Natural Capitalism – Paul Hawken

Natural Capitalism enables organizations to increase profitability and efficiency while becoming more environmentally and socially responsible. The concept integrates the “triple bottom line,” (a term that refers to the business goals of profitability, environmental awareness, and social responsibility) into a single bottom line, fostering greater levels of operational efficiency within organizations.

These principles, outlined in the book Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolutions, co-authored by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, are the basis for Hunter Lovins’ consulting and educational services. The book has been hailed by, among others, former President Clinton and acclaimed by Harvard business professor Peter Senge as “the Bible for the next industrial revolution.” It has sold over 100,000 copies in 12 languages.

Natural Capitalism as an idea and thesis for a book emerged in 1994, the year after the publication of “The Ecology of Commerce”. After meeting with and speaking to different business, government, and academic institutions in the aftermath of the book’s publication, it became clear to Hawken that industry and government needed an overall biological and social framework within which the transformation of commerce could be accomplished and practiced. To that end, articles and papers were written that became the basis of a book about natural capitalism. A key element of this theory was the idea that the economy was shifting from an emphasis on human productivity to a radical increase in resource productivity. This shift would provide more meaningful family-wage jobs, a better worldwide standard of living to those in need, and a dramatic reduction of humankind’s impact upon the environment. So while the context for “Natural Capitalism” existed in a theoretical framework, the exposition…