Scenes from Joel Makower's Book Launch Party

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When GreenBiz.com's Executive Editor Joel Makower wrote his first book, "The Green Consumer," in 1990 he soon realized that there really wasn't any green consumer movement to speak of. Now, after more than 20 years of looking at the growing green movement, Joel says that has changed.

"We've become green consumers almost in spite of ourselves," he explained to Aron Cramer of BSR and a packed room at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club on Wednesday evening..

The occasion was the launch of his latest book, "Strategies for a Green Economy," and in his conversation, Joel ran the gamut not just of how the green consumer movement has evolved over the years, but how business is learning the ropes as well.

Some of the change, he said, comes from companies realizing that they are accountable to more and more groups -- not just shareholders, but also to their customers, to their workers, and increasingly by the government. But another key driver of the green economy occurs as companies learn that they can squeeze money out of inefficiencies and waste in their operations.

"What's going on behind the scenes supports the belt-tightening phase," that we're in with the weak economy, Joel said. That means that a lot of companies are walking more than they're talking on green issues.

Nike, one of several companies that came up as examples during the course of the night, is a good example of companies doing more than they're talking about. In addition to innovations like making shoes from scraps of the manufacturing process (the "Trash Talk" model), Joel explained that the company is also using computer-assisted design tools to cut the number of sample shoes it needs for a new product down by 66 percent.

Other companies Joel and Aron repeatedly cited as examples of leaders in the green economy are Wal-Mart, with its host of internal green initiatives and goals for greening its supply chain, and General Motors, which despite being a slow-moving dinosaur ("These companies know they're dinosaurs," Joel told the crowd of the U.S. auto giants), has been making significant steps toward and investments in greening their operations and products.

"Who knew that Bentonville, Arkansas, would be the hub of all this change?" Joel asked the crowd.

(We've been running a series of excerpts from "Strategies for the Green Economy" on GreenBiz.com -- From a Movement to a Market, Green In Spite of Ourselves, and What's In It for Me?, and of course you can buy it here.)

After the talk at the Commonwealth Club, at least 120 green business leaders and fans of Joel's gathered at the Catharine Clark Gallery in downtown San Francisco for wine, hors d'oeuvres and discussions about green business in a down economy. We've got this photo and many more from the event on the next page.

From left: Joel Makower, Roberto Piccioni of Dominican University, and Andrew Lawton of Union Bank.