Southwire Corp. -- a billion-dollar wire and cable manufacturer -- has followed a similar path toward energy efficiency, says Lovins. Over the past 20 years, the company has invested in new energy-efficient motors and better light bulbs. Engineers also found a way to cut down on the creation of scrap metal and retooled the furnaces so that they capture and reuse heat that once exited through smokestacks. "We used to pay about $22 million to $25 million a year to keep things running," says Lee Hunter, the company's vice president of energy. "Now, we pay about $18 million."

Then there's Interface. Bertolucci, speaking before the group of investment advisors, says that his company has put several reforms in place. Interface has purchased solar panels, reengineered its manufacturing process in a way that reduces the amount of toxic chemicals used and shifted from products to services, offering not just sales but also industrial-carpet leases. All of these moves help the environment: American companies and individuals trash 3.5 billion pounds of carpet every year. By making a few changes, by the end of 2000, Interface had eliminated more than $165 million in waste from products and processes.

These success stories, cited repeatedly by Lovins in lectures, in books and on his Web site, are not entirely complete. Interface, for example, despite offering leases for the past three years, has managed to sign up only four customers -- a drop in the revenue bucket. Lovins' stories also gloss over or entirely ignore a key source of natural capitalism's improved bottom lines -- government. Under laws passed in the 1970s, and maintained through the Clinton era, companies that reduce pollution receive financial credits. Part of DuPont's improved bottom line comes from these federal programs, says Leslie Cormier, a DuPont spokesperson, although DuPont doesn't break out government-related cost savings from pure market savings, so it's impossible to know exactly how big a role government has played.

Government incentives and regulations play an important role in encouraging corporate responsibility, says John Holdren, an environmental policy professor at Harvard. Lovins tends to be too optimistic, says Holdren; he ignores the fact that "industry is not, by itself, going to worry enough about overdependence on oil, or about greenhouse gas emissions that affect the climate." Plus, even if capitalism eventually does realize that protecting the environment is in its own interest, how long should society be expected to wait? Should the environmentally conscious simply watch as places like Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge are slated for the oil industry's auction block? Should they really believe that the Bush administration is simply a distraction, a bump in the road to environmental Utopia?

Holdren and more radical environmentalists, who sometimes call Lovins' stance "wishy-washy" or "naive," are concerned that Lovins assigns too much control to companies and consumers. Like Henderson, they argue that government can dramatically alter the future course of world events. Some even say that Lovins, by diminishing the importance of government, threatens to hurt the environmental cause by discouraging activism.

Lovins doesn't appear to be bothered by such criticism. He maintains an unvacillating faith in the markets. No one, he insists, not Jimmy Carter, nor President Bush, can affect the environment as much as pure, powerful, plain-and-simple capitalism.

"Government is important, and yes, people in government are often eager to use power for purposes we don't agree with," he says. "But the two biggest springs of action are companies and communities. They're big enough to get things done and small enough not to trip all over themselves."

"Natural capitalism is extremely profitable today," he adds in an e-mail. Indeed, Southwire confirms that not a dime of its savings comes from government credits. And at Interface, Bertolucci says, the vast majority of cut costs come directly from the market.

Today, "even when nature (and people) are valued at roughly zero," Lovins says, companies are still saving millions of dollars by becoming more efficient. "The business case for natural capitalism, in both short-term profitability and stunning longer-term competitive advantage, comes from dramatic reductions in private internal costs through eliminating waste, making only things people want to buy, aligning incentives with customers and reinvesting in the most productive forms of capital. In short, orthodox economics taken seriously."

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