This book throughly presents sustainable real estate development. It answers the basic questions of how, what, when, why and who with text and photos illustrating numerous case studies.

It is written for a wide and concerned audience, composed of real estate professionals, financiers and designers. This book is not technical. It is a conceptual book and guides the reader toward sustainable solutions.

This subject is very large and this book is necessarily a summary, which includes recent projects.

This book does not "preach to the choir". It addresses difficult obstacles to the sustainable development paradigm and provides workable solutions.

This book provides an inspiring catalog of the many ways that entrepreneurs have turned the scarcity of natural resources and threats to the environment into successful business advantages. There are endless examples of how people have achieved success reducing energy use and waste, creating technologies to create clean water, more natural building materials and urban designs, and healthier food, to name just a few. If you're turned off by the amorality of business in the 1990s and the idea of growth at whatever price, this book can help instill faith in the resorative potential of business. As such, it's a good introduction to sustainability.

The book's weakness is that it implies that with a little greening here you can have it all. It's long on the "natural" but very short on considering what kind of capitalism will be necessary to make our economy truly sustainable. As co-author Paul Hawken admitted in the introduction of an earlier book ("The Ecology of Commerce"), almost no business presently operating is truly sustainable. As economist Herman Daly has pointed out, even with increased resource efficiency, northern nations still consume too many resources too inefficiently for the world to accept much more growth, a sobering thought as China begins to gear up its automotive industry. To be sustainable, we will have to accept that the world economy must live within limits, which represents a true change of paradigm and not the incremental improvement that Natural Capitalism implies is sufficient. Without accepting such limits, many of the good ideas presented in this book (such as fuel cells, lightweight vehicles made of kevlar or other materials, to name just two examples) will likely remain uneconomical and unutilized.

Natural Capitalism is a good, solid read, but it is not a quick read. Each chapter tackles a different aspect of our society that affects the world environment, from air pollution to our water supply to economics to agriculture. The issues are closely examined, and the reader is provided a refreshing update on the great progress we are making, or have the potential to achieve in maximizing efficiency, conserving resources, reducing our waste, and so forth. This book would make a great text for an environmental entrepreneurship class. As the issues are explored, one cannot help but consider all of the opportunity that exists to develop businesses that embrace the concepts of Natural Capitalism, embracing the model that nature has perfected over billions of years. A key point that the book returns to again and again is that our natural environment is a model of efficiency and conservation. There is no waste in the natural world. Also, the book does not suggest abandoning the market-based economy, but rather that we include all factors in our assessment of the true cost of our actions. The current model of economics in the US does not account for natural capital, such as the value of having long term reserves of oil, water, air, trees, etc.

Read this book if you are an aspiring eco-entrepreneur, a student of economics, or a businessperson in virtually any field.

This was one of those books that took me weeks to read simply because of the fact that it was so disturbingly real and struck home so well that when read before bed there was no sleeping to be had. I had the honor of seeing Paul Hawkin speak in person at the Oregon Sustainability Forum this month in downtown Portland. It is obvious how moving Paul finds the issues confronted in this book, that are faced by every member of the human race, and every other race, on the planet today. The authors of Natural Capitalism bring heartening, encouraging, and inspiring tales of communities that are successfully implementing the concepts presented here as well as the grim facts associated with current capitalist, industrialist society. If you are at all interested in the future of business, your community, and the planet I highly recomment this book.

Here are some favorite passages:

This section relating directly to my life in a cubicle company :o) :"People are not simple uniform entities that thrive in a box. They are, rather, complex living organisms that evolved in and still function best in a dynamic and divers environment."..."People are happier, healthier, and more alert unders subtly dynamic than under constant conditions."..."Buildings that are alternately a solar oven or a walk-in refrigerator, with discomfort and energy bills to match, are coming to be seen as unacceptable. In the rapidly arriving era of green design, buildings that cost more than they should to construct and run and that work worse, look worse, and make informed customers feel worse than they demand will simply stand empty. - P 88

"At first, Winston Churchill said, we shape our buildings, and then our buildings shape our lives. This high purpose requires designs that celebrate life over sterility, restraint over extravagance, beauty over tawdriness. Green buildings do not poison the air with fumes nor the soul with artificiality Instead, they create delight when entered, serenity and health when occupied, and regret when departed. They grow organically in and from their place, integrating people within the rest of the natural world; do no harm to their occupants or to the earth; foster more diverse and abundant life than they borrow; take less than they give back. Achieving all this hand in hand with functionality and profitability requires a level of design integration that is not merely a technical task but an asthetic and spiritual challenge. - P 110

"In the face of this relentless loss of living systems, fractious political conflicts over laws, regulations, and business economics appear petty and small. It is not that these issues are unimportant, but that they ignore the larger context. Are we or are we not systematically reducing life and the capacity to re-create order on earth? This is the level on which our discource should take place, for it is there that a framework for both understanding and action can be formulated. In spite of what such signals as the GDP and the Dow Jones Industrial Average indicate, it is ultimately the capacity of the photosynthetic world and its nutrient flows that determine the quality of life on earth." - P 149

Many of the anecdotes related in this book appear again in "Natural Capitalism", a more recent work by Lovins et al. There are enough differences, however, to merit an inspection. The authors have a real knack for research. You'll probably be surprised by some of the facts they lay before you, e.g. 50-100 kg of nitrates fall out of the sky per hectare in central Europe.