As Sustainable Industries prepares to mark its five-year anniversary in 2008, we thought we’d use the annual TrendWatch issue to give a shout-out to the writers and thinkers who came before us. We sought the advice of key professors at some of the nation’s leading programs in sustainable business education: What are the classics, the crème de la crème, the“must read” books for sustainable business leaders?

Ultimately, we selected Paul Hawken’s classic text “The Ecology of Commerce” as the No. 1 in sustainability. The pick may not surprise many of our readers—the book has recently seen a renaissance of interest: HarperCollins, the books’ publisher, is reprinting it as a Classic, and Hawken says he’s working a revised edition. In 2007, Hawken told Sustainable Industries, “‘The Ecology of Commerce,’ when published, was a pariah book. Writers at Forbes, BusinessWeek and other publications reviewed it, but editors killed the reviews. Although the business press reviewed my previous books...‘The Ecology of Commerce’ was shunned.”

The book became a best seller, despite indifference from the business press, but Sustainable Industries asked reviewer Aaron Berg to take a closer read of this landmark text.

"Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability"
By Paul Hawken
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To say Paul Hawken is a visionary and that he was ahead of his time in 1993 might be an understatement. Even with “green” being the zeitgeist of 2007, as a society we are nowhere near the type of sustainable economy envisioned by Hawken. But now, nearly 15 years down the road, I think we want to be. And that’s the point of any good economics theory, really: We don’t have to accept the economy as it is. Our economy should be dictated by our values as a society now, rather than what our values were in the past.

The rules of modern business were established hundreds of years ago, when natural resources were seemingly limitless. Today, we find ourselves faced with challenges that are most likely a direct result of our business practices. The traditional belief has been that business and the environment are innately at odds with each other. Hawken doesn’t seem to believe this. In fact, he argues just the opposite: that business can be the solution to our environmental problems. His philosophy is that we must rewrite the rules of business to create an economy that places value on restoration, rather than degradation, of the natural world.