The Zeronauts

by John Elkington

A world of 9 billion people by mid-century will demand fundamental changes in our mindsets, behaviors, cultures, and overarching paradigm. Just as our species broke the Sound Barrier during the 1940s and 1950s, a new breed of innovator, entrepreneur, and investor is lining up to break the Sustainability Barrier. In this book, John Elkington introduces the Zeronauts – a new breed of innovator, determined to drive problems such as carbon, waste, toxics, and poverty to zero – as well as creating the first Zeronaut Roll of Honor, spotlighting 50 pioneers in the field of zero. Zeronauts are innovating in an astonishing range of areas, tackling hugely diverse economic, social, environmental, and governance challenges. To give a sense of progress to date, we zero in on five key challenges (the 5Ps): population growth, pandemics, poverty, pollution, and proliferation. The power of zero has been trumpeted, notably in relation to zero defects. This book spotlights key lessons learned in the field of total quality management – and introduces a five-stage "Pathways to Zero" model, running through from the Eureka! discovery moment to the point where a new way of doing things becomes endemic in the economy. In order to move from incremental to transformative change, we must embrace wider framings, deeper insights, higher targets, and longer time scales. This book investigates some ways in which leading Zeronauts are pushing change in relevant directions, with cases drawn from a spectrum of human activity – from water profligacy to human genital mutilation. If we learn from these pioneers, the twenty-first century could be our best yet.

Genres: Sustainability

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Professor John Elkington is an Executive Director of SustainAbility Ltd. A leading authority on the role of industry in sustainable development, he is a consultant to such organisations as BP, Procter & Gamble, USAID, and the UN Environment Programme.
He sits on advisory panels at the Merlin Ecology Fund and the Nature Conservancy Council. He has authored or co-authored numerous books and has published several hundred reports, papers and articles for a wide variety of journals, magazines and national newspapers.
On World Environment Day in June 1989, John Elkington was named to the United Nations Environment Programme's 'Global 500 Roll of Honour' for his 'outstanding environmental achievements'.

Reviews

[Allan Olley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a an exploration of questions of what kinds of change may be necessary to allow an environmentally sustainable planet Earth, along with some other questions of human well being. The key theme of the book is the role of the goal to achieve zero in various harm reduction campaign's zero emissions of green house gases, zero waste from industry, zero population growth and so on. The word and concept of zero are played with a bit, one of the cuter and more obvious ways is the author has adopted the style of adding a zero to the year "02012" instead of "2012" in aid of trying to understand the value of goals involving zero. In one minor theme concepts from Total Quality Management are discussed and compared with environmental ideas, which is novel.

Overall the book is a rather interesting exercise but I find it somewhat too glib. There is a recognition that things like zero net Green House gas emissions may require a fundamental reordering of society, but what that will practically mean and what concrete practical steps we can make towards it is often left very vague beyond brief often congratulatory examinations of projects that even if they work in small scale it is admitted would have to scale up in ways not easily imagined. Of course in some ways this is the necessary character of changes that we will not be able to imagine before they happen. The book has a set of endnotes that cite sources and in some cases suggest further readings. A great number of sources of this book are Wikipedia articles and Economist magazine (newspaper) articles. I don't think either of these sources are bad as such but they suggest a certain lack of serious scholarship in the composition of the book, one suspects more directed citations to specific accounts of the things discussed would provide a better groundwork to the ideas touched on here.

I was led to this book because I knew it had a citation of a quote attributed to Lenin "There are decades were nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen." I wanted to look up, perhaps excessive to get a book from the library just for that. Especially as I knew already the quote was misattributed (thanks to the Quote Investigator website). Emblematic of the general atmosphere of the book Elkington gives as his source for the quote talking with Grateful Dead Lyricist John Perry Barlow in the Bahamas "many moons ago".

[Monica Meagher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Crucial concept for us to adopt as our population grows and pollution must decrease. Having read much in this space, I just didn't connect well with Elkingtons writing style - he jumped around and I couldn't always follow his train of thought. More examples would have helped strengthen this books message.

[Oscar · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is a book that feels it was written in terms of world's sustainability. Very informative and it push you to doing something in favor of the planet (and us) right away.