Attending Berkeley in the law and city planning programs really opened up my eyes to numerous legal and policy issues that face our country and world.
I started this blog as a test run to have a blog that discusses topics in our current laws and policies. I hope to eventually have more content on here. But for now this blog will have to be a few jotted notes until I have more time to develop it.
Friday, May 18, 2012
Monday, June 13, 2011
Natural Capitalism is best described as a monumental work that both in breath and depth describes today’s problems of social, economic and environmental costs from our current models of industrial production and regulation, and demonstrates how successful new models of production can solve these problems. This work shows how these new models can give us both the economic development and environmental solutions we need today to solve much of the world’s environmental problems. This is such that this work should serve as a reference for everyone from a CEO to an institutional manager to an enlightened voter or consumer, as a collection of solutions that show that new business organizations can be good for the environment.
Writers, Paul Hawken, Amory and Hunter Lovins, expose a world where current single problem-single solutions models produced by both market and government innovations have created multiple layered problems that today produce significant environmental damage that restrict our people’s potential to create and reach greater heights of economic, environmental and human advancement. They go through each major problem area and show how closed-loop solutions exist at every level that increase profit, productivity and innovation, and decrease social and economic costs and environmental degradation.
Solutions and business models are described that show that industry can reinvent its production cycles to increase profits and make a world that is environmentally friendly, by among other things, moving to product models that deliver needed services (e.g. transportation or entertainment) instead of just products that ultimately produce waste (e.g. cellphones or televisions that ultimately have to be replaced).
The authors highlight and demonstrate existing success stories from entrepreneurs that exemplify this revolutionary way to solve human needs. All together it sums up to demonstrate the origins of the next industrial revolution from an old capitalism with significant social costs to a smarter, leaner, more innovative capitalist structure that works harmoniously with social goals of environmentalism.
This work also provides a broad and deep look at how industry benefits at every step from government decisions that often create perverse incentives, which hide the true costs of industry. Natural Capitalism shows how modifying regulations, privatizing certain government functions, and creating proper price signals can result in a more efficient distribution of responsibilities that show the true costs of public infrastructure and private production of goods.
Moreover, the book goes at great lengths to show how both private and public incentives can be harmonized to embrace global planning solutions that leverage the wastes of one product as a gain for another to achieve zero waste.
One chief example of this new global planning scheme being applied is found in the City of Curitiba, Brazil. Through utilizing the new type of planning and problem solving described above, the City turned its perceived negative effects of overcrowding, poverty, and environmental degradation to both support economic development and human development. Natural Capitalism explains how this third world city tackled all of the city’s problems by turning everything it possessed, both liabilities and assets, into a harmonious mutually supportive network of production that propelled the City to gain the status of a first world city, in many respects putting developed trophy cities like New York or London to shame.
In sum, a better form of productive society is out there that creates environmental sustainable solutions that are economically profitable and Natural Capitalism is its herald. It is a must read for every voter, consumer or business manager in the United States to help create a smarter more green and profitable private market and a more enlightened government.
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