Work Like Nature
Work Like Nature
Sustainability lessons from ecosystems for your job or business
About the Book
Do you want to take action at work that will benefit you, your job and your community as much as it helps the environment? Lea Elliott’s Work Like Nature presents lessons from nature to help you make sense of sustainability and start making a difference.
These ecosystem ideas are illustrated through inspiring stories from Vancouver-area green innovators. See how these bright thinkers from a variety of disciplines work like nature to benefit the environment and, surprisingly, to win at their job or business.
You’ll see how a city secures its energy needs, a community designs a dynamic waterfront, and an entrepreneur protects our oceans. You’ll also discover how a diversity of flowers growing in a blueberry field fortifies our food supply, how turning manure into renewable natural gas can in fact protect our water, and how views of nature make us healthier. Exercises and examples in each chapter will help you apply these lessons to your own work.
By simply looking outside, you can gain insights to help you protect the environment, grow the green economy, build resilient communities and do work you’re proud of.
If you enjoyed Hawken’s Ecology of Commerce, Braungart and McDonough’s Cradle to Cradle or Benyus’s Biomimicry you’ll love Work Like Nature.
Reader Testimonials
Kristin Ohlson
Author of The Soil Will Save Us
Lea Elliott's book is both inspirational and practical, full of great ideas for transforming our urgent need to work with nature into actual change.
Melissa Chaun
Tri-City News
Lea Elliott provides practical exercises to help readers begin to analyze their business and develop a sustainability framework.
Dr. Steve Schein
Author of A New Psychology for Sustainability Leadership: The Hidden Power of Ecological Worldviews
I highly recommend Lea Elliott's new book to anyone looking to up their game as a sustainability change agent, educator, or practitioner. Her six lessons from nature contain abundant new ideas about how to accelerate and scale sustainability practice...and are fun to read as well!
Table of Contents
- Build Your Career and Be Sustainable
-
Preface
- Journey to win-win
- Introduction
-
Chapter 1. Work With Nature’s Services
- Nature provides
- Crop insurance: nature
- Health insurance: nature
- Storm insurance: nature
-
Chapter 2. Use Non-Toxic Materials and Processes
- Greener plastics for a bluer ocean
- Feel good about what you wear
-
Chapter 3. Seek and Share Optimal Resources
- Seeking a more optimal fish feed
- Powering a city with under-utilized, local resources
- Optimize travel with car sharing
-
Chapter 4. Upcycle Wastes into Resources
- Finding a use for rejected produce
- Turning smelly ick into cozy warmth
-
Chapter 5. Be Diverse
- Bee diversity generates profit
- Bees need landscape diversity
- More energy diversity for better energy security
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Chapter 6. Pay Attention to Interconnection
- Systemic issues need systemic solutions
- Thinking of interconnections causes a sustainability ripple
- Connect to and work with your natural setting
- Conclusion
- Request for Review
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Common and Scientific Names
-
Notes
- Preface
- Introduction
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Conclusion
- About the Author
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