Reviews From Our Customers
A Real New World Order...
"It doesn't have to be this way..."
For too long, our western industrial culture has equated sheer numbers, whether dollars, cans of soda or tons of trash, with growth. The concept of growth based only on labor productivity and dollars moved has lead us to our current degraded environmental and social conditions. The perverse accounting behind this scheme allows the government to actually subsidize wasteful practices and encourages industries to turn their backs on innovation and improvement.
The authors offer here an alternative that is at once eminently practical and thoroughly visionary. However, this work does not make the liberal's usual cry for increased command and control regulation by government. Rather, it argues for decreased regulation, the elimination of the above-mentioned subsidies and an honest accounting of the true costs of production that include the value of degraded natural and social systems. Such new practices, which are oriented toward a truly free market, would force producers to increase resource, rather than labor, efficiency, which would, in turn, result in increased employment, greater innovation and healthier ecosystems.
Should the reader be overly skeptical, the authors share many examples of companies who are "doing well by doing good," that is, being commercially successful while at the same time improving the quality of life for all natural systems, both human and non-human.
This, along with Hawken's earlier The Ecology of Commerce, as well as Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth by Lester R. Brown are highly recommended as primers on a new vision for the future.
The question is what kind of natural capitalism
This book provides an inspiring catalog of the many ways that entrepreneurs have turned the scarcity of natural resources and threats to the environment into successful business advantages. There are endless examples of how people have achieved success reducing energy use and waste, creating technologies to create clean water, more natural building materials and urban designs, and healthier food, to name just a few. If you're turned off by the amorality of business in the 1990s and the idea of growth at whatever price, this book can help instill faith in the resorative potential of business. As such, it's a good introduction to sustainability.
The book's weakness is that it implies that with a little greening here you can have it all. It's long on the "natural" but very short on considering what kind of capitalism will be necessary to make our economy truly sustainable. As co-author Paul Hawken admitted in the introduction of an earlier book ("The Ecology of Commerce"), almost no business presently operating is truly sustainable. As economist Herman Daly has pointed out, even with increased resource efficiency, northern nations still consume too many resources too inefficiently for the world to accept much more growth, a sobering thought as China begins to gear up its automotive industry. To be sustainable, we will have to accept that the world economy must live within limits, which represents a true change of paradigm and not the incremental improvement that Natural Capitalism implies is sufficient. Without accepting such limits, many of the good ideas presented in this book (such as fuel cells, lightweight vehicles made of kevlar or other materials, to name just two examples) will likely remain uneconomical and unutilized.
An important work of our times. Soft Green / Hard Green
Given the degree to which the reciprocal conflict between economy and ecology is couched in our lives by now, it is surprising how little of a concerted effort exists in terms of a framework to understand the ecological crisis and the fundamental transformation for industrial capitalism, i.e., new business concepts and technological processes that can save the earth. This book offers an important, bold, optimistic framework.
It sets off quickly by challenging the glaring fallacy of orthodox economics that natural capital is an infinite resource to be used as input for manufacturing and other human activities because nature is "free" except for costs of extracting, transporting, altering it and is also a bottomless pit where the wasted materials can be conveniently dumped. Nowhere in the accounting books of our current businesses do we see any entry for the finite elements of the earth itself: land, air, water, the multitudes of self-sustaining biosystems. This becomes quite startling a discussion when the authors reveal an estimate that in the vast flows of natural materials devoured by the global economy every year, only 3 percent actually end up in products.
Optimistically (as this whole book is), Hawkens et al then demonstrate with their plethora of real-world case studies and anecdotes that eco-friendly processes are already in place, not just as wishful theory but as a set of successful and even spreading practices.
One noteworthy example of Natural Capitalism in the book is about the "ecological city" Curitiba, which is located in the Southeastern Brazilian state of Parana and has a population of about 4 million people--the size of Houston or Philadelphia. There, "responsible government in partnership with vital entrepenurship has succeeded better than most cities in the U.S." They have implemented "hundreds of multipurpose, cheap, fast, simple homegrown, people-centered initiatives...treating all its citizens--most of all its children--not as burden but as most precious resource". This is a good testimony to how these new approaches to production and consumption can in fact be used to redefine socio-economic life, not out of noblesse oblige but because they deliver dramatic cost-saving efficiencies to the bottom line, that is, higher rates of return for capital.
However, Hawkens et al take what is perhaps a "Soft Green" approach compared to Peter Huber's "Hard Green" (ISBN: 0465031137), who defines Soft proponents as supporters of micro-management and future forecasting by computer-based models. Hard resources, such as coal and oil, represent cheap but nonrenewable energy sources, while "Soft" refers to such expensive, alternative, and renewable energy sources as wind and solar power.
Natural Capitalism endorses the outcome of market processes and credit the Industrial Revolution with increasing real wages, raising standards of living, and expanding the productivity of labor 200 fold! Ultimately, dematerialization and prosperity have prevailed over the early negative effects of industrialization. In wealthy, highly modernized nations, pollution and waste have been significantly decreased, with some types even eliminated. The criticism of Hawken et al. concerning the market process (one that free-market environmentalists are willing to concede) is that for-profit ventures only account for what is on the ledger, with the end result being a loss of capital. Thus, Natural Capitalism offers strategies and examples of success that empower people to behave "as if all forms of capital were valued".
Huber on the other hand clearly prefers solutions from technology and market processes. "To Hard Green minds...ecological objectives are effectively advanced only by dispersed control, free markets, and traditional ethics". Above all, he promotes wealth as the cure of environmental insensitivity and physical damage grounded in his belief that technology and market coordination will foster prosperity, dematerialization, and enhanced environmental awareness, but he dismisses alternative approaches as wasteful.
Despite many differences, Natural Capitalism and Hard Green share an adulation of innovative economic solutions and implicitly acknowledge environmental quality to be a superior good. New approaches are bound to exasperate some and excite others but both these books pose an intelligent challenge to lazy assumptions on both sides of the political divide and ought to jump-start a reinvigorated environmental debate.
Either way, this is a valuable purchase for just about anyone involved in business or policy making. But a sincere reader would consider tempering this book with Peter Huber's work as well.
