto a track that might not lead us over the cliff we're heading towards. I recommend it to anyone who has sunken into the despair of cynicism (we're doomed!) and to anyone who, conversely, thinks that acting to "save the environment" hurts business. It has a lot of data to shlep through, but I found it worth it. Please read!!!

On a society based upon this system, we have to manage ourselves to be responsible with the planet and our environment. Take care of it and try to make the less negative impact on it and also being affordable for the businessman and profitable.

slow read. advice: pick a chapter, read it, put book on shelf for a month, repeat.

good content makes it worth reading in pieces or skimming the most interesting parts.

Paints a pretty compelling picture of a possible future where capitalism and ecological stewardship are not only compatible but function symbiotically - the picture is compelling not just because it's nice to image there being a non-eschatological future, but because they use existing, real-world examples of systems and processes that need only be extended in order for that future to come about.

The book is pretty personally important to me, enough that I can imagine bringing at least a part of the vision into reality as something I work at for the rest of my life.

But is it capitalism?  About the highest praise I can give this book is that it is not complete rubbish.  There are aspects of this book, particularly the way that it encourages a wise environmental stewardship and the skillful use of technology as well as intelligent design to make processes as well as buildings less wasteful.  Unfortunately, with that sound advice comes a great deal of writing which is unsound, which repeats tired cliches about the Club of Rome's limits to growth, with strong bashing of American desires for dispersed settlement and easy personal transportation, with a great deal too much trust in the coercive power of government to enforce dubious actions that would not receive support democratically, and perhaps even the strong hint of Agenda 21 and other unappealing aspects of what is mistakenly viewed as international law.  Moreover, the authors praise technologies that have simply not developed or achieved any sort of mainstream use and thus are unable to help create the green paradise the authors desire, although it should be noted that the authors themselves see their political worldview as a combination of blue capitalism, red socialism, and green environmentalism.  It may be such a combination, but it is not freedom loving capitalism.

This book of more than 300 pages is divided into fifteen planets.  After a preface and acknowledgements the authors hype a supposed next industrial revolution to make the world a more sustainable place (1).  This leads to a discussion of hypercars and neighborhoods to rid dependence on driving (2).  The authors tackle the subject of waste (3) and how the world can be made a better place (4) through the skillful use of various building blocks that utilize high technology and design principles (5).  The authors discuss how some advances can tunnel through the cost barrier that limits savings (6), the way that a great deal of waste (muda) informs a lot of industrial processes (7), and gives a great deal of talking about capital gains (8) as it relates to natural as well as financial capital.  The authors write about efficient use of wood fibers (9) and the importance of having sufficient food (10), and also look at solutions to improve water efficiency (11) as well as how to make money off of climate change concerns (12) even if one does not believe in them.  Finally the author looks at ways to make markets work better (for whom?) (13) as well as ideals about human capitalism (14) and speculation about the future of our planet (15).  The book ends with notes, references, and an index.

This book is not as good as it thinks it is and can be added to a long list of false prophecies that sought to imagine a better world through higher levels of regulation and government coercion in favor of environmentalist goals.  The authors show a marked anti-American bias and also evince a desire for America to copy the corrupt and technocratic bureaucracy that one finds in Europe, for example.  The authors shower a great deal of praise on technocratic figures like the former mayor of a Brazilian city who showed some ingenuity in how to handle the social crises of the 1980's and 1990's there and who then moved on to govern his hometown province.  Some of what the authors talk about would be interesting to see, like less wasteful homes and office buildings and factories and even toilets that separate urine and feces in such a way as to increase efficiency, but the authors' naive belief that the stock of technologies would quickly change in mainstream American society was definitely unfulfilled.  There are aspects of this book where the authors' worldview is deeply abhorrent, and others that are merely evidence of a certain lack of realism in the understanding of sunk costs and in the barriers to innovation that prevent a great many solutions from being successfully implemented.  Such are the ways of the world, though.

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

Now that I've finished this book, I'm probably going to have to start it all over again to pick out all the things that I can actually absorb and apply. Lots and lots of suggestions and hypotheticals in here, and since it was written so long ago I'm not sure what is applicable today, what has already been done, and what still CAN be done. Oy.

This is a great book about natural resources, economics, and efficiency. The tone is upbeat, and a great deal of the book is storytelling of examples where things are cleverly engineered to make them astoundingly more efficient than their typical counterparts. One example: buildings engineered to need no heating/cooling systems, using things like great insulation, 'smart' windows, and shade trees to manage the temperature without conventional electrical systems. Another example: lightweight cars build mostly from carbon-fiber rather than steel that can get over 100 MPG. And lots of others, including carpet companies that recycle their carpets, better ways to make paper from wood, supply-chain improvements, etc.

The main thesis of the book, as suggested by the title, is that we need a market valuation of 'natural capital', which includes all those parts of the natural environment that provide value in the form of goods and services. Some parts of the environment (like that which gives the service of providing clean air and water, or biodiversity to mitigate risks) are more easily overlooked than others (like a forest, which has a more obvious valuation that can be assesed in terms of trees or sustainable tree-producing ability of the land). These resources are 'capital' in the economic sense, and whereas before now they have been so abundant that liquidating them for a profit was just easy money, now they are becoming depleted and such a strategy is too short-sighted. For a sustainable economic future, we need to find ways to make things we need without draining the rest of our natural capital. And so most of the book describes clever ways to do things more efficiently - consuming less, polluting less, and being an economic/marketable win with today's technology all at once. As a person concerned about the environment and someone that loves making things efficient, I loved the book, even if some of the examples were already slightly dated (1999).

A recurring side-theme that I also enjoyed is that over time it is easy for industries/practices to get caught in 'local maxima' that end up being inefficiencies/pessimizations when considered in terms of the big picture. Many of the examples in the book are so clever because they attack a problem in a new way, or challenge fundamental assumptions that are outdated but stick around due to inertia.

A good book for chapter hopping...I especially like the chapter about Cucurbita, Brazil