amount of energy annually converted from sunlight into food by the worlds plants. According to William Rees (2001), based on estimates of sustainably productive ecosystems, humanity has already overshot the long-term human carrying capacity of the Earth by up to 40 percent; while North Americans are using three to four times more per capita than their fair share of the earths sustainable resources. The New Economics Foundations Living Planet Index, developed with the World Wildlife Fund, estimates that humanity has destroyed one third of natures resources over the last 30 years. The growing destruction of natural habitats has generated a rate of biodiversity loss that is now 1,000 times the natural background rate (Rees, 2001). The economic costs of climate change have doubled for each of the last few decades according to the insurance giant Munich Re. According to economist James Robertson (2000), if that pattern continues, by 2060 the costs will be greater than total Gross World Product. The invisibility of natures materials and services has permitted a particular structure or organization of the industrial economy that has been called a river economy (Stahel, 1998). In contrast to the workings of nature which cycle and recycle like ecosystems in a lake, resources in the human economy move in a linear flow, more like a river: from extraction, through processing, distribution, use and finally to disposal. Because of the severity of our environmental crisis, changes that do not alter this organizational structure will be hopelessly insufficient to establish sustainability. And yet, despite growing environmental costs and concerns, most environmental measures have left this structure intact. Despite the growth of recycling over the last 30 years, in North America only about 25 percent of municipal solid waste was recycled by 1995, and less than 2 percent of the total waste stream (Gardner & Sampat, 1998) .