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.

Steve Schein, a longtime business exec who now teaches sustainability at Southern Oregon University, sent a Top 20 list:

1) Blackburn, William, The Sustainability Handbook – The Complete Management Guide to Achieving Social, Economic, and Environmental Responsibility (2007), Environmental Law Institute, Washington, DC.

2) Savitz, Andrew, The Triple Bottom Line – How Today’s Best-Run Companies are Achieving Economic, Social, and Environmental Success (2006), Jossey – Bass

3) Esty, Daniel and Winston, Andrew, Green to Gold (2008), Yale University Press

4) Edwards, Andres R., The Sustainability Revolution – Portrait of a Paradigm Shift, (2005), New Society Publishers – BC, Canada

5) Hawken, P., Lovins, A., Lovins, Hunter, Natural Capitalism – Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, (1999), Little, Brown, and Company – New York

6) Henderson, Hazel, Ethical Markets – Creating the Green Economy, (2006) Chelsea Green Publishing Company, White River Junction, Vermont

7) Brown, Lester R., Plan B 4.0 – Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble, (2010) Norton & Co. – New York

Jones, Van, The Green Collar Economy – How One Solution Can Fix our Two Biggest Problems, (2008) Harper One Publishing

9) Senge, Peter, The Necessary Revolution – How Individuals and Organizations are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World, (2008) Doubleday – New York

10) Hawken,Paul, Ecology of Commerce – A Declaration of Sustainability, (2010) Harper Business – New Yor

11) Schendler, Auden, Getting Green Done – Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution – (2009) Public Affairs – New York

12) Flannery, Tim, Now or Never – Why We Must Act Now to End Climate Change and Create a Sustainable Future – (2009) Atlantic Monthly – New York

13) McDonough, William, Braungart, Michael – Cradle to Cradle – Remaking the Way we Make Things – (2002) North Point Press – New York

14) Hollender, Jeffrey, The Responsibility Revolution – How the Next Generation of Business Will Win – (2010) Josey Bass – San Francisco

15) Barlow, Maude, Blue Covenant – The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water – (2007) W.W. Norton – New York

16) McKibben, Bill – Eaarth – Making a Life on a Tough New Planet – (2010) Times Books – New York

17) Douglas, Dave, Papadopoulos, Dave, Citizen Engineer – A Handbook for Socially Responsible Engineering  (2010)

18) Cramer, Aron, Karabell, Zachary, Sustainable Excellence – The Future of Business in a Fast-Changing World, (2010) Rodale Books – New York

19) Hawken, Paul, Blessed Unrest – How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming – (2007) Viking – New York

20) Werbach, Adam, Strategy for Sustainability – A Business Manifesto, (2009) Harvard Business Press – Boston

Paulina Migalska, who’s active in the D.C. professional chapter of Net Impact, is a Tom Friedman fan. She writes:

(1) The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman – Yes, I know book is not on CSR but one quote from the book really stuck with me. Hence my pragmatic viewpoint of CSR, even though my true love is social enterprise. “Sometimes the best way to change the world is by getting the big players to do the right things for the wrong reasons, because waiting for them to do the right things for the right reason can mean forever.”

(2) The Blue Sweater by Jacqueline Novogratz – from the first pages of the book I couldn’t stop thinking: ” Jacqueline, you’re amazing, I agree with you more than you agree with yourself”

(3) Hot, Flat, and Crowded again by Thomas Friedman – he may sound gloomy at times but one has got to admire his pragmatism.

Dror Etzion, who teaches about business and the environment, at McGill, had two recommendations:

Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution, by Auden Schendler

Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman, by Yvon Chouinard

Lewis Ward, who grew up in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., my hometown, fittingly nominates:

a booklet that influenced my thinking, by friend and colleague Paul Glover: Hometown Money: How to Enrich Your Community with Local Currency

Rusty Shelton, a digital marketer with Shelton Interactive, suggested two books from his clients:

THE GREEN TO GOLD BUSINESS PLAYBOOK, by Daniel Esty and PJ Simmons (April, 2011)

This is the follow-up to Esty and Andrew Winston’s bestseller, GREEN TO GOLD, and is getting very nice reviews from the corporate community. The book scored endorsements from Jeff Immelt (CEO, GE), Muhtar Kent (CEO, Coca-Cola Company), Paul Polman (CEO, Unilever), Andrea Jung (CEO, Avon), Mark Tercek (The Nature Observatory) and others.

What is different about it–it skips the environmental ideology and deals exclusively with tools and strategies that have been shown to cut costs, reduce risks, drive revenues, and build brand identity.

THE RESPONSIBLE BUSINESS, by Carol Sanford (March, 2011)

Carol’s new book has been turning heads in corporate circles for a few months. It offers a new and strategic approach to doing business that holistically integrates responsibility into all aspects of an organization, allowing for returns at every level, business and social. This book goes beyond the often well intentioned but limited attempts at sustainability to present a framework that allows organizations to bring responsibility into everything they do and re-imagine success. From innovation, product development, and production processes to business management, strategic planning, and shareholder development, the author shows how being a Responsible Business is a practical skill that can be applied day-to-day at every level of the business.

What is different about it–When most people think of corporate responsibility, they are focusing on a business’s effect on and relationship to stakeholders. A Responsible Business sees stakeholders as full partners and meaningful instruments for the evolution of healthier communities and more successful businesses.

Richard Mills has a favorite which was highlighted by several others:

The Sustainable MBA: The Manager’s Guide to Green Business by Giselle Weybrecht is a great overview and introduction to sustainability. It skips the how to save the world stuff and is really focused on the business side, why business should be interested in sustainability and what they can do. It covers sustainability as it relates to Accounting, Finance, Entrepreneurship, Economics, Marketing, Operations, Organizational Behaviour Strategy. Giselle is not a journalist or a consultant which is probably why the book is most useful.  The aim is to give individuals tools to be able to bring sustainability into their jobs.

R. Paul Herman, author of The HIP Investor, says:

Faves are Cradle to Cradle, Natural Capitalism and now Climate Capitalism.

Of course, I love The HIP Investor: Make Bigger Profits By Building a Better World, because it focuses on how to design an investment portfolio to seek both human impact and profit at the same time – as well as a guide for companies (and yes, I wrote it too).

