Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
sense to make natural resources 10 or 100 times as productive. By tunnel-
ing through many, many cost barriers, indeed we can do that, not just at
reasonable cost, but profitably. It is cheaper to do it than not to do it. It is
cheaper to save the resources than to buy them, just as protecting the cli-
mate is profitable because it is cheaper to save fuel than to buy it, let alone
burn it.
Advanced resource productivity is only one of four main elements of
natural capitalism. Another one is to redesign industry on biological lines
with closed loops and no waste. As Bill McDonough says, waste equals
food. Everything's waste is somebody else's food. Therefore nothing is left
over, everything is used. Third, we need to change the economy from the
episodic acquisition of goods to a continuous flow of service and value at
the pull of the customer. Fourth, as any prudent capitalist would do, we
need to reinvest in restoring, sustaining, and expanding the stock of natural
capital, our scarcest resource. These are, in a way, not such novel ideas, but
they are very powerful ideas, and, I think, especially so because they are not
just a better way to make money. They also get at some of our most pro-
found social problems. Lack of work, lack of hope, and shortages of satis-
faction and security are often not just isolated pathologies but result from
the intimate connections among the waste of resources, of money, and of
people. The solutions are equally intertwined. For example, if you fire the
unproductive tons, gallons, and kilowatt hours, you then have a chance to
keep the people, who will have more and better work to do.
I think historians may look back and say that the end of the cold war, via
the fall of communism, was indeed a landmark in the intellectual transition
at the close of the twentieth century. But equally significant, I think, will be
the end of the war against the Earth and the rise of natural capitalism. Many
businesses, in practice, are already gaining huge competitive advantages
from applying these principles. Companies that don't try hard to do so will
not be a problem, because they won't be around. Those firms that survive
the transition to natural capitalism will, I think, thereby be creating the sal-
vation of nature, the catalyst for a just society, and the new cornerstone of
commerce.That would be, indeed, a useful invention.
