Review: "Natural Capitalism" by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins

"Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution" by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins is a fascinating exercise in reperception. I give it a solid +.

This environmentalist book is neither liberal nor conservative: it is pure green, meaning both earth-friendly and money-centered.

The philosophy of NC is based on a simple fact: at the beginning of The Industrial Revolution, resources and materials were bountiful-- it was workers who were scarce. The whole system was constructed to squeeze as much as possible out of labor with little regard for physical capital.

Now, two centuries later, we are in the opposite situation. We have an overabundance of people, and scarce resources. We need a second Industrial Revolution, in which we retool the system to optimize it for use of materials and energy and water, even if that means using more people. Fortunately, this is possible: we have made tremendous advances in materials science, engineering, and chemistry that could potentially bring about huge savings in our industrial processes-- savings of resources that amount to vast savings of cash as well as preservation of the environment.

Hawken, Lovins, and Lovins (HLL) have noticed that our society has an unspoken rule: saving the environment and making money must be traded off against each other. If you want a "green" factory, you'll barely make a profit. Companies that comply with sewage regulations must do so at a cost to their bottom line.

But is that true? Not necessarily! After all, if you can cut half the energy and water use out of your production line, won't that cost you less? If you can avoid paying disposal fees by eliminating the toxic chemicals from your factory, won't that save you money? If you can make a product using 75% of the material that your competitor does, and ship it in a lighter crate, aren't you going to beat them out? Green can mean greenbacks.

Practicing Natural Capitalism means adhering to four basic principles that amount to a strategic plan for inciting the next Industrial Revolution:

Radical resource productivity. This is the principle of wasting as little as possible in terms of materials, energy, and every part of the value chain, even those that are not tracked in traditional accounting (such as the health of the biosphere).
Biomimicry. Evolution can teach us a lot; it's been operating for hundreds of millions of years. An oyster can make a pearl at normal ocean temperature using only the energy it ingests, producing no toxic byproducts; why should we need vast furnaces, motors, and pumps that spew out harmful wastes in order to construct materials that are mechanically inferior to pearl? Modeling industrial processes after Nature can result in vast increases in efficiency, which ultimately saves money as well as the environment.
Service and flow economy. Instead of thinking of ourselves as consumers of goods that we buy, we can start to restructure our economic perceptions toward the continuous flow of quality materials and service through our lives. We don't want to own a carpet, per se-- we want the effect of a clean, soft floor covering. Renting could be a viable possibility, especially if you get "upgrades" every couple years and free cleaning service. If companies think of themselves as providing these sorts of services and experiences for their customers, they can come up with creative ways of fulfilling the customers' true needs while expending far less in energy and materials.
Investing in natural capital. This means making a conscious choice to direct financial capital toward products and processes that will result in a sustainable ecosystem and social cohesion. If done sensibly, the economic savings of such an effort will be in the trillions of dollars.

NC is a vast compendium of statistics and real-world examples where relatively simple changes in the way a product was made or a process carried out resulted in huge savings on the company's bottom line and for the environment. There are also chapters on improving the automobile (the "Hypercar"), designing better buildings, and planning more human-friendly cities. The authors are consultants who have actually helped bring about some of these changes. I found myself wanting to hire them to design me a kick-ass super-efficient house, like their headquarters at the Rocky Mountain Institute!

I have a couple of bones to pick with the book, despite HLL's perception-altering analysis. First, it is easy to see that even though the physical changes associated with adopting NC are often simple, the mental reperception for the companies and politicians involved is vast, a point which is largely glossed over or given only cursory attention. The result is that the book seems to assume a straightforward technological fix for problems that are in fact embedded deep within our social and political systems. Federal subsidies, zoning laws, and corporate accounting methods are not going to change overnight-- if ever. I would have liked to see more practical suggestions for implementing the vast psychological and sociological adjustments that must accompany NC.

Another shortcoming of the book is that it is overoptimistic in some cases. HLL talk about all these wild new technologies that will transform the world as if they are already in production, just waiting to be fully utilized. But in some cases, I know it isn't true. I wasn't intimately familiar with many of the innovations they describe, but in the one or two cases where I was, I thought they overstated the positive qualities of the technology while skipping over its drawbacks. That made me concerned that many of the "superior" technologies they touted were in fact still in laboratory development, with those superior qualities actually being theoretical, not yet proven.

But if you overlook those details to the main message, this is a really worthwhile book. At last, we can get beyond the tired old arguments of Exxon vs. Greenpeace and Ford vs. The Sierra Club. Here is the middle ground: you don't have to choose EITHER the environment OR economic growth. You can have both with the right kind of industrial processes, city planning, buildings, cars, and manufacturing. And then we all win, including the Earth and the humans on it.

There is more information on NC (and the entire text of the book) online: http://www.naturalcapitalism.org/.