Anything by David Bornstein is a compelling read as well, from How To Change the World to Muhammad Yunus.

And you can’t beat Ray Anderson for telling it straight, and translating it for both engineers and businesspeople (check out his TED video as well as John Doerr’s).

Graeme Heyes writes from the UK to recommend:

Climb the Green Ladder: Make Your Company and Career More Sustainable by Amy V. Fetzer and Shari Aaron

I imagine that many of the nominations you will receive will be based around bringing about change in large corporates, by already qualified
individuals, however as somebody who has just graduated with a Masters Degree in Environmental Management and who has been fortunate to find
himself leading the environment group of one of the UK’s largest environmental charities just a few months after graduation, I have found this book to be a tremendous help, possibly second only to reading articles posted on Greenbiz!

It contains many tips I have found useful in terms of engaging with employees, talking to senior management, and beyond.

Helen Clarkson, who runs the U.S. office of Forum for the Future, has some fresh suggestions:

I think that the market for ‘making the case’ books is pretty saturated now, as your bookshelf shows. So there are plenty on this list so far for anyone new to the topic. I think the next layer of reading is where it gets interesting, so both in-depth books about particular industries (The Omnivore’s Dilemma is one of my favourites in that category) or books about how change is created. In that category I loved Switch by Chip and Dan Heath, SuperCorp by Rosabeth Kanter, and Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky, all with very different but very interesting things to reflect on as we try and shift the way we do business.

Other suggestions can be found in last week’s comments, which link to other lists. Writing about this reminded me how lucky I am to have engaged readers of this blog, as well as to have had the opportunity to meet leading thinkers and doers  like Hawken, McDonough and Ray Anderson. I forgot to mention another favorite of my own last week–Steward Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline.

Finally, I’ve decided to send the free books to Keli Rae McMillen, Lew Ward and Paulina Migalska.

Judging by the number of books about business and the environment piling up on my shelves, the corporate sustainability movement is alive and well.

One of the best is Business Lessons from a Radical Industrialist by Ray Anderson, the founder and chairman of the commercial carpet company Interface.

I’ve been provided with two signed copes of the paperback edition to give away. I’m expecting a signed copy of Howard Schultz’s book, which I’m also going to give to a blog reader. More on that, in a moment.

But first, a few thoughts about Ray and his book. Ray is a terrific guy who has had a great influence on business people across America, by tirelessly promoting the idea that a truly sustainable approach to business  is good for business. (See my 2009 interview, Ray Anderson, Radical Industrialist.) “Take nothing from the earth that cannot be replaced by the earth” is how he puts it.

Fifteen years after setting that goal for Interface, the company has cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 94 percent, cut fossil fuel consumption by 60 percent, cut waste by 80 percent, increased sales, doubled earnings and re-invented the way carpets are made, sold and recycled.

Says environmental activist Bill McKibben: “Ray Anderson is a hero.”

A soft-spoken, genial Georgian, Ray, who is in his late 70s, can’t get out to promote the paperback edition because, as he writes in a new foreword: “I have spent the last year dealing with cancer, thankfully holding my own–barely.”

He can’t help but draw analogies between his own experience with disease and environmental pollution. Neither his father, who was one of seven siblings, nor his mother, who was also one of seven, nor any of their brothers and sisters had cancer. But he and and his two brothers have had the disease. Could it be something in the environment? Hard to say.

But Ray writes:

Irresponsible business–the diggers, the drillers, the processors of poison, all of whom ought to know better–they and their abusive industries–are a cancer on society.

…It is high time we all started on the right treatment of this disease before it takes us all down.

Strong words, to be sure, but coming from a CEO and businessman with his own inspiring story, they resonate.

Interestingly, I’ve found that the best books about business and sustainability are written by CEOs and insiders, and not by journalists or consultants. My personal favorites include Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins, Stirring it Up by Gary Hirshberg and What Matters Most by Jeff Hollender and Stephen Fenichell.  I liked Howard Schultz’s first book, Pour Your Heart Into It, a lot, although it’s less about the environment and more broadly about doing business right. Jim Collins’ work, especially on leadership in Good to Great, has had a big influence on my thinking. My friend Barbara Waugh’s The Soul in a Computer is another inspiring read.

What about you? Which books about business, values and sustainability have influenced you most? I invite you to nominate a favorite or two in the comments below or, if you prefer, email me at marc.gunther@gmail.com. I’ll do a blogpost in the next week or so highlighting some of the nominations. Here’s a Top 10 list I found online to get you thinking.

I’ll send my two signed copies of Ray Anderson’s book and my  copy of Howard Schultz’s Onward (assuming it arrives soon) out to those who sent in the most interesting or original nominations. Ancient as well as contemporary wisdom is welcome.

I’ve also decided to reduce my pile of books (below) by sending them to people who write guest posts to this blog, so if you’re passionate about a corporate sustainability issue, please let me know if you like to contribute a post.

This week, Newsweek released its second annual  Green Rankings of the largest companies in America, as well as a new analysis of big global corporations. These sorts of cross-industry comparisons of companies are difficult to do, but my sense is that Newsweek has done a credible job, with the help of partners MSCI ESG Research, Trucost and CorporateRegister.com. Given the attention that the list is getting,  it seems like a good time to return to a question I’ve thought about for years: Do companies committed to sustainability represent good investment opportunities?

The stock-market performance of Dell, which tops the 2010 list, is not encouraging: The firm’s shares have fallen by 55% during the last five years, while the NASDAQ is up by 18% during the same time period. Of course, one company’s performance over one time period doesn’t prove a thing. It turns out that over the past year, the top 100 companies on the 2009 Newsweek list outperformed the S&P500 by 6.8%.  While this data point doesn’t prove anything either, it’s interesting. So I arranged an email interview with Cary Krosinsky of Trucost to explore the issue further.

Cary Krosinsky

Cary is head of investor and corporate services for North America for Trucost, which is based in the UK. He’s also the author and co-editor, with Nick Robins of HSBC, of Sustainable Investing: The Art of Long Term Performance (Earthscan Publications, 2008), and he has taught classes on investing and sustainability at Columbia.

