They call their approach natural capitalism because it's based on the principle that business can be good for the environment. For instance, Interface of Atlanta doubled revenues and employment and tripled profits by creating an environmentally friendly system of recycling floor coverings for businesses. The authors also describe how the next generation of cars is closer than we might think. Manufacturers are already perfecting vehicles that are ultralight, aerodynamic, and fueled by hybrid gas-electric systems. If natural capitalism continues to blossom, so much money and resources will be saved that societies will be able to focus on issues such as housing, contend Hawken, author of a book and PBS series called Growing a Business, and the Lovinses, who cofounded and directed the Rocky Mountain Institute, an environmental think tank. The book is a fascinating and provocative read for public-policy makers, as well as environmentalists and capitalists alike. --Dan Ring

Product Description
Most businesses still operate according to a world view that hasn't changed since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Then, natural resources were abundant and labor was the limiting factor of production. But now, there's a surplus of people, while natural capital natural resources and the ecological systems that provide vital life-support services is scarce and relatively expensive. In this groundbreaking blueprint for a new economy, three leading business visionaries explain how the world is on the verge of a new industrial revolution. Natural Capitalism describes a future in which business and environmental interests increasingly overlap, and in which companies can improve their bottom lines, help solve environmental problems and feel better about what they do all at the same time. Citing hundreds of compelling stories from a wide array of sectors, the book shows how to realize benefits both for today's shareholders and for future generations and how, by firing the unproductive tons, gallons, and kilowatt-hours it's possible to keep the people who will foster the innovation that drives future improvement.

Business readers and anyone concerned about the changing global economy and its impact on the ecosystem will want more than copies of the HBR article once they realize it was actually a tantalizing synopsis of the authors' new book, "Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution" (Little, Brown, 1999). This important book can take its place alongside such touchstone volumes as "Future Shock," "Megatrends " and "The New New." The authors describe in vivid detail how business and industry can gain competitive advantage through a new business model based on doing much more with much less.

The authors set out to prove that changing realities of the information economy and global competitiveness are already transforming industry and commerce in ways unforeseen even a few years ago. The new business model takes into account the values of all forms of "capital" including human, manufactured, financial, and natural. "Natural Capitalism" starts with an elegantly simple premise: economies need no longer be based on the idea that human capital is finite and natural resources are infinitely abundant when the obvious truth of the 21st Century is exactly the opposite.

With mounting confidence, Lovins, Lovins and Hawken predict that the latest industrial revolution will create "a vital economy that uses radically less material and energy." Businesses that recognize the trend toward this new type of industrialism will gain advantage over their less alert competitors. Those that postpone this shift will be left behind and will eventually, make themselves irrelevant in the new economy.

Theirs is not merely a detailed updating of Buckminster Fuller's "small is beautiful" thesis. Rather, the authors describe a step-by-step process of business restructuring that should result in more efficiency at the corporate, national and global level. Such a process, if carried out across several industries simultaneously, would make it much easier for governments to promote social equity and conserve or even restore the natural ecosystems reaching across traditional borders.

This next stage of industrialism, the authors' "natural capitalism," is founded on four core business strategies already being adopted by the most innovative corporations across the globe. The strategies suggest that companies need to:

1) employ technology and design innovations to use resources much more productively. This results, of course, in companies using fewer resources, reducing pollution, and setting the stage to create more jobs;

2) practice "biomimicry" by redesigning industrial systems to be more like biological systems, leading to an elimination of even the concept of waste;

3) shift from an economy based on goods and purchases to an economy based on service and flow. This concept leads to a quantum shift in how manufacturing companies service their clients, especially in terms of inventories, sales strategies, etc; and

4) reinvest in "natural capital" to sustain, restore and expand the resources on which industry, and ultimately all life, and therefore all livelihood, depends.

"Natural Capitalism" is not a "gloom and doom, industry vs. the environment" anti-consumerism rant. Neither do the authors fall into the trap of proposing a Pollyanna hypothesis that begins with "if only we could change our basic cultural values." Lovins, Lovins and Hawken make elegant use of facts and examples from several industrial sectors and actual case histories of large and small companies based in the US and overseas.

