I believe in commerce, I believe in entrepreneurship, I believe in business, I mean I want to make it really clear. But capitalism? No. I don’t hold trump with that at all. It was meant to be a double entendre. A pun, a pun.

From an interview with Paul Hawken (by Kamal Patel), one of the coiners of the concept:

Q: What can you say about people who struggle with the concept or word, capitalism. And could you maybe help them better understand what you mean by “Natural Capitalism?

PH: “Three years before the book came out, I had written an article called “Natural Capitalism,” and coined the term. And what I was writing about was Natural Capital, and that was (coined) by E. F. Schumacher. And what he was trying to say, as an economist, was (take a) look at this form of capital — living systems and ecosystems services, what we call resources. We don’t put this on the balance sheet of the world. We count it as zero, until we cut it down, extract it, mine it, kill it. And then it has value. But before we do that, it has zero value. That’s crazy. It has more value before we touch it.

So, then it goes to Herman Daly, and what Herman Daly was saying is that the limiting factor to human prosperity to the world wasn’t human productivity, but the productivity of our resources because we are in a resource restrained world caused by our industrial systems taking so much, so often and for so long. Therefore, when you have an economy and you see what the limiting factors are to development, then you work on maximizing what is limiting. And what is limiting to us isn’t people, we have lots of people, too many some may say.

So my reason for writing the piece in Mother Jones, which was written in ’96 and published in ’97 (and the book in ’99), was to say what kind of economy would it be if we were to maximize the production of natural capital, rather than maximizing the capital of people? When you maximize the productivity of people, you use less people. Well we have more people than there are jobs. Basically we are using less and less of what we have more of, and with natural capital, using more and more of what we have less of. And we are using more of it (natural capital) to make people more productive, to use less people. So this is upside down and backwards, we should be using more and more people to use less and less natural capital.

So when it came to titling it for the magazine, we called it Natural Capital — “ism.” It had nothing to do with capitalism, as such. It was actually meant to tweak the Mother Jones readers. And some of them were really mad, and my editor was fired for it. And was fired by people who had not really read the article. They felt like it was just about granola capitalism, or we were justifying capitalism. And it had nothing to do with capitalism, and it still doesn’t. Now Amory (Lovins) and Hunter (Lovins) interpret it that way. But as a coiner of the term, and as one of the two authors of the book, I can tell you that “Natural Capitalism” is in no way meant to imply or be a justification or bull work to capitalist systems, which I think, are basically pathological.

I believe in commerce, I believe in entrepreneurship, I believe in business, I mean I want to make it really clear. But capitalism? No. I don’t hold trump with that at all. It was meant to be a double entendre. A pun, a pun.”

I strongly recommend to read the whole interview here.