Marc: Cary, let’s start by defining “sustainable investing.” Is it different from socially responsible investing?

Cary: Socially responsible investing, or SRI, is too broad an investment category.  SRI encompasses very different things—alternative energy investing on the one hand, funds with a religious mandate on the other, as well as funds investing in a mainstream index such as the S&P 500, and subtracting out alcohol, tobacco and firearms.  We see many different styles of SRI.

Sustainable Investing is the more positive strand of SRI – one that is future-oriented, risk-adjusted and opportunity-directed. It looks at what companies can do to lessen risk, as well as capitalize on opportunities, in order to be ahead of the curve in their respective industries. It helps create long-term value, identifies “predictable surprises,” (as opposed to “black swans,”) such as climate change, diminishing water availability, human rights issues and others that influence investment outcomes.  Innovation emerges as a key driver of value through sustainability, as does the active management of environmental impacts.

Marc: It sounds like sustainable investing means identifying the smartest, most forward-thinking companies. In your book, you write that “sustainable investing funds have already outperformed consistently over the short, medium and long term.” How can you support that claim?

Cary: We found that for the 1, 3 and 5 years leading up to the end of 2007, when looking at SRI funds with this positive, opportunity-focused sustainable investing methodology, that they consistently outperformed their mainstream index equivalents.  When updating this study for a UN Principles of Responsible Investment academic paper in 2009, this still held true, both before, through and after the recent financial crisis of 2008 into 2009.

Further correlation of this has been demonstrated by diverse investors including Paul Hawken, who helps manage the Highwater Global Fund as well as Abby Joseph Cohen of Goldman Sachs.  Mark Fulton of Deutsche Bank spoke earlier this year regarding how the climate change sectors they are tracking have been outperforming their benchmarks since the recent market bottom. Matthew Kiernan, formerly of Innovest, now runs money and is also demonstrating outperformance from this more positive approach. The top 100 performers in the Newsweek Green Rankings which we actively participate in at Trucost, have outperformed the S&P 500, on an equally weighted basis, by 6.8% over the last year.

There appears to be an emerging business case that sustainability drives shareholders value.  Our next book for Wiley will focus on how sustainable investors specifically find these opportunities, and how their thinking and methodologies have evolved.

This is in contrast to the first wave of SRI, which used mainly negative approaches. That approach still shapes most SRI assets under management, especially in the US.  Those approaches at best meet market performance as many studies have shown.  One reason why people believe that you can’t make money investing in your values is that these funds are designed to not outperform.

Marc: What do you mean, “designed to not outperform”?

Cary:  The largest SRI fund in the US , the CREF Social Choice Equity Fund,  has a Beta of 1 by design – in effect, it is designed to meet market performance.  And so it doesn’t surprise us when such funds match market performance over time.

The first wave of SRI has been backward looking and frankly somewhat fingerpointing.  Sustainable Investing, unlike this first wave, is very much forward looking, and can find opportunity where it isn’t always expected.

Problems are emerging on a global scale that require innovative solutions, including solving global poverty, and many other issues of inequity.  With global regulation, it is the positive opportunities for corporates that emerge as vital and as a result, most investable as well.

Marc: I’m a fan of Paul Hawken [See: Paul Hawken's winning investment strategy], but his critics say he hasn’t been completely transparent about his results and methodology. Are any of the other managers you mentioned open about what stocks they are picking and their returns? If so, how are they doing?

Cary:  I believe the folks at Highwater would like to be transparent, but they are operating a private fund – I wish a major fund company would have the sense to seize an opportunity to work with Paul, which would remove the transparency issue as well.

A good example of a fund investing this way has been the UK’s Jupiter Ecology Fund – a consistent outperformer that finds novel opportunities.  For example, over the last difficult 5 years, Jupiter Ecology has returned +34% vs. benchmark +26% and a sector average fund return of 18%.  Going back another 5 years, this was the single outperforming fund in its category, so it has a great long-term track record and holds companies for a long time. In fact, for many years its largest two holdings were the same two companies in Vestas Wind Systems, who I’m sure your readers will be familiar with, and Cranswick Plc, a pork producer trying to do things right (which remains the fund’s largest holding as of now).

A “Warren Buffett” approach to sustainable investing–make good bets and stick with them–is starting to emerge as an excellent strategy.  Even the Yale Endowment has been moving in this direction as its most recent report indicates.

Marc:  But there are very few money managers with a track record as good as Buffett’s. In fact, there’s evidence that the majority of actively managed funds underperform market indexes, especially once their higher costs are taken in account. Why would a fund based on the principles of Sustainable Investing be any different?

Cary:  That’s an important point. It has been an ongoing challenge for active managers to outperform passive indexes.  But we are entering a new paradigm – one where innovation is leading to outperformance as has been demonstrated above, and where macro trends are emerging that the mainstream investment community has yet to pick up on in a serious way.

As a result, the opportunity to invest in a sustainable manner remains, and sticking with legacy indexes may be the riskiest strategy of all. Whether it’s peak oil, climate change manifestation, or fresh water shortages, mainstream indexes won’t protect you as they are currently configured.  You may have lower costs temporarily, but longer term, if you take no action, you will have a very high risk profile.

Marc: I know you’d rather not give investment advice but are there any U.S. mutual funds that you see adopting the principles of Sustainable Investing–or at least coming close?

Cary:    That’s what we’ll be exploring in our next book.  At this point, it seems to be early days here in the U.S.  for public practitioners of our investment philosophy.  With a growing awareness of environmental sustainability, and given the outperformance we’ve seen, I honestly don’t know what the investor world is waiting for.

“We have very, very expensive food in this country.”

“It’s just that the prices are cheap.”

So said Paul Hawken, the environmentalist, entrepreneur and author, in a speech that began Cooking for Solutions, a conference on food and the environment, accompanied by lots of marvelous eating and drinking, this week at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, CA.

The American industrial food system, he said, is bad for the planet, bad for farmworkers and bad for consumers.  “How did we make destroying our land, our children and our health a big business?” Hawken asked.

This was not an upbeat way to start the two-day event, but it’s hard to argue with his analysis. Big Ag produces lots of food–particularly grain and meat–at very cheap prices. According to USDA (cited by Bryan Walsh in this terrific article in TIME), Americans spend less than 10% of their incomes on food, down from 18% in 1966. Farm price supports, cheap fossil fuels and vast amounts of water all drive down the price of food.