Consider the "Hypercar," a synthesis of emerging automobile technologies developed in 1991 by the Rocky Mountain Institute, the think tank founded by Amory and Hunter Lovins. Imagine "a family sedan, sport-utility, or pickup truck that combines Lexus comfort and refinement, Mercedes stiffness, Volvo safety, BMW acceleration, Taurus price, four-to eightfold improved fuel economy (that is, 80 to 200 miles per gallon), a 600 to 800 mile range between refuelings, and ZERO emissions."

If such technological innovations sound like eco-friendly pipe dreams, think again. Today, DaimlerChrysler, Ford, GM, Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen and others are actively competing to bring this revolutionary vehicle to the market within the next few years.

As global a corporate presence as DuPont is already feeling (and no doubt, influencing) a sea change in manufacturing philosophy. The Delaware-based chemical giant is on record in favor of "comprehensive resource productivity". In DuPont's words, "sustainable growth has to be focused on a functionality, not a product. The next major step toward sustainable growth is to improve the value of our products and services per unit of natural resources employed." To that end, DuPont is "down-gauging" its polyester film, making it thinner, stronger and more valuable so that it may sell less material at a higher price.

What the Lovins and Hawken have given us with "Natural Capitalism" is nothing less than an up-to-date business manual for the next century, complete with clear explanations and solid, real world examples. Their thinking finds common ground between business and environmental interests and makes the common sense case for how the two outlooks are merging into a new, practical, eco-friendly approach to making a profit.

Just as business and civic leaders in Atlanta and elsewhere are redefining how sprawling cities should grow, "Natural Capitalism" redefines how businesses and ultimately the entire planet should grow to sustain a prosperous and equitable quality of life for the indefinite future.


Beyond Darwin   January 4, 2000
 80 out of 91 found this review helpful

As this new century begins, if there is only one book which everyone on the planet should read, it would be Natural Capitalism. Why is it so important? In my opinion, because it provides the most convincing, the most compelling argument in support of Wendell Berry's assertion that "what is good for the world will be good for us." Darwin's concept of natural selection becomes irrelevant if there is no environment in which such selection can occur. The authors introduce us to "The Next Industrial Revolution" with all oif its emerging possibilities. In subsequent chapters, they continue to examine natural capitalism in terms of "four central strategies": radical resource productivity, biomimicry, service and flow economy, and investment in it. According to the authors, natural capitalism "is about choices we can make that can start to tip economic and social outcomes in positive directions. And it is already occurring -- because it is necessary, possible, and practrical." For me, the information provided in Chapter 3 was almost incomprehensible in terms of the nature and extent of waste. Of the $9 trillion spent every year in the United States, at least $2 trillion is wasted annually. How? For example: Highway accidents ($150 billion), highway congestion ($100 billion in lost productivity), total hidden costs of driving (nearly $1 trillion), nonessential/fraudulent healthcare ($65 billion), inflated and unnecessary medical overhead ($250 billion), and crime ($450 billion). All of this waste can and should be reduced, if not eliminated. What the authors present, in effect, is a blueprint for the survival of the planet. All manner of statistical evidence supports their specific recommendations. Unless "The Next Industrial Revolution" succeeds in implementing those recommendations, natural capitalism will eventually be depleted ...and no one left to regret its loss.


Another dissenting opinion   March 10, 2000
 55 out of 74 found this review helpful

Any book that seeks to bring the economic and business system more into alignment with the natural processes of the Earth, is surely welcome. And like the other reviewers, I find much that is attractive, sensible, innovative and informative in the book. It's the things that are left out that are troubling. Why, in a work of synthesis, that proclaims the launch of a new economic paradigm, would something as fundamental as ecological cycles and their economic implementation, get such short shrift? Yes, recycling within firms is discussed at some length -- but recycling through the economic system, with firms interlinked through economically driven connections, is ignored. For that matter, it is inexplicable that the very term "industrial ecology" is completely absent from the text -- and yet the structuring of the economy so that it mimics ecological cycles should surely be one of the central aims of "natural capitalism." The inexplicable absence of such an important topic bespeaks partiality, and that spells trouble for a work of synthesis.

