This book was given to me at Greenbuild 2007, and I started reading it right then. I got about a quarter of the way through, set it down, and didn’t pick it back up until this past Labor Day Weekend.

What I most enjoyed about this book was Hawken’s inquisitiveness and academic approach – I feel like I haven’t read anything this thoughtful or comprehensive since Core in undergrad. Some of Hawken’s insights:

- “By almost any measure of well-being, the United States brings up the rear: It is number one in prison population (726 per 100,000 verses 91 in France and 58 in Japan); first in teen pregnancy, drug use, child hunger, poverty, illiteracy, obesity, diabetes, use of antidepressants, income disparity, violence, firearms deaths, military spending, hazardous waste production, recorded rapes, and the poor quality of its schools. (The United States is the only country in the world besides Iraq where schools need metal detectors.)”
- “…monetary gains are called GDP, but the losses that are suffered, even in the industrialized West, mush less the Third World, are not tallied, as if one were recording sales at the cash register but ignoring thefts at the back of the warehouse.”