Natural Capitalism

A key variable in production levels is clearly how long the widgets last. If

INVESTING IN NATURAL CAPITAL. This works toward reversing worldwide planetary destruction through reinvestments in sustaining, restoring, and expanding stocks of natural capital, so that the biosphere can produce more abundant ecosystem services and natural resources.

downstream savings merit the greatest emphasis. The reason is simple.

Singapore’s prosperity could have turned it into another bumper-to-bumper Bangkok, whose congestion—gridlocking the average driver the equivalent of forty-four full days a year—is estimated to reduce Thailand’s entire GDP by about one-sixth. Yet Singapore is rarely congested, because it taxes cars heavily, auctions the right to buy them, imposes a

In the standard industrial model, the creation of value is portrayed as a linear sequence of extraction, production, and distribution: Raw materials are introduced. (Enter nature, stage left.) Labor uses technologies to transform these resources into products, which are sold to create profits. The wastes from production processes, and soon the prod

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.

their true costs. 2. Foster genuine competition between different modes of transportation. 3. Emphasize sensible land use over actual physical mobility—a symptom of being in the wrong place.

slows resource depletion at one end of the value chain, lowers pollution at the other end, and provides a basis to increase worldwide employment with meaningful jobs.

SERVICE AND FLOW ECONOMY. This calls for a fundamental change in the relationship between producer and consumer, a shift from an economy of goods and purchases to one of service and flow.