Please read this 1997 article by Paul Hawken in Mother Jones.

We don't place value on our natural resources where it counts.....accounting balance sheets.  Learn what Natural Capitalism is.  What were the results and lessons of the $200 million, 1991 Biosphere II experiment?  The purpose of the following excerpts are to generate interest in reading the full article.  I hope you do.

   - Somewhere along the way to free-market capitalism, the United States became the most wasteful society on the planet. Most of us know it. There is the waste we can see: traffic jams, irreparable VCRs, Styrofoam coffee cups, landfills; the waste we can't see: Superfund sites, greenhouse gases, radioactive waste, vagrant chemicals; and the social waste we don't want to think about: homelessness, crime, drug addiction, our forgotten infirm and elderly.

   - Conventional economic theories will not guide our future for a simple reason: They have never placed "natural capital" on the balance sheet. When it is included, not as a free amenity or as a putative infinite supply, but as an integral and valuable part of the production process, everything changes. Prices, costs, and what is and isn't economically sound change dramatically.  "Natural capital" .... comprises the resources we use, both nonrenewable (oil, coal, metal ore) and renewable (forests, fisheries, grasslands).

   - Economist Herman E. Daly cautions that we are facing a historic juncture in which, for the first time, the limits to increased prosperity are not the lack of man-made capital but the lack of natural capital. The limits to increased fish harvests are not boats, but productive fisheries; the limits to irrigation are not pumps or electricity, but viable aquifers; the limits to pulp and lumber production are not sawmills, but plentiful forests.

   - Let's begin with a startling possibility: The U.S. economy may not be growing at all, and may have ceased growing nearly 25 years ago........  The GDP measures money transactions on the assumption that when a dollar changes hands, economic growth occurs. But there is a world of difference between financial exchanges and growth. Compare an addition to your home to a two-month stay in the hospital for injuries you suffered during a mugging. Say both cost the same. Which is growth? The GDP makes no distinction.

   - Today, the nuclear power industry has become moribund, not because of anti-nuclear protests but because it is uncompetitive.

   - We have to revise the tax system to stop subsidizing behaviors we don't want (resource depletion and pollution) and to stop taxing behaviors we do want (income and work).....The important element to change is the purpose of the tax system because, other than generating revenue, the current tax system has no clear goal.

   - Natural capitalism is not about making sudden changes, uprooting institutions, or fomenting upheaval for a new social order. (In fact, these consequences are more likely if we don't address fundamental problems.) Natural capitalism is about making small, critical choices that can tip economic and social factors in positive ways.

   - So why be hopeful? Because the solution is profitable, creative, and eminently possible. Societies may act stupidly for a period of time, but eventually they move to the path of least economic resistance.