“I don't want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.”— John Davison Rockefeller. John D. Rockefeller was an
American business tycoon and industrialist.
I quoted him to illustrate that how capitalism really works, and this book
serves as a cornerstone to refute the claim that exploiting capital will
sustainably maximize wealth without posing any threat in the long term.
Even after 19 years of its
publication, “Natural Capitalism: Creating the next Industrial Revolution”
co-authored by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins, is still so
opportune and meaningful. The book is
full of ideas of innovation and revolutionary examples which businesses or
entrepreneurs can take inspiration from. Authors tried to distinguish Natural
Capitalism from Capitalism, but, I believe, an integral part of the economic
system called capitalism, is natural capital which has been ignored from the
very beginning by not taking into account the environmental footprint or
irreversible repercussions of the industrial actions into the cost of
production. This is high time we got out of the short-term wealth maximization
mentality for environment is where all the economic activities take place and
we have been granted only one earth. “First,
many of the services we receive from living systems have no known substitutes
at any price; for example, oxygen production by green plants. This was
demonstrated memorably in 1991-93 when scientists operating the $200 million
Biosphere 2 experiment in Arizona discovered that it was unable to maintain
life-supporting oxygen levels for the eight people living inside. Biosphere 1,
a.k.a Planet Earth performs this task daily at no charge for 6 billion people.”
We have been exploiting nature— clean
air, water, fertile soil, rainfall, ecological systems etc. as if it were free:
Has any grain producing company tried to determine the value of 1mm of rainfall
and to incorporate it in the "Liabilities" section of Balance Sheet or in the COGS? Poorly-designed business
processes, population growth and wasteful consumption (both by individuals and
businesses) are the main causes of depletion of natural resources and obstacles
towards sustainable economy.
Automobile transportation is one
of the biggest industries of the world and in the chapter 2 of the book, the
authors talk about how a transformation in the energy source and material can
prevent the destruction of natural capital. Polymer composites instead of steel
to make the body of car and hydrogen fuel cell to produce electricity in the
cleanest and most efficient way are the two most game-changing ideas, but sadly
yet to be put into effect in a commercial way. Coupled with sensible design of
cities that limits use of car, Hypercar could reverse the erosion of natural
capital.
Chapter 3 is eye-opening exposing
the amount of waste we produce (in 1999) because we fail to “close the loop” or
recycle like biological systems do. “Two
quarts of gasoline and a thousand quarts of water are required to produce a
quart of Florida orange juice. One ton of paper requires the use of 98 tons of
various resources.” “Total annual wastes in the United States, excluding
wastewater, now exceed 50 trillion pounds a year. (A trillion is a large
number: To count to 50 trillion at the rate of 1 per second would require the
entire lifetimes of 24,000 people.” We also waste human capital. Rikers
Island (in the US) is the world’s largest penal colony which needs an annual
budget of $860 (in 2015) million with an average daily population of 10,000
inmates. Isn’t there something profoundly wrong with the design of the society
that incarcerates so many people at an overwhelming cost to the society itself?
The authors emphasized the fact
that the society that wastes its resources wastes its people and vice versa by
providing statistics of unemployment and disemployment rates which are rising
faster than employment rate globally.
Companies are downsizing to increase the profit one more percent; but
greater gains can come not from eliminating people, but from eliminating those
wasted energy used by ACs to keep the temperature exceedingly lower in summer
days, those extra barrels of oil that were mishandled and those wasted papers
to produce hundreds copies of reports which could easily be e-mailed.
The book is also filled with lots
of examples of how businesses benefitted from small and smart changes in design
and process making the system more efficient and cost-effective by wringing
more service from a given artifact. Remanufacturing and recycling are
essentially closing the loop and “saving energy equivalent to the output of
five giant power stations”. For example, big companies like Xerox and IBM
employ “Dedistributing” where products come back from customers for remanufacture.
Chapter 5 and 14 are my personal
favorite where in chapter 5 authors underscores the importance of building self-sufficient
green buildings as oppose to just laying out some concrete blocks. Because we
spend ninety percent of our time in them (nowadays it should be more than
ninety five percent) and “one-third of our total energy and two-thirds of our
electricity” are consumed by them. Also billions of tons of raw materials are being
used annually to construct them and a major part of it goes wasted instead of
going into the building because of improper planning. Incorporation of natural
air and light handling, solar design, strong sense of community etc. would
contribute to astonishing energy savings as well as to an increment of quality
and value of human lives. One solution could be paying compensation to
designers and architects on the basis of what they save in terms of energy
consumption by the building, instead of paying them a percentage of the cost of
the building. There are also various examples of innovations in the book, for
example, photovoltaic power generation, superwindows, which could make buildings
more efficient optimizing passive solar heat gains and passive cooling.
The highlight of chapter 14 is
how Curitiba, an archetypal Brazilian city with chaos, poverty, unemployment
and pollution at its center of existence, became a standard in sustainable
urban planning by being the greenest city or the most innovative city in the
world in only three decades. Combining entrepreneurship, good governance and
vital leadership, Jaime Lerner, an architect and also the mayor of the city by
treating all its citizens not as burden but as its resource. If someone is
intrigued by the book, but does not want to read the whole book, she or he may
go through this one chapter.
Industrialization of farming may
seem to be a triumph of technology, but actually it uncomfortably worsens the
situation. Despite improving efficiencies, “….farming
still uses ten times as much fossil-fueled energy in producing food as it returns
in food energy. Our food, as ecologist Howard Odum remarked, is made wholly of
oil with oil left over.” Industrial agriculture destroys soil’s organic
richness and most civilizations collapsed because they destroyed their topsoil.
It also uses about two-thirds of all water drawn from the world’s rivers, lakes
and aquifers. One-third of world’s cereal are being fed to livestock which
turns only 10-45% of grain inputs into meat.
Organic farming, Biointensive minifarming could be the answer.
There is a chapter dedicated to
fresh water usage and designs to minimize water waste. Charging households for
their actual use rather than a flat rate combined with education and awareness
program usually saves up to a third of water usage. Harvesting rainwater, using
of graywater for flushing toilets, biological treatment plants in neighborhoods
are proving to be pioneering.
The economic viability of the businesses who not only want workers, but also thinkers suggesting and designing innovative ways incorporating the value of natural and human capital should be considered by businesses. The simple proposition of this
great work is that all capital be valued. If it is not practically possible to
attach a value to a hundred years old tree, one may ask how much it would cost
to make a new one. How much would it cost to make a new atmosphere after we are
done destroying this, a new culture, a new Earth?