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Paul Hawken thinks we’ve had it backward. Instead of taxing good things like income, Hawken would like to see government tax bad things like pollution or excessive use of energy or virgin materials. Taxing fuels based on their carbon content, for instance (more carbon is more damaging), would encourage use of low-polluting fuels like natural gas in

MANHATTAN AS MECCA If—in America—dense, transit-served cities are better, then New York is the best. This is the clear and convincing message of David Owen’s Green Metropolis, certainly the most important environmental text of the past decade. This book deserves a bit more of our attention, so profound is the revolution in thinking that it represen

industrial parks whose tenants will constitute an industrial ecosystem in which one company will feed upon the nontoxic and useful wastes of another.

Making decentralization and empowerment work on a large scale is no easy feat. Top and middle managers are effectively asked to share power and give up some control. To make it work, companies have found that they needed to very clearly spell out the kind of Green leadership that they expect from people in senior and middle management.

Nike has pioneered a whole new approach to shoe design: Considered Design. It is built to “reduce waste throughout the design and development process, use environmentally preferred materials, and eliminate toxics.”3