Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage

Books & Magazines

Selected Green Business Books

The business world has been talking about going green for many years. Some writers and thinkers were ahead of the curve and wrote some important books that set the stage (and helped our thinking). Here is our list of the best of the last 15 years, with stars next to the core canon -- those books that have had some time to make a real impact on the business community.

The Green Consumer Guide, John Elkington and Julia Hailes (1989)***
Changing Course: A Global Business Perspective on Development and the Environment, Stephan Schmidheiny and the Business Council for Sustainable Development (1992)***
Costing the Earth, Frances Cairncross (1992)
Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability, Paul Hawken (1993)***
Measuring Corporate Environmental Performance: Best Practices for Costing and Managing an Effective Environmental Strategy, Marc J. Epstein (1995)
Financing Change: The Financial Community, Eco-Efficiency, and Sustainable Development, Stephan Schmidheiny, F.J. Zorraquin, and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (1996)
Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century
Business, John Elkington (1997)***
Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, Janine Benyus (1997)
Factor Four: Doubling Wealth—Halving Resource Use: A Report to the Club of Rome, Ernst von Weizsacker, Amory B. Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins (1998)
Counting What Counts: Turning Corporate Accountability Into Competitive Advantage, Marc J. Epstein and B. Birchard (1999)
Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins (1999)***
Greening the Firm: The Politics of Corporate Environmentalism, Aseem Prakash (2000)
Down to Earth: Applying Business Principles to Environmental Management, Forest Reinhardt (2000)***
The Chrysalis Economy: How Citizen CEOs and Corporations Can
Fuse Values and Value Creation, John Elkington (2001)
From Heresy to Dogma: An Institutional History of Corporate Environmentalism, Andrew J. Hoffman (2001)
Walking the Talk: The Business Case for Sustainable Development, Charles O. Holliday, Stephan Schmidheiny, and Philip Watts (2002)***
A Thousand Shades of Green: Sustainable Strategies for Competitive Advantage, Peter Winsemius and Ulrich Guntram (2002)
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, William McDonough and Michael Braungart (2002)***
Shades of Green: Business, Regulation, and Environment, Neil A. Gunningham, Robert A. Kagan, and Dorothy Thornton (2003)
Smart Alliance: How a Global Corporation and Environmental Activists Transformed a Tarnished Brand, J. Gary Taylor and Patricia J. Scharlin (2004)
The Market for Virtue: The Potential and Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility, David Vogel (2005)
Capitalism at the Crossroads: The Unlimited Business Opportunities
in Solving the World’s Most Difficult Problems, Stuart L. Hart (2005)
The Triple-Bottom Line: How Today's Best-Run Companies Are Achieving Economic, Social and Environmental Success -- and How You Can Too, Andrew Savitz, with Karl Weber (2006)

Environment-Oriented Magazines

A number of organizations have regular reporting on the state of the scien, the ongoing policy debates, consumer interest pieces, and a range of other topics. We recommend a combination of the following magazines and newsletters to stay on top of all the issues.

Resources

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Books & Magazines

Selected Green Business Books

Environment-Oriented Magazines