Description
By Gunter Pauli
Trade paperback book
ISBN 9780912111902
336 pages, 8.00 x 10.00″
Dr. Gunter Pauli is challenging the green movement he has been so much a part of to do better, to do more. He is the entrepreneur who launched Ecover; those products are probably in many of your homes. He built the largest ecologically-sound factory in the world. His participation in the Club of Rome and the founding of Zero Emissions Research Institute (ZERI) has made an immense contribution to sustainability both in terms of research, public awareness and articulating a visionary direction. He has dedicated himself to teaching and the hands-on implementation of projects that have brought healthy environments, good nutrition, health care and jobs in sustainable commerce to a myriad of places in the world
The Blue Economy is a signature work that heralds a paradigm shift in economics and sustainability. It showcases cascading business models that have multiple cash flows, examines new energy and building options, and explores 100 innovations that achieve zero pollution and build social capital.
Dr. Pauli articulates a strategic focus for bringing to market innovations that draw inspiration from how the laws of physics guide nature’s optimal use of energy and resources. He proposes business strategies that progressively entrain productive and sustainable applications of physics, then green chemistry, then biology.
By modeling natural systems and cascading locally available nutrients and energy, we can meet basic needs for survival, create full employment, and even reach abundance. Citing many examples from what nature and ecosystems achieve and from what innovators are doing now, Dr. Pauli points out ideas, methods, and products that will make life better not only for humans but for all inhabitants of our blue planet Earth.
The Blue Economy takes readers beyond the obvious and awakens the entrepreneur in all of us. The innovations it explores are founded in solid science and have been demonstrated on multiple platforms. Worldwide, committed grassroots entrepreneurs can relize three times the cash flow using open-source innovations to found competitive business models. This book will encourage thousands, perhaps millions, of us to apply a Blue Economy business model to shift us from scarcity to abundance.
The Blue Economy began as a project to find one hundred of the best nature-inspired technologies that could effect the economies of the world, while sustainably providing basic human needs – potable water, food, jobs and healthful shelter. Starting with 2,231 peer review articles Dr. Pauli found 340 innovations that could be bundled into systems that function the way ecosystems do. These were then additionally reviewed by a team of corporate strategists, expert financiers, and public policy makers. Further meetings with entrepreneurs, financial analysts, business reporters and corporate strategy academics reduced the list to one hundred. These are listed in an appendix of The Blue Economy.
Many of the innovations inspired by nature are so interesting by themselves it is easy to forget that the key to the book is their integration with real world economies as ways to provide sustainable benefits to the commons. The Blue Economy is presented in fourteen chapters, each of which investigates an aspect of the world’s economies and offers a series of innovations capable of making aspects of those economies sustainable. There are “in-a-nutshell” descriptions of the chapters with very brief examples at the Publishers site. Please see the Table of Contents (upper right column) for further details.
Praise for The Blue Economy
“Our current economic crisis is also a crisis of ethics and values which has led to the enrichment of a few and disempowerment of many. The Blue Economy advocates for a new economy, one led by innovation and creativity to cultivate the next generation of social entrepreneurship. We are in need of such an economy and no one is better placed than Gunter Pauli to offer this to the world.”
-Wendy Luhabe, Chancellor, University of Johannesburg, Chair, Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa
“The Blue Economy shows us that by securing materials and aligning production schemes as nature does, many problems of environmental degradation and pollution would disappear. However, economic policy and core business models largely ignore integrated solutions. Future economic models would do well to take into account the strategic advantage of a portfolio of innovations based on nature and physics. That will be a tall order, but Gunter Pauli’s book, with its rich presentation of how nature and economy can and must collaborate, convincingly shows the way.”
-Anders Wijkman, Member, Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, European Parliament (1999-2009)
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