Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution.

• Author: Edelman, Larry
• Position: Review

Imagine a world in which cities have become peaceful and serene because cars and buses are whisper quiet, vehicles' exhaust consists only of water vapor, and parks and greenways have replaced unneeded urban freeways. In this world, buildings actually produce energy rather than simply consume it, forest acreage is increasing rather than decreasing, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are decreasing, industrialized countries have reduced resource use by eighty percent while improving the quality of life, and alliances have formed between businesses, unions, environmentalists, and governments to foster sustainable development.

The vision outlined above is not that of a utopia, according to the authors of Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution.(1) Rather, it is a vision of changes that could materialize in the decades to come as the result of economic and technological trends already in place. In Natural Capitalism, authors Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins(2) have collaborated to explore and define what could emerge as a new form of environmentally friendly capitalism based on an economic system that would value natural capital (natural resources, living systems, and ecosystems) and use radically less material and energy.

The basic premise of Natural Capitalism is that the earth's very ability to sustain life, and therefore economic activity, is now threatened by the extraordinarily inefficient way in which we extract, process, transport, and dispose of a vast flow of resources--some 220 billion tons per year.(3) Our current economic system and the businesses that operate within it value and focus only on exploitable natural resources while failing to value and account for such life supporting "services" as regulation of the atmosphere and provision of species habitat that are provided by the earth's ecosystems.

The authors note, however, that there is an increasing number of examples of highly profitable conservation-based production and design changes in businesses that could, if adopted by businesses and governments on a broad scale, reverse the trend of environmental exploitation and degradation.(4) The authors go further and suggest that a move toward radical resource productivity and natural capitalism, exemplified by these examples, is beginning to feel inevitable.

Natural Capitalism begins by introducing a framework of four interrelated strategies, which the authors claim would enable countries, companies, and communities to operate profitably and efficiently by behaving as though all forms of capital, including ecosystem services, are valued. The first strategy is Radical Resource Productivity.(5) By this concept the authors mean using resources much more efficiently--on the order of five, ten, and even one hundred times more so than at present. Achieving such efficiency gains is generally possible, the authors claim, by using "whole system design" when constructing or retrofitting industrial and commercial facilities--that is, designing for the most efficient overall operation rather than focusing on, and trying to save the costs of, system components in isolation, and by using new technologies based on natural processes and material. The second strategy is Ecological Redesign.(6) This strategy involves completely redesigning many industrial systems to maximally eliminate creation of waste through a move to closed loop production processes. The idea of the third strategy, Service and Flow Economy, is to shift economic activity and value from production and consumption of goods to...