And the true social and environmental costs? Let’s tally them. They include millions of tons of fertilizer that runs into rivers and the Gulf of Mexico, created an oxygen-starved dead zone that kills of sea life. Hog and chicken waste that contaminate waterways and the Chesapeake Bay. Overuse of antibiotics on animals that helps create antibiotic-resistant bacteria. If you care about animals, there’s the horror of confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. We’ve got food safety risks. Tons of global warming pollution. And, oh yeah, an epidemic of obesity, which, again according to TIME, adds $147 billion (that’s billion with a B) a year to our medical bills.

Ugh. And so, for the rest of day, scientists, activists, academics and a sprinkling of farmers and food company executives such as Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farm and Margaret Wittenberg of Whole Foods Market talked about how to make our food system more sustainable.

Here are a just a few highlights:

Fish farms that mimic nature: I was surprised to learn that for the first time this year, more fish consumed in the world this year will be farmed than caught in the wild.  The vast majority of salmon and shrimp consumed in the U.S., for example, is farmed, most of it in Asia. To meet predicted demand for seafood by 2020, aquaculture will have to double production. Yet fish farming has a terrible environmental reputation–excess feed and copious waste cause water pollution, farmed fish escape into the wild and spread disease, the fish meal needed to feed them depletes marine systems.

Thierry Chopin, with kelps

Dr. Thierry B.R. Chopin, a professor of marine biology at the University of New Brunswick, has a simple idea with a technical name that can make fish farming more environmentally friendly. He raises several species of sea life–say, Atlantic salmon, mussels and different seaweeds–together in the same water, they complement one another ecologically and they create multiple revenue streams for the fish farmer. The idea is to duplicate some of the ocean’s biodiversity. Waste from one acquatic species becomes food for another, and the seaweed cleanse the water of surplus nitrogen.(The name for this is Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture, or IMTA. Branding is not Thierry’s specialty.)

“It’s diversification. Don’t put all your salmon eggs in the same basket,” Thierry said. “It’s true in agriculture. It’s also true in acquaculture.” A company called Cooke Aquaculture is now practicing this approach at a half dozen fish farms in the Bay of Fundy, and it wants to expand to another 8-10 sites.

LEED for Food? When tenants need new space, they can seek out LEED-certified buildings. When consumers buy wood or paper, they can look for products certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. Refrigerators, TVs, washer-dryers have Energy Star labels.

But when buying food—at least the vast majority of food–there’s no way for consumers, supermarkets, chefs or even big food companies to know which farmers, ranchers or meat producers are better stewards of the environment than others.

More surprising—your local supermarket or restaurant often does not even know where its food was grown.

These two problems—a lack of standards for agriculture, and an opaque, as opposed to transparent, supply chain—stand in the way of making agriculture more sustainable. With the exception of those who go organic, farmers who are good stewards of the planet aren’t rewarded for their efforts.

I moderated a panel where Wittenberg of Whole Foods and Maisie Greenawalt of Bon Appetit Management Co.,  a forward-looking food service company, talked about ways to bring more transparency to their supply chain and standards to the food they sell or serve. Wittenberg, for example, said that Whole Foods has developed its own animal welfare standards and environmental standards for aquaculture, and that it can enforce them by building direct relationships with ranchers and seafood suppliers. Greenawalt, meanwhile, talked about how Bon Appetit became the first food service company to sign an agreement with the Coalition of of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a organization fighting for more humane farm labor standards in Florida; this required the company to build direct relationships with growers who agreed to live up to the deal.

Several organizations–the Keystone Center, the Leonardo Academy, and the Food Alliance — are, in one way or another, trying to define standards for sustainable food, which could eventually lead to labels and third-party certification. But all face obstacles, not the least of which is how tough the standard should be.

Talking about the effort by the Leonardo Academy, Jonathan Kaplan of the Natural Resources Defense Council said: “I’m very skeptical that the committee will be able to agree on a standard, given who’s at the table.” He went on to say:  “If you set a high bar, you are by definition leaving out most of the industry,” including  farmers who most need to improve. On the other hand: “If you set a low bar, you are just greenwashing.”

Stonyfield’s win-win-win-win business model: Gary Hirshberg ended the day by sounding a very optimistic note. He recalled the early days of his company, which began with a handful of diary cows: “We had a wonderful business. We just had no supply and no demand…You couldn’t use the word organic and the word industry in the same sentence.”

Today, even though less than 1% of farmland in the U.S. meets organic standards, organic food is a $23 billion business and the fastest-growing segment of the food industry. All the major supermarkets have their organic store brands.

Stonyfield Farm has built brand loyalty by doing the right thing, he argued–working closely with farmers and paying them fair prices for milk, donating 10% of profits to environmental groups, being as transparent as possible about its practices.

Hirshberg said: “The farmers are making money. The animals are healthier. Consumers are getting something a lot better. Our employees are well taken care of. And our shareholders have done incredibly well.”

What will drive organic agriculture to scale, he said, is the realization that it can be more profitable than conventional agriculture. “Everything we’ve done is completely scalable,” he said. “Everything I’ve just described to you can be done, whether you’re Unilever, Kraft or Stonyfield.”

More to come in a few days, including a visit to Earthbound Farm, the nation’s largest grower of organic produce and the unlikely story of the New York couple who started it.

If you believe that companies that are strongly committed to socially and environmentally sound practices will outperform their peers in the long run, then you would expect so-called socially responsible investment (SRI) funds to deliver superior returns to investors.

The trouble is, they don’t. Sure, some years the mutual funds run by the Calvert, Domini, Parnassus and the rest do very well—they excelled during the tech boom of the late 1990s because they tend to eschew heavy industry—but other years, they lag market indexes. Over time, most track the broader market.

Over the three years ending December 31, 2009, for instance, among the big SRI funds, Calvert Social Investment is down by a cumulative 13.02%, Domini Social Equity is down by a total of 16.2% and Parnussus Equity Income is up by 0.14%. Only Parnussus performed significantly above the S&P500, which was down by 15.9%,

Why haven’t they done better. Some of us have long believed that the problem with conventional SRI funds is that their definition of “socially responsible” is not nearly as rigorous as it could or should be.

