We are now heading down a centuries-long path toward increasing the productivity of our natural capital - the resource systems upon which we depend to live - instead of our human capital.
Seeing the world around you clearly is a critical step in developing an idea for a business, carrying out that idea, and then thriving with an ongoing concern. Through choice, predilection, lack of education, impatience, or other causes, the entrepreneur lives, in a way, outside the mainstream.
What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.
Intelligent policies will be largely self-regulating in the sense that the system of incentives and standards makes it absolutely ludicrous to not move towards clean, internalized systems of cost and production.
We assume that everything's becoming more efficient, and in an immediate sense that's true; our lives are better in many ways. But that improvement has been gained through a massively inefficient use of natural resources.
We have to ask ourselves, 'What kind of world is it where a baby-food executive substitutes artificial flavoring and sugar for apple juice? What kind of businesses have we created when we even lie to infants?'
The financial capital is being concentrated by corporations, institutional investors, and even our pension funds, and being reinvested in companies that repeat this process because it provides the highest return on that financial capital.
This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Civilization needs a new operating system.
Local companies don't have to internalize their costs, and few actually do, but they tend to more often because the owners live there and they have to show their face in town, and their kids play with other kids.
Trees are being saved because of the Kindle.
The self-owned and -operated business is the freest life in the world.
If, as is natural, you focus on the corruption and on those threatened institutions that are trying to prevent change - even though they don't really know what they're trying to prevent - then you can get pessimistic.
When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on Earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data.
We can no longer prosper by increasing human productivity. The more we try to do, the more poverty we will create.
We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy Earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it.
Green business is not about tie-dyed T-shirts. It's about transforming the industrial system itself into one that looks at all the connections.
And also, more and more businesses really want to do the right thing. They feel better about themselves, their workers feel better, and so do their customers. I think this is equally true in the transnational corporations, but it is harder to express in those situations.
Somewhere along the way to free-market capitalism, the United States became the most wasteful society on the planet.