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Summary: The question is what kind of natural capitalism
Review: 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.
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Summary: A Comprfehensive Guide to Survival
Review: I wish that I had the time to write a more complete review of this book. It was given to me by a son in law and I have been reading it "in the cracks" ever since. And I've been sharing it with my students and friends. (I've even shared it with some strangers.) It needs to be shared on every level, and I have given several copies to recent graduates and advised several grade school and high school teacher friends that they need to share its contents with their students. The world is rushing headlong into disaster on many fronts, but there are several hopeful voices and people, companies and governments doing something about it. Which makes it a very exciting time to be alive. Buy the book, share it and look for chances to apply its ideas. A "viable future" will not be built on the present, but it will require a visionary quantum leap. This book can seed your thinking and lead to your contribution to that future-large or small. Enjoy. J.D.
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Summary: Great book -- one major flaw seen so far
Review: I had to read this book when I saw that my conservation hero, David Brower, said it may be the most important book of the century. In general, I find this book full of incredible, encouraging information on how human endeavors on this planet can be sustainable for not only human generations to come, but for preservation of biodiversity and ecological health of the planet. My one gripe so far is an example used by the authors on pp. 207 and 208 relating to the suitable goal of better-managed livestock grazing. I have personally researched the methods recommended by Alan Savory, called "Holistic Management" and even communicated with Savory and his practicioners. The bottom line is that Savory's theories about grazing are severely flawed, especially in the context of the American West, where his principles are most widely accepted. For starters, the huge herds of migratory ungulates in North America (that he wishes to duplicate through management) were on the Great Plains east of the Rockies, not in the arid West. The arid West did not evolve with large-scale grazing and is ecologically incompatible with Savory's methods for several reasons. For one, fragile microbiotic soil crusts on large portions of the West are damaged by cattle hooves and thus lose their critical ability to exclude seed germination of non-native invasive weeds, like cheatgrass, which is a huge and growing problem in the West. Commercial cattle grazing in the west (especially in areas with less than 12" of annual rainfall) changes native vegetation composition by species and structure and results in a disastrous cycle of brush encroachment, fire, and non-native species encroachment. Savory does not distinguish between native biodiversity and non-native biodiversity, and he fails to understand that the American West IS a natural desert. Pristine, ungrazed, natural deserts in the American West are healthy places, full of native biodiversity, but cattle grazing creates wastelands from healthy desert or favors non-native plants that are totally unfavorable for native flora and fauna. There is a growing body of literature and professional opinion by the grazing community and the conservation / environmental community that the solutions offered by Savory are contributing to the problem, rather than the solution. A better approach would recommend the implementation of a plan, such as the National Public Lands Grazing Campaign, which offers to generously compensate public lands cattle ranchers in the Arid West to voluntarily retire their revokable Federal grazing permits. This would ultimately save the taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidation fees annually, allow the public lands to heal and become preserves of native biodiversity and watershed resource protection areas, plus provide opportunities for revenue production for recreational uses, such as birdwatching, hiking, wildlife viewing, archaeological research, etc. Despite that flaw, the book "Natural Capitalism" is a fantastic book, perhaps the most encouraging body of information I have seen in some time. I heartily encourage and even implore all conservationists to read and digest it and work for implementation of its concepts, including stoppage of the massive subsidation of environmentally destructive industries, such as agriculture, livestock grazing, and unsustainable timber harvest.
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Summary: Environmentalism using free market incentives
Review: Finally - an environmental book that doesn't attack the market system! Armory Lovins is one of the best thinkers of our time and this book reveals how our current system of tax and production incentives leads to environmental degradation. The message is positive, realistic, and filled with examples of success. The authors discuss what needs to be changed and show the potential improvements that can be made using real world examples. Their fundamental hypothesis is that we can in fact improve the well-being of humans and nature. By abandoning the traditional environmentalists' dichotomy of humans versus nature, they provide a third path that preserves the wealth of nature and uses it efficiently. I dare anyone to read this book and not start to believe that we should tax gasoline rather than incomes!
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Summary: Empirical evidence to backup ideas in Ecology of Commerce
Review: If you are planning on reading Natural Capitalism, I strongly suggest you first read Paul Hawken's Ecology of Commerce. It sets most of the philosophical foundations for this book. Natural Capitalism is a perfect and hopeful followup because it shows that even without increased government regulation (which is one of the main themes in EoC), businesses can profit from helping rather than harming the environment. Both are excellent reads, but I think you'll appreciate and enjoy NC more by first reading EoC.
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Summary: What were the glowing reviewers thinking?
Review: The topic of how certain externalities can be better reflected in the costs to producers and consumers without producing the distortions in the market typical of political interventions is an important one, deserving of a serious discussion. Unfortunately, despite what the reviewers who somehow love this book claim, it appears to be nothing of the sort.