Paul Hawken has been vocal in his critique of the SRI establishment, and since 2005 he has put his money where his mouth is. In a partnership with Baldwin Brothers, a Massachusetts-based investment firm, Hawken has overseen the Highwater Global Fund, a fund for qualified investors (i.e., the rich) that invests in companies “that have a clear sense of current global trends and future societal needs.” His results have been impressive, to say the least.

Since inception in the fall of 2005, Highwater is up by a total of 52.55%. During the three years ended in December (the same period cited above), Highwater is up by a total of 19.75%.  This is, in part, because Hawken and the other fund managers are very picky about what stocks they hold. More than 90% of the FORTUNE 500 fail their screens.

If you don’t know about Paul Hawken, you should. He’s a path-breaking thinker and influential writer whose books include The Ecology of Commere (1993), Natural Capitalism (1999, with Amory and Hunter Lovins) and Blessed Unrest (2007). He’s an entrepreneur who founded Erewhon and Smith & Hawken, and an advisor who has worked with to Wal-Mart and Ford. These days, he’s focused on a  startup in stealth mode called OneSun, a a solar energy company based on green chemistry and biomimcry.

I had the great pleasure of visiting with Hawken last week at his office in Sausalito, CA. Mostly, we talked solar. OneSun’s chief science officer is John Warner, a pioneer of green chemistry, a longtime researcher at Polaroid and author (with Paul Anastas, now EPA’s top researcher) of Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice.  OneSun has hired more than a dozen PhD.’s and aims to produce “solar beneath the cost of nuclear and coal,” Hawken says, but he’s not ready to divulge much more yet.

Highwater is an equally interesting story, in part because it seemss to validate Hawken’s critique of social investing.  When his Natural Capital Institute analyzed SRI funds in 2004, he found that “90% of FORTUNE 500 companies were represented in their portfolios,” as a group. (I did a brief story about this headlined Are Green Funds True to Their Colors? in FORTUNE.)

Some funds weren’t very strict about who they let into their club. Others adopted silly screens. A few have been rethinking their approach–Calvert, for example, now offers a range of choices for investors, as it explains here. I’m a believer in social investing and an investor in Calvert and Domini funds.

But I think Hawken is on the mark when he writes:

Many of these [SRI] funds employ the term sustainability. This is a catchall term that…has come to mean less than it could and more than it should. At Highwater, we also use the word, but we believe that sustainability is a scientific concept, not a feel-good term. It is rooted in biology and physics, and describes the limits within which society can grow and prosper over time.

Hawken, as a result, is a tough grader. “We think Portfolio 21 [an environmentally-focused mutual fund based in Portland] has the best screens, and only 60% of their portfolio would qualify for ours,” he told me. Hawken respects Portfolio 21, as do I–it’s another place where I’ve invested.

So, for example, Whole Foods Markets, which is widely held by SRI funds, doesn’t pass muster with Hawken and his analysts. Why? “Unethical behavior by the CEO,” says Hawken, referring to John Mackey’s antics on a Yahoo! message board, where he demeaned a competing chain under a pseudonym. What’s more, he says, Whole Foods’ global supply chain needlessly undermines local food markets. Did you know that some organic frozn vegetables sold under Whole Foods’  365 brand—even an assortment called the California Medley—come from China? (Here’s a Whole Foods’ blogpost about “Chinese organics,” followed by skeptical comments.)

Most global banks and pharmaceutical companies failed Highwater’s screens as well. “We spurned money center banks because of liar loans, teaser rates and usurious interest rates on rampant consumer credit,” Hawken says. Of course, that turned out to be smart when stocks of the big banks cratered during 2008. Most SRI funds held big banks as well as big pharma.

Hawken seeks out companies with a compelling purpose, as evidenced by what a company does, not what it says it does. He writes:

Our main question is straightforward: Are the company’s products or services helpful? The reasoning here is simple: If a company is heading down a path that does not serve society into the future, it matters little how it gets there.

For example, the values statement at Kellogg’s has lofty goals. However, at no point does it mention children or health. There is a children’s health crisis in the US due to obesity and type 2 diabetes. Advertising and promoting Cookie Crunch, Frosted Flakes and Star Trek cereals, all of which contain more than one-third simple sugars, during Saturday morning cartoons, belies Kellogg’s value statement.

So who passes the screens? Google, whose purpose is to make all of the world’s information available to everyone. “That’s a reason to go to work in the morning,” Hawken says. The Danish wind company Vestas qualifies, as does First Solar, which makes photovoltaic panels. (Some Chinese solar firms do not because of their workplace and environmental practices.) Ford and Honda pass as well. “I was driving 100 miles per gallon cars in Dearborn two years ago,” says Hawken, an advisor to Ford. He drives a Ford Escape hybrid.

Other firms that qualify include eBay, which enables thousands of small business owners to flourish, and Amazon, which has begun to deliver digital books, magazines and newspapers. “Trees are being saved because of the Kindle,” Hawken says.

Highwater’s performance, it must be said, doesn’t prove that Hawken’s approach works. Much of the credit for the fund’s success goes to the managers at Baldwin Brothers, who decides when to buy and sell the securities held by the fund. Luck can also come into play.

My takeaway?

It’s become a cliché to say that companies can do well by doing good.

A more intriguing idea is that a small number of companies that set out to do the most possible good will, in the long run, do very, very well. This is what Hawken believes, and my gut tells me he’s right.

William Clay Ford Jr.

Before I head to Copenhagen this week for the global climate extravaganza, I want to bring you the latest news about Brainstorm Green, FORTUNE’s conference about business and the environment. I’m delighted by the caliber of leaders and thinkers who have agreed to speak at the event, which will be held April 12-14 in Laguna Beach, CA.