Another troubling oversight concerns recycling manufacturing materials. There is a lengthy discussion of corporate recycling initiatives, covering paper, carpets, fibers, food etc. All depend on individual company initiative. This is fine, as far as it goes. But when it comes to the critical issue of a whole industrial economy tackling the problem, as Japan has done, mandating through MITI regulation that all components to be used in an increasingly wide range of manufactured products are to be recyclable, over a span of years -- well, this kind of initiative is completely ignored. It can't be because the authors are ignorant of Japan -- after all they devote an entire chapter to the impressive achievements of "lean thinking" which originated in Japan. One suspects that the authors simply have no political tolerance for solutions that span more than single firms, and particularly for solutions that have governments imposing enlightened directives on all firms in an industry that are designed to give these firms a collective competitive advantage.

Natural capitalism is an attractive concept -- but it is given a very particular slant in this text. The chapter on markets, for example, is really a diatribe against market inefficiencies and management short-sightedness. One looks in vain for a constructive sense as to how markets might be harnessed more effectively to achieve natural objectives and biomimicry. The work of firms like Enron, which very creatively makes markets in resource use where none existed before, is completely ignored. Let us say that these authors have created some interesting signposts, but there is still a long journey to be accomplished before the conceptual apparatus of business and economics is in harmony with Gaia.


Natural Capitalism is a MUST READ for MBA's, CEO's, Politici   November 1, 1999
 48 out of 50 found this review helpful

Throughout this extensively researched book, the three authors (Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins) eloquently describe the mind-set required of businesses that wish to evolve their models of business successfully into the next millennium.

By providing a mix of real-world examples, coupled with logical extensions to the philosophies that have dominated main stream economic theories for the majority of the 20th century - the authors allow us to peak through the curtain - to catch a glimpse of what the world will be like in 50 years time.

Natural Capitalism espouses a vision of a world where long term profit is the driving force behind global strategy, where 'whole system thinking' dominates rather than simplistic compartmentalised agendas.

We have only just discovered the technologies that allow us to assess the impact of the techno-industrial systems which we have grown over the past 150 years. With a little imagination, and a lot of logic Natural Capitalism gently points out the way forward. Toward a trajectory where the (re)application of such systems can construct a new environment, together with the economic opportunities and rewards that come from such an evolution...

This a must read book for all entrepreneurs, businessmen, politicians, researchers, economists, environmentalists, educationalists in fact just about anybody who wishes to live both comfortably, profitably and in harmony during the next century. It argues for an extension to the economic theories that pervade organisational thinking, for a more realistic assessment of the life cycle costs involved in business processes, and above all for a more realistic assessment of the value of natural resources.

This book will help you think. This book will help you live. This book will help you work. This book will help add value to your life... READ IT!


Natural Socialism   September 22, 2000
 41 out of 93 found this review helpful

I had been excited by the title, thinking it offered some bold new green ideas - but it offers up recycling, solar energy, greater manufacturing efficiency, and leasing copiers? I agree with the environmental problems presented, but not with most of the solutions. There were a lot of "duh" moments while reading, i.e. "Innovations in manufacturing help cut...costs." or "A further key way to waste fewer materials is to improve...quality". Also, the author has a socialist bent I found disturbing. "The economy is massively inefficient," "The Capitalist system is based on accounting principals that would bankrupt any business" "The best...environment for commerce is provided by systems of governance that are based on the needs of people rather than business" "Societies need to adopt shared goals that enhance social welfare but that are not the prerogatives of specific value or belief systems" (What about freedom and democracy as values?). One chapter is called "Making markets work" - I think our market already works. The author also assigns too many ills of society to our economic theory, which is an oversimplification. Capitalism will create a new economy based on info technology that will run cleaner and more efficiently! We shouldn't still be focused on creating the new "industrial" revolution, but the new "information economy". Had they created more efficiency or more green building in Socialist countries? Seems like the Internet, green building, and fuel cells are only happening in our competitive Capitalist markets.