Profits and Sustainability

A History of Green Entrepreneurship

By: Geoffrey Jones

Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain

Are profits and sustainability compatible?

This book brings unique perspectives to this key debate by exploring the history of green entrepreneurship since the nineteenth century, and its spread globally in industries including renewable energy, organic food, natural beauty, ecotourism, recycling, architecture, and finance.

The book uses the lens of the extraordinary and often eccentric men and women who defied convention and imagined that business could help save the planet, rather than consume it. The social and religious beliefs that drove many of these individuals are explored as the book looks at how they overcame huge obstacles to execute their strategies. The green entrepreneurs seen here are shown to have created new markets and industries, and driven innovations in sustainable practices, even at times when most consumers and governments marginalized the entire subject. The struggles of early pioneers appear to have been rewarded by the growth of environmental awareness among consumers, business leaders, and others in recent years, but the Earth's environmental health continues to deteriorate. If profits and sustainability have proved challenging to reconcile, the book argues that one reason was how they were both defined.

©2017 Geoffrey Jones (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Comprehensive and detailed

I was surprised to learn how important each entrepreneur’s belief system/spirituality was to their contributions to sustainable business. The need for organic and green labels, especially in agriculture, was all new and interesting information to me. I work in architecture but it was nice to have a book that included other industries. I’m not sure if I would revisit this book, hence the 4/5 star rating. A very comprehensive and detailed chronology, so much so that I had to listen at 1.5x speed.

I’m in the SA business

I am in the SA economy and love well written non fiction books. This is not interesting. This is not well written. This is not well read. Those positive reviews at, perhaps his friends or academics who have a different definition than the rest of the people