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Natural capitalism is a set of trends and economic reforms to reward energy and material efficiency - and
remove professional standards and accounting conventions that prevent such efficiencies. It emerged in the 1990s as a coherent theory of how to exploit market systems and mechanisms of neoclassical economics to save energy, discourage waste, mimic
ecology (biomimicry), and to
generally support the goals of environmentalism by reframing
commodity and product relations as a strictly service economy -
extending the services of natural capital.
When capitalized as Natural Capitalism, the term usually refers to the specific set of reforms described in
1999 by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins in the book of the same name. There is a well-developed theory of natural capital that predates this work, and some generic use of the phrase
to apply to environmental economics. The book and
additional material are available online at the book's promotion site: http://www.natcap.org/
A related, sometimes overlapping movement believes that networks are inefficient ways to provide services, and advocates
autonomous buildings.
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