Bill Ford, the executive chairman of Ford Motor, who was a huge hit last year, will be back in 2010. Ford (the company) is one of the few bright spots in the U.S. auto industry, as you know, and while it took a long while coming, the firm seems committed to hybrids, electric cars and other environmentally-friendly technologies, including wheat-straw reinforced plastic and other bio-based materials. Hybrid sales are taking off, as the company recently reported:

Ford Motor Company’s year-to-date hybrid sales are 73 percent higher than the same period in 2008, fueled by the introduction of hybrid versions of the 2010 Ford Fusion and Mercury Milan

More than 60 percent of the sales of Fusion Hybrid are by non-Ford owners – with more than 52 percent of those customers coming from import brands.

Stewart Brand

One of the best books that I’ve read in a long time is Whole Earth Discipline: An Eco-Pragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand, so I’m thrilled to announce that Stewart will be featured at Brainstorm Green. In the book, he brings a fresh perspective to nuclear power (he’s for it), geo-engineering (he’s intrigued) and megacities (they are both green and engines of economic growth). You can be sure he will challenge conventional wisdom at the conference.

Three powerhouse leaders of the enviromental movement–Frances Beinecke of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Fred Krupp of Environmental Defense and Mark Tercek of the Nature Conservancy–are also planning to attend. Fred and Frances have ben at the event before, and they both plugged into the Washington scene, which will surely be a topic this spring, while Mark, formerly of Goldman Sachs, will be able to offer great insight into the role of markets in solving environmental problems.

Sylvia Earle

New to Brainstorm Green this year will be Sylvia Earle, the well-known American oceanographer. Dr. Earle was chief scientist for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from 1990-1992, and she has been a . National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence. We’ll be talking about the health of the world’s oceans, from a business perspective. Other voices on that topic will include Kim Lopdrup, president of the Red Lobster seafood chain.

Since this is a FORTUNE conference, we’ll also be hearing from some of the most thoughtful and influential CEOs and business leaders in the world. I’ve already reported that Lee Scott, the former CEO of Wal-Mart who is now chairman of the company’s executive committee, has agreed to speak. So, once again, has Paul Hawken, the influential author and thinker who, among other things, has advised Wal-Mart. I’m hoping that Paul, who did a fabulous job for us last year, will have news to share about the innovative solar power company he’s been working hard on.

David Sokol

Other chairmen, CEOs or presidents we will be hearing from include Lew Hay of FPL Group, Jeff Smisek of Continental Airlines, Arne Sorenson of Marriott, David Sokol of Mid American Energy (and board member of BYD Automotive), David Crane of NRG Energy, John Replogle of Burt’s Bees, Sally Jewell of REI, Bill Roe of Coskata, Randy Zwirn of Siemens Energy, Kevin Surace of Serious Materials, Kevin Czinger of Coda Automotive and Naomi Porat of Zeta Communities.

We’ll also have investors Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, Alan Salzman of VantagePoint Venture Partners, Wilber James of Rockport Partners, Anup Jacob of Virgin Green. We’re working on getting Obama administration officials. We’ll showcase some great green ideas you haven’t heard much about.

Meanwhile, we are organizing a series of panels that I think of as news-you-can-use, explaining how  how to think about, organize and implement sustainability practices in big companies. Just this week, for instance, Will Sarni, the founder and CEO of consulting firm Domani, agreed to help me organize a conversation about why your company needs a water strategy. (Will is literally writing the book on that topic right now.) And Justin Yuen, the dynamic young president of FMYI, will lead a discussion about how to engage employees around sustainability–how to get them excited, tap into their best ideas and measure progress.

One last treat: Have you ever seen Julie Scardina on The Tonight Show? She has been on the program more than 20 times! Julie is the “animal ambassador” of Sea World and Busch Gardens, as well as an expert conservationist. She will be a Brainstorm Green and, yes, she will be bringing some of her “friends” along.

Brainstorm Green will be held April 12-14, 2010, at the Ritz Carlton in Laguna Niguel, CA. You can sign up to attend at the website. As the co-chair of the event, with my FORTUNE colleague Brian Dumaine, I’m also open to hearing proposals for just a few more speakers. (We could use an expert on geoengineering, for example.) No hurry–I don’t expect to be extending any more speaking invitations until after I return from Copenhagen in about 10 days.

“Nature is the goose that lays all the golden eggs. We don’t want to squeeze her to death…If we don’t take care of nature, we won’t have a civilization someday.”

Does that sound like a tree-hugging environmentalist? Well, it is, but it’s also the founder and chairman of a $1-billion a year carpet company. His name is Ray Anderson, he calls himself a “radical industrialist” and he has led his company, Interface, on a remarkable 15-year journey to sustainability. He’s got a lot to teach the rest of us.

One of the best things about my work is that I  get to spend time with people like Ray. He’s got a new book out—it’s called Confessions of a Radical Industrialist—and so we got together last week when he was in Washington.

With his gentle Georgia drawl and genial manner, Ray, who is 75, does not look like a radical—but he believes that business as usual is the principal agent of global destruction, and that only new industrial revolution can save us. His goal for Interface is Mission Zero—zero waste, zero pollution, zero use of fossil fuels, and zero use of materials from the earth that cannot be renewed rapidly and naturally. This is where all of business needs to go, he says, paraphrasing his mentor, Paul Hawken:

There’s really only one institution on earth that’s large enough and powerful enough and pervasive enough and wealthy enough to really change all that, and it’s not government and it’s not the church and it’s not education. It is the institution of business and industry, the very institution doing the damage, my institution.

Ray is optimistic because of his experience at Interface. Sustainability, he says, “has proven to be the most powerful marketplace differentiator I have known in my long career.”

“I can’t tell you how much business we’ve won because of the reputation we’ve developed,” he says.

How’s Interface doing? Here are some of the metrics cited in the book:

Since 1996, Interface’s baseline year, the company has cut its net greenhouse gas emissions by 71% in absolute tons.

Consumption of fossil fuels per square yard of carpet fell by 44 percent.

Renewable energy provides the electricity to power eight of its 10 factories.

The percentage of recycled and bio-based materials used to manufacture our products worldwide has grown from 0.5 percent in 1996 to 24 percent in 2008.

Companywide waste elimination measures saved a cumulative $405 million, which Interface then used to invest in other “green” initiatives. Sustainability has been self-funding.

And sales are up by 60 percent.

To dig deeper into Interface’s sustainability story, read the book. But a couple of examples of wins and losses jumped out at me.

