Excerpts from:
Natural Capitalism
1999 -- By Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter LovinsImagine giving a speech to Parliament in 1750 predicting that within seventy years human productivity would rise to the point that one person could do the work of two hundred. The speaker would have been branded as daft or worse. Imagine a similar scene today. Experts are testifying in Congress, predicting that we will increase the productivity of our resources in the next seventy years by a factor of four, ten, even one hundred. Just as it was impossible 250 years ago to conceive of an individual's doing two hundred times more work, it is equally difficult for us today to imagine a kilowatt-hour or board foot being ten or a hundred times more productive than it is now...
Resource productivity doesn't just save resources and money; it can also improve the quality of life. Listen to the din of daily existence--the city and freeway traffic, the airplanes, the garbage trucks outside urban windows--and consider this: The waste and the noise are signs of inefficiency, and they represent money being thrown away. They will disappear as surely as did manure from the nineteenth-century streets of London and New York. Inevitably, industry will redesign everything it makes and does, in order to participate in the coming productivity revolution.
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
Natural Capitalism Quotes
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comments:
Hawkens and Lovins express opportunities as future projections in the second paragraph.
I think some important correlated issues include valuing electric car conversions. I have recently learned about Electro Auto.com, for example. The possibilities are intriguing. Another is the valuation of home made goods over machine and factory made. Even Amy's organics or Newman's Own Second Generation are really part of brand marketing psychology. Naomi Klein's book No Labels touches on this subject.
The gap between optimism and projection, and ecological and industrial awareness emerges in the simple discussion of practical, small-scale actions. This also then relates to Galbraiths final critiques of America's corporate economy, and Greider's recent book The Soul of Capitalism, which discusses a range of relevant issues, including Herman Daly's whole cost accounting and David Ellerman's philosophy of employee ownership rights. I think Muhammed Yunus' work on small business lending is also valuable in imagining ecosocial entrepreneurship and cultural values.
Post a Comment