I say "appears to be" because I bailed out after page 58, something I do only exceedingly rarely on the theory that even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while. But 58 pages of invalid premises, cooked or irrelevant statistics, and sweeping assertions of the authors' prejudices presented as fact were quite enough for me. I will not tire the reader with a compilation of all the whoppers contained on those pages. Suffice it to say that the final straw was the authors' assertion that "had we adopted in 1974 the efficient energy practices of some other advanced industrial countries, and applied the savings to the national debt, we would not today have a national debt." The fact, of course, is that the United States expends the lowest amount of energy per unit of GDP of any major industrialized country. This was written only a couple of pages after the authors advocate decreased productivity in order to hire more workers. Of course, they do not say where the money for this scheme will come from.
For those who believe that the authors of this book are insightful, you'll love the "Megatrends" series!
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Summary: Highly important for shaping the future
Review: This was one of those books that took me weeks to read simply because of the fact that it was so disturbingly real and struck home so well that when read before bed there was no sleeping to be had. I had the honor of seeing Paul Hawkin speak in person at the Oregon Sustainability Forum this month in downtown Portland. It is obvious how moving Paul finds the issues confronted in this book, that are faced by every member of the human race, and every other race, on the planet today. The authors of Natural Capitalism bring heartening, encouraging, and inspiring tales of communities that are successfully implementing the concepts presented here as well as the grim facts associated with current capitalist, industrialist society. If you are at all interested in the future of business, your community, and the planet I highly recomment this book. Here are some favorite passages: This section relating directly to my life in a cubicle company :o) :"People are not simple uniform entities that thrive in a box. They are, rather, complex living organisms that evolved in and still function best in a dynamic and divers environment."..."People are happier, healthier, and more alert unders subtly dynamic than under constant conditions."..."Buildings that are alternately a solar oven or a walk-in refrigerator, with discomfort and energy bills to match, are coming to be seen as unacceptable. In the rapidly arriving era of green design, buildings that cost more than they should to construct and run and that work worse, look worse, and make informed customers feel worse than they demand will simply stand empty. - P 88 "At first, Winston Churchill said, we shape our buildings, and then our buildings shape our lives. This high purpose requires designs that celebrate life over sterility, restraint over extravagance, beauty over tawdriness. Green buildings do not poison the air with fumes nor the soul with artificiality Instead, they create delight when entered, serenity and health when occupied, and regret when departed. They grow organically in and from their place, integrating people within the rest of the natural world; do no harm to their occupants or to the earth; foster more diverse and abundant life than they borrow; take less than they give back. Achieving all this hand in hand with functionality and profitability requires a level of design integration that is not merely a technical task but an asthetic and spiritual challenge. - P 110 "In the face of this relentless loss of living systems, fractious political conflicts over laws, regulations, and business economics appear petty and small. It is not that these issues are unimportant, but that they ignore the larger context. Are we or are we not systematically reducing life and the capacity to re-create order on earth? This is the level on which our discource should take place, for it is there that a framework for both understanding and action can be formulated. In spite of what such signals as the GDP and the Dow Jones Industrial Average indicate, it is ultimately the capacity of the photosynthetic world and its nutrient flows that determine the quality of life on earth." - P 149
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Summary: A compelling read displaying practicality and vision
Review: I first encountered Paul Hawken's writing in 'Growing a Business'. The clear-sighted practicality of that book is evident in this work. Combining thorough research, excellent analysis and insights, Hawken and the Lovinses put forward a vision, and mark out the path to that vision. A host of examples illustrate their arguments brilliantly, and leave one restless, wanting to put their recommendations for a environmentally sustainable world into immediate effect. Moreover, the chapters and arguments are set out so as to appeal to people in many industries and professions - MBAs, engineers, architects, town planners, farmers, scientists - you should all read this book.
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Summary: Breakdown the divide
Review: Natural Capitalism does more than any other work I have seen to break down the divide in our thinking between prosperity and environmental protection. Lovins shows us with crystal clean prose that the two can go hand in hand. As a businessman and an environmentalist I cherish the book.
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Summary: The Best of All Worlds
Review: Most of us realize that our current economy works by converting raw materials into useful products, which are used and then discarded. Business carries little or none of the cost of the nonrenewable resources used to create these goods, nor the cost to bury them when they're used up. In a finite world, this cannot go on forever, but no one wants to give up the good things the current system has brought us. How can we switch to something sustainable and still keep improving our quality of life? Natural Capitalism finds the answer in heavy use of computer automation in manufacturing, distribution, disposal, etc. plus requiring the government to cease subsidizing waste and starting to charge for hidden costs (e.g. road use). The authors apply this formula across several different industries and bolster their case with countless examples from real life. Refreshingly, they take the view that we can make all the needed changes gradually and mostly using methods already developed. The authors possibly exaggerate risks of things like global warming, nuclear power, and genetic engineering, but, as their plans call for avoiding all three, this is a side issue. Topic summaries at the start of each chapter make this a great reference book - finding any topic for rereading requires little more than a quick skim. Well indexed and rich with references, it earns the right to be taken seriously.
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