This book explores a system of sustainable living that works really well for people, but not so well for products or for business. In other words, the opposite of what we now have.

Set-up: Washington, Oregon, and California have seceded from the union, and create their own country. Then they create a sustainable civilization. They use "steady-state" to describe what we call sustainable, and they generate very little waste--nearly everything is recycled. Their cities lack automobiles and are havens for people to walk; they have public busses or trains that go everywhere and they changed to a national 20-hour work week.

The most interesting part of this book is that it was written in 1975, so there are some cute ideas such as magnetic tapes that store information on books that anyone can access from a sort of kiosk (sounding suspiciously like a PC). Overall, it is very forward thinking, and relates well to the present moment, where some business leaders are starting to point to sustainable ways of doing business, such as is mentioned in the link below:

http://www.ncseonline.org/NCSEconference/2003conference/page.cfm?FID=2504