Overview
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.
Author Information
Gunter Pauli
Author: The Blue Economy
Gunter Pauli was born in 1956. He is a graduate from St. Ignatius Loyola’s University in Belgium, Economics (1979) and obtained his MBA from INSEAD (1982) in Fontainebleau, France. He also has an honorary master in Systemic Design from the Politecnico di Torino (Italy) and an honorary doctorate in economics from the University of Pecs (Hungary). Pauli has lived on 4 continents, is fluent in 7 languages and is a resident of Japan since 1994. He is father of 5 sons, 1 daughter (adopted) and married to Katherina Bach.
He has been active as an entrepreneur, lecturer and commentator in culture, science, politics, sustainability innovation, and the environment.
He built the first ecological factory when Chairman and CEO of Ecover, that under his leadership became a worldwide acclaimed ecological building, being completed in 1992.
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The science behind the 340 new, green technologies this book describes are fascinating and encouraging opportunities to entrepreneur an emissions-free society.