Natural Capitalism [antikvár]

Natural Capitalism as an idea and thesis for a book emerged in 1994, the year after the publication of The Ecology of Commerce. After meeting with and speaking to different business, government, and academic institutions in the aftermath of the book's publication, it became clear to Hawken that industry and government needed an overall biological and social framework within which the transformation of commerce could be accomplished and practiced. To that end, articles and papers were written that became the basis of a book about natural capitalism. A key element of this theory was the idea that the economy was shifting from an emphasis on humán productivity to a radical increase in resource productivity This shift would provide more meaningful familywage jobs, a better worldwide standard of living to those in need, and a dramatic reduction of humankind's impact upon the environment. So while the context for Natural Capitalism existed in a theoretical framework, the exposition did not. Contemporaneously, Amory and Hunter Lovins were coming to the same conclusion: that a shared framework was needed that could harness the talent of business to solve the world s deepest environmental and social problems. Both were writing Factor Four: Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use for publication in Germany in 1995. The senior author of Factor Four, Ernst von Weizsácker, among Europe s top innovators in environmental policy, had teamed up with the Lovinses to pool the experience of their respective nonprofit research centers - Wuppertal Institute in Germany and Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) in Colorado. The three authors had assembled fifty case studies of at least quadrupled resource productivity to detail how, across whole economies, people could live twice as well but use half as much material and energy. Factor Four showed that such striking gains in resource efficiency could be profitable, and that obstacles to their implementation could be hurdled by combining innovations in business practice and in public policy Both Factor Four and The Ecology of Commerce urged the priváté sector to move to the vanguard of environmental solutions. Factor Four