The Ecology of Commerce

Reading The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken.

Hawken argues that there are design flaws in the way we do business, and that business needs to not only adapt in order to become sustainable, but also restorative. To model itself after nature's process.

Here are some interesting tidbits...

The problem is, in part, in the language of business ... "In the language and accounting of classical economics, resources do not technically exist until they are drilled, extracted, pumped, or cut; in biological accounting, the principle is reversed."
...and...
"If Hawaiians had 138 ways to describe falling rain, we can assume that rain had a profound importance in their lives. Business, on the other hand, only has two words for prift - gross and net. The extraordinarily complex manner in which a company recovers profit is reduced to a single numerically neat and precise concept ... it does not factor in whether people or places were exploited, resources depleted, communities enhanced, lives lost, or whether the entire executive suite was in such turmoil as to require stress consultants ... "(p10)

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He quotes a farmer / essayist named Wendell Berry: "However destructive may be the policies of the government and the methods and products of the corporation, the root of the problem is always to be found in private life. We must learn to see that every problem that concerns us ... always leads straight to the question of how we live. The world is being destroyed -- no doubt about it -- by the greed of the rich and powerful. It is also being destroyed by popular demand. There are not enough rich and powerful people to consume the wohole world; for that, the rich and powerful need the help of countless ordinary people." (p15)

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"... 27 years worth of stored solar energy is burned and released by utilities, cars, houses, factories, and farms every 24 hours." (p22) Translate - what the earth (natural processes, God...) took 10,000 days to create we un-create in a single day.