Natural Capitalism

to one another with the product kept in continuous flow. The goal is to have no stops, no delays, no backflows, no inventories,

Half of all textile fibers come from cotton, whose cultivation uses one-fourth of all agrochemicals6 and of all insecticides.

the Bellcomb47 system of cardboard-like honeycombs sandwiched between sheets of cheap strandwood (pressed like chipboard, but using tough fibrous strands of wood). The sandwiches are prefabricated in many precisely cut shapes that fit tightly together like a child’s miniature house kit—only this kit can be full-sized. Two unskilled adults could ass

With nearly ten thousand new people arriving on earth every hour,

if there is to be prosperity in the future, society must make its use of resources vastly more productive—deriving four, ten, or even a hundred times as much benefit from each unit of energy, water, materials, or anything else borrowed from the planet and consumed.

Agriculture uses about two-thirds of all the water drawn from the world’s rivers, lakes, and aquifers.

crop-drying, which is often needed to keep crops from mildewing, uses about 5 percent of direct U.S. on-farm energy.

This hidden carbon stock, often upward of 44 tons of carbon per acre, is at risk of mobilization into the air if insensitive farming practices defeat living systems’ tendency to fix carbon into soil biota.

Range management based on an understanding of the ecology of each piece of land, often using more cattle, more intensely resident for shorter and less frequent periods,

management-intensive rotational grazing (MIRG)