Gil Friend

Reader faves: Best books about green business

May 15, 2011

Thanks for your emails and comments to my post last week, Best books in corporate sustainability? Not surprisingly, there was no consensus on what books are best–probably 200 books in were recommended–although many, many people suggested the writings of Paul Hawken and Bill McDonough. I don’t want to overwhelm you by listing all of the books that were recommended by email,  but here are some of my favorites as well as a few selections from last week’s comments, which can be found here.

From sustainability consultant Gil Friend, the ceo of Natural Logic:

My current picks:
> New: Climate Capitalism, Hunter Lovins & Boyd Cohen
> Venerable: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth – R. Buckminster Fuller
> Practical: The Truth About Green Business – Gil Friend
> Inspiring: Confessions of a Radical Industrialist – Ray Anderson

There are many more good ones, so here’s TriplePundit.com’s [year-old] list of the “must read” sustainability books:
http://www.triplepundit.com/2010/02/sustainable-mba-crash-course/

A classic suggestion came from Keli Rae McMillen of Winter Park, CO, who send me a PDF of essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as this quote from Emerson’s History:

In old Rome the public roads beginning at the Forum proceeded north, south, east, west, to the centre of every province of the empire, making each market-town of Persia, Spain, and Britain pervious to the soldiers of the capital: so out of the human heart go, as it were, highways to the heart of every object in nature, to reduce it under the dominion of man. A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. His faculties refer to natures out of him, and predict the world he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose air. He cannot live without a world.
(Coincidentally, I’ll have some news about Emerson later this month but I can’t say more now.)

Steve Schein, a longtime business exec who now teaches sustainability at Southern Oregon University, sent a Top 20 list: [click to continue…]

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Shareholders say: Tell the truth about fracking

March 7, 2010

IMG_0697_hydraulic_ranch

No form of energy–not solar, wind, hydropower, obviously not coal or oil–comes without environmental tradeoffs.

One promising new energy source–a vast supplies of natural gas, trapped in shale deep beneath the earth’s surface–is getting renewed scrutiny these days, and for good reason.

While natural gas is often called a “bridge” to a clean energy future, critics are bombing the bridge with a frack attack, says energy policy analyst Kevin Book of Clearview Energy Partners.

Book was referring to the drumbeat of questions being raised by environmentalists, community activists, reporters and  members of Congress about  hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a process during which water, chemicals and sand are pumped underground at  high pressure to cause tiny fissures in rock and force natural gas to the surface.

In the weeks ahead, new pressures will come from activist shareholders of a dozen energy companies. They’ve filed shareholder resolutions asking the companies to take a hard look at fracking and its risk, and they will raise the issue at annual shareholder meetings. [click to continue…]

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