Like many companies, Interface was intrigued by the idea of putting solar panels on the roof of one of its factories; an engineer named Mike Bennett who ran the numbers found the cost of the project, $1.2 million, could not be justified in strictly economic terms, even with subsidies from the state of California. Then he ran some other numbers–how much carpet could be made if the solar-powered electricity was channeled to run carpet-tufting machines in the factory. It turned out that Interface could make 1 million square yards of what it came to call Solar-Made [tm] carpet. This was 1996, solar energy was a novelty and buyers reacted, particularly the University of California, which awarded the company a $20 million three-year order.

Anderson writes:

All the talking, all the advertising and marketing in the world, could not have bought that recognition without the actual doing. That is how what seemed like a terrible investment came out golden.

Not as successful were Interface’s efforts to transform its entire business model from selling carpets to selling a “floor covering service” by leasing carpets, promising to clean and maintain them, and then take them back (for recycling) when customers needed new ones. Carpets would actually last longer, because the company would repair and replace only those tiles that were worn. (The 80-20 rule applies to carpets, it turns out, with 80% of the wear affecting 20% of the carpet. But people typically throw away the whole thing when only parts of it need replacing–a real waste.) In any event, customers didn’t go for the new model for a host of reasons, including FASB rules (read the book, too complicated to explain here), a reluctance to enter into long-term contracts and their belief that leasing was more costly than an outright purchase. Anderson says they were mistaken. But the idea of product takeback is gaining ground, and I suspect that business models like this one will catch on before long.

When we talked, Ray told me that he doesn’t just want Interface to be a sustainable company; he wants it to be a restorative company, to leave the earth better off than before. How? Through its influence. Ray gives dozens of speeches a year, he’s written the book and Jim Hartzfeld, who helped lead Interface’s transformation, now heads up an Interface consulting business called Interface Raise that shows other companies how sustainability can drive innovation and profits.

One of the most remarkable things about Ray was that he had his epiphany at age 60. It came after reading  Hawken’s brilliant book, The Ecology of Commerce. Ray, Paul and Janine Benyus of Biomimicry fame spoke at an all-star panel last year at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green. Unfortunately, we didn’t videotape the session, but below is a short video of Ray talking about how the book changed his life. You can also read an edited transcript of my conversation with Ray here at Greenbiz.com.

While I thoroughly enjoyed all of FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference last month, my personal highlight was meeting and interviewing Paul Hawken. He’s done great work as an entrepreneur, social critic and teacher. His books have inspired me. And now he has done something really hard: He has given a commencement speech worth reading. Ordinarily, I don’t republish the writings of others on this blog but I want to share Paul’s words with you. (You can download a PDF version that’s easy to print out here.) The speech was delivered on May 3 at the University of Portland. Enjoy! And then pass it on to a young person you know.

–

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” No pressure there.

Let’s begin with the startling part. Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation… but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food—but all that is changing.

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring. The earth couldn’t afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refuge camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.

You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,” is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.

Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown — Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood — and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity.  Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, non-governmental organizations, and companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.

The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. And dreams come true. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe, which is exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”

So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. You can feel it. It is called life. This is who you are. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. Our innate nature is to create the conditions that are conducive to life. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night and we watch television.

This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.
……….
Paul Hawken is a renowned entrepreneur, visionary environmental activist, and author of many books, most recently Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. You can visit his website at
www.paulhawken.com

That’s how author and sustainability guru Paul Hawken responded when I asked him during FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green why a small-is-beautiful guy agreed to work for huge companies like Wal-Mart and Ford. And I like to think that’s why nearly 300 business executives, NGO leaders, activists and government types came to our conference on business and the environment earlier this week. They were a diverse and occasionally disputatious group, which is exactly what we want: We had speakers from Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network, as well as Big Oil , the nuclear industry and American Electric Power, the nation’s No. 1 emitter of global warming pollution. But while there was disagreement over what path to take, there was broad consensus that business needs to find ways to become more sustainable.

Here are some of my takeaways from the event. One caveat—the quotes below were taken down on the run and may not be word-for-word perfect but they are close.

Bill Clinton doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty. Where do you find the former president these days? Occasionally, mucking around in the waste of cities like Lima, Mexico City and Lagos. “Whenever I think of an urban landfill, I see it not just as an eyesore and a contributor to global warming but a source of great wealth,” Clinton said, during the closing plenary. His Clinton Global Initiative on climate change, he explained, is training scavengers in Lima to be recycling workers, given them a salary and health care and encouraging them to become part of a “new industry in glass and metals.”

Clinton’s speech was a state-of-the-union style laundry list, long on details/solutions. He got all charged up about energy efficiency (hard to do) as he talked about retrofitting the Empire State Building, described extensive efforts to get cities to curb their carbon emissions and explained how he is helping to  make college campuses more efficient. “The most important thing you can do if you are not a member of the U.S. Congress,” he told the crowd, “is to show that the change we are all seeking is good economics.” He had a couple of odd ideas, suggesting that the states of Nevada and Arizona or maybe a Caribbean nation become “energy independent” to show the world that it’s possible. Clinton looked good, by the way—he wore a pair of Texas cowboy boots and hustled out of the hotel after his speech and a photo session to squeeze in a round of golf.

Some big problems, corporate America can’t solve. Fisk Johnson of SC Johnson, Jeff Hollender of Seventh Generation, Bill Valentine of HOK (big architecture firm) and Carl Bass of Autodesk (design company) joined me for a panel called Re-Imagining Consumption. The question put before them was simple but important: How can companies grow their revenues and profits while shrinking their environmental footprint? I thought we’d get into a conversation about cradle-to-cradle products that companies sell, or new business models like ZipCar. But we veered into a discussion of overconsumption after someone mentioned he oft-cited fact that Americans make up roughly 5% of the world’s population and consume 25% of its resources. That’s obviously a problem, and since companies are invented to solve problems, I ask them if there is a business opportunity there. They couldn’t see one although Bill Valentine said HOK often asks its clients whether they really need a new building, Carl Bass said  Autodesk is incorporating sustainability questions into its software, and Fisk and Jeff both talking about “greening” their products and packaging.  The truth us, it’s hard to imagine even progressive companies (except for recycling firms) coming up with products, services or new business models around buying less stuff. This tough job is probably best left to parents or religious leaders.

Environmentalists should reconsider nuclear power. I’m told there was a long and animated dinner conversation one night during which two leading thinkers of the sustainability movement—Janine Benyus of biomimicry fame and Ray Anderson of Interface–peppered Alan Hanson, an executive from Areva, the big French nuclear power company, with probing questions about nuclear power. I was pleased to hear that because I’ve thought for some time that environmentalists need to rethink their almost-religious opposition to nuclear power. (I’m going to write about this in more detail next week.)

If the problem of climate change threatens the very existence of human life on this planet (and it does), shouldn’t we reconsider nukes? Of course we should. We’re going to need baseload power and while a combination of efficiency, renewables and battery storage might get us where we need to go under a best-case scenario, I don’t want to bet the planet’s future on a best-case scenario. It’s likely we’ll face a choice between nuclear and so-called cleaner coal. I’m not sure where I come down on that.

During a panel on nuclear power (read David Whitford’s account here) that focused on its costs, I learned that Steven Chu, the energy secretary, is an advocate for nuclear while Carol Browner, the climate czar, is an opponent. President Obama has punted on the issue—he hasn’t said much of anything, at least according to our panelists. While Browner’s the more powerful figure in D.C., Chu is a brilliant and impressive guy, not to mention the only cabinet member with a Nobel Prize. I’d love to be a fly on the wall when they and Obama get together to talk about nukes.

I’m still not convinced about green jobs. Van Jones, the White House green jobs czar, spoke at Brainstorm Green and he managed to be both inspiring and utterly charming. But he couldn’t come up with a clear-cut definition of a green job. That’s not surprising. Consider the farmer who grows corn for popcorn. He’s a mere farmer. His buddy up the road who grows corn for ethanol? Green job, I presume.

Clinton, too, has hopped on the green jobs bandwagon: “I’ve always believed that work is the best social program,” he said. “Saving the planet from the threat of climate change will create more jobs, more ideas, more interdependence than anything else we can do.”

Hmm. Fred Krupp of the Environmental Defense Fund said the best economic studies about the impact of a cap-and-trade program to regulate greenhouse gases project that the long-term impact on GDP will be very, very slight. But if GHG regulation has even a slight negative effect on GDP, how can it create more jobs?

It’s time to stop feeling guilty about business travel. Brainstorm Green was held at the Ritz Carlton in Laguna Niguel, California—a spectacular place overlooking the Pacific. We had some fabulous meals—prepared by organic chefs—and I got up early to run (a little) each day. At night, I opened the door to my hotel room and fell asleep to the sounds of the waves and an ocean breeze.

As it happens, we were at ground zero for the crisis in business travel. Next door was a St. Regisl where AIG held a meeting last fall that made national news and led to the cancellations of hundreds of business meetings. Luxury hotels and their working-class employees are suffering. What’s good about that?

More important, there was value in getting 300 people together in a relaxing place for a couple of days to talk about things that matter. We learned. We met new people. We built relationships. We showcased leading thinkers and doers, perhaps inspiring others. Maybe a startup that needed money raised some. We may live in an always-connected, everything-linked world, but you can’t do those things very well on email or over the phone or in a video conference.

FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green began Monday afternoon (less than 24 hours ago as I write this) and my head has been spinning ever since. We’ve talked about Washington and the politics of climate change, Andy Serwer did a a great interview with Bill Ford, and I had a relaxed conversation with Paul Hawken during dinner that generated lots of nice buzz. This morning, we’ve done panels on nuclear power and cars. I can’t keep up with it all—you can find lots of coverage, including video, at Fortune.com. I’m about to interview execs for a panel that we are calling Green Superpowers—GE, Wal-Mart and IBM. For now, I’m just going to dump some quotes from my laptop into this blog to give you a flavor for what’s going on.

Better Place’s Shai Agassi, the dynamic electric-car entrepreneur who is making headway in Israel, Denmark, Hawaii and San Francisco: “If you’re wiling to give me what you pay for gasoline, I’ll give you a free (electric) car.” Electric cars will be dramatically more efficient that gas-powered ones as battery costs come down, he argues

Bill Ford, chairman of Ford, on the history of the auto industry: “We haven’t had a lot of revolutions but boy are we now. I love it.”

More from Ford, on how times have changed: “When I joined the (Ford) board, I was asked to stop affiliating w/ known or suspected environmentalists.” Ford now works with Paul Hawken and Environmental Defense Fund.

Hawken, on why a small-is-beautiful guy has agreed to advise Wal-Mart and Ford on sustainability: “I’m a slut for change.”

Ford to Ian Clifford CEO of Zenn Motors, an electric-car startup: “You guys are leading the charge, so to speak!” Ford really won over the crowd with his low-key charm.

PG&E CEO Peter Darbee, yet another electric car fan: “I believe the electric car will be one of the great areas of breakthrough that will change our industry.

More from Darbee: “The smart grid will be the key enabling technology for the electric cars.”

Peter Corsell, CEO of GridPoint, on the smart grid: “Current system was designed in an era when information was scarce, fuel was cheap and pollution was free.”

David Crane, the CEO of NRG Energy, another utility guy who likes electric cars: “The electric car is our savior, It is the air conditioner of the 21st century.”

Alan Hanson, exec vp of nuclear power company Areva, saying concerns about nuclear waste are way overblown: “I don’t know of any part of the electricity generating world that treats its waste as well as the nuclear industry does.”

More from Crane: “I’m convinced that there will e three nuclear power plants built in the U.S. in the next 10 years.” Whether they will be anomalies (supported by a limited pool of federal loan guarantees) or lead to a nuclear renaissance remains to be seen.

Crane, explaining why there is no political constituency for nuclear energy in Washington, where Waxman, Boxer and Browner are anti-nuke but eager to accommodate the coal industry: “Right now the dominant wing of the Democratic Party knows they need to accommodate the coal wing of the Democratic Party in order to get energy and environmental policy passed.”

More to come when I can come up for air….and I hope to dig into the nuclear issue in a more thoughtful way within a week or so. I’m convinced that environmentalists need to think anew about nuclear, in light of new circumstances and the threat of climate change.