"We are losing our living systems, social systems, cultural systems, governing systems, stability, and our constitutional health, and we're surrendering it all at the same time." -- Paul Hawken
Paul Hawken (born February 8, 1946, in California) is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, and author.
"A local company has more accountability.""All is connected... no one thing can change by itself.""Always leave enough time in your life to do something that makes you happy, satisfied, even joyous. That has more of an effect on economic well-being than any other single factor.""And also, more and more businesses really want to do the right thing. They feel better about themselves, their workers feel better, and so do their customers. I think this is equally true in the transnational corporations, but it is harder to express in those situations.""Businesses who are members of Businesses for Social Responsibility or the Social Venture Network are internalizing costs on a voluntary basis and therefore raising their costs of doing business, but their competitors are not required to.""Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.""I think an old style of addressing environmental problems is ebbing, but the rise of the so-called conservative, political movement in this country is not a trend towards the future but a reaction to this very broad shift that we are undergoing.""If, as is natural, you focus on the corruption and on those threatened institutions that are trying to prevent change - even though they don't really know what they're trying to prevent - then you can get pessimistic.""In short, industrialism is over.""Information from destructive activities going back a hundred years right up until today is being incorporated into the system. And as that happens the underlying framework of industrialism is collapsing and causing disintegration.""Intelligent policies will be largely self-regulating in the sense that the system of incentives and standards makes it absolutely ludicrous to not move towards clean, internalized systems of cost and production.""Interestingly, the oil companies know very well that in less than 30 years they will not only be charging very high prices, but that they will be uncompetitive with renewables.""Local companies don't have to internalize their costs, and few actually do, but they tend to more often because the owners live there and they have to show their face in town, and their kids play with other kids.""People are naming it the Third Wave, the Information Age, etc. but I would say those are basically technological descriptions, and this next shift is not about technology - although obviously it will be influenced and in some cases expressed by technologies.""That appropriation of resources and the transformation of them into goods and services through the European production system characterized, and characterizes to this day, all industrial systems including the information age.""That inefficiency is masked because growth and progress are measured in money, and money does not give us information about ecological systems, it only gives information about financial systems.""The financial capital is being concentrated by corporations, institutional investors, and even our pension funds, and being reinvested in companies that repeat this process because it provides the highest return on that financial capital.""The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them.""Thus, the forces and value systems that are most threatened by this shift are becoming the most coherent and are rising to the top as minority or plurality powers. But they do not represent either the shift, the change, or the future.""We are now heading down a centuries-long path toward increasing the productivity of our natural capital - the resource systems upon which we depend to live - instead of our human capital.""We assume that everything's becoming more efficient, and in an immediate sense that's true; our lives are better in many ways. But that improvement has been gained through a massively inefficient use of natural resources.""We can no longer prosper by increasing human productivity. The more we try to do, the more poverty we will create.""What we are missing, utterly and completely, in this government is accountability."
Paul Hawken had a Swedish grandmother and a Scottish grandfather with a farm. His father worked at UC Berkeley. As a teenager, he "roam[ed] the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, the dry eastern valleys that sprawl down to Mono Lake, and the White Mountain area above Owens Valley." He received no formal degrees but attended UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University.
He worked in the Civil Rights Movement.
He currently lives in or near Sausalito, California, a neighbor of Stewart Brand.
Hawken has authored six books including The Next Economy (1983) , Growing a Business, and The Ecology of Commerce (1993), wherein he coined the term the "restoration economy."His book, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (1999) coauthored with Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins, popularized the now-standard idea of natural capital and direct accounting for nature's services. Natural Capitalism has been translated into 26 other languages.
Blessed Unrest, How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming published by Viking Press (New York) in May 2007, argues that a vast world-changing “movement with no name” is now forming, which Hawken believes will prevail. He conceives of this "movement" as developing not by ideology but rather through the identification of what is and is not humane, like an immune system.
The following passage, introducing the appendix on the WiserEarth project (which is not mentioned in the book itself), gives an idea of his conception of the movement: “It is axiomatic that we are at a threshold in human existence, a fundamental change in understanding about our relationship to nature and each other. We are moving from a world created by privilege to a world created by community. The current thrust of history is too supple to be labeled, but global themes are emerging in response to cascading ecological crises and human suffering. These ideas include the need for radical social change, the reinvention of market-based economics, the empowerment of women, activism on all levels, and the need for localized economic control. There are insistent calls for autonomy, appeals for a new resource ethic based on the tradition of the commons, demands for the reinstatement of cultural primacy over corporate hegemony, and a rising demand for radical transparency in politics and corporate decision making. It has been said that environmentalism failed as a movement, or worse yet, died. It is the other way around. Everyone on earth will be an environmentalist in the not too distant future, driven there by necessity and experience.”
His books have been published in over 50 countries in 27 languages.
Growing a Business became the basis of a 17-part PBS series, which Mr. Hawken hosted and produced. The program, which explored the challenges and pitfalls of starting and operating socially responsive companies, was shown on television in 115 countries.
Hawken took over a small retail store in Boston in 1966 called Erewhon (after Samuel Butler's utopian novel published anonymously in 1872) and turned it into the Erewhon Trading Company, a natural-foods wholesaler, relying solely on sustainable-agricultural suppliers. With Dave Smith, he co-founded the Smith & Hawken garden supply company in 1979, a retail and catalog business. He heads PaxFan, which uses geometries found in nature to increase the efficiency of industrial fans, turbines, and electronic thermal management. In 2008, he co-founded Biomimicry Technologies with biologist Janine Benyus, the author of Biomimicry, Innovation Inspired by Nature, HarperCollins, 1997.
Hawken founded and directs the Natural Capital Institute (NCI) located in Sausalito, California. Its main focus is WiserEarth, an open source database of activists and civil society organizations focused on environmental and social justice.
Mr. Hawken has served on the board of public organizations including Point Foundation (publisher of the Whole Earth Catalogs), Center for Plant Conservation, Conservation International, Trust for Public Land, Friends of the Earth, and National Audubon Society. He was the founder of The Natural Step in the United States.
As of 2009 Paul Hawken had been awarded six honorary doctorates.
In 2002, Fortune called him “the original hippie entrepreneur, the merchant of Marin County who got turned on to business when others were still dropping out,” adding: “Today Hawken occupies a unique niche in the American landscape, combining bottom-line business credentials [he regularly addresses corporate audiences] with credibility among environmentalists and social critics. He once wrote, and stands by, the following sentence: ‘There is no polite way to say that business is destroying the world.’ Yet he also believes, passionately, that business?with its restless energy, imagination, and creativity?will one day get us out of the mess it has made. Says Hawken: ‘I believe business is on the verge of . . . a change brought on by social and biological forces that can no longer be ignored or put aside.’”
Paul Hawken was hired by Ben & Jerry's to perform a social audit.
Other recognition and awards received are:
Green Cross Millennium Award for Individual Environmental Leadership presented by Mikhail Gorbachev in 2003
World Council for Corporate Governance in 2002
Design Futures Council Senior Fellow
Small Business Administration Entrepreneur of the Year in 1990
Utne One Hundred Visionaries who could Change our Lives in 1995
Western Publications Association Maggie award for Natural Capitalism as the best Signed Editorial/Essay in 1997
Creative Visionary Award by the International Society of Industrial Design
Design in Business Award for environmental responsibility by the American Center for Design
Council on Economic Priorities’ 1990 Corporate Conscience Award
American Horticultural Society Award for commitment to excellence in commercial horticulture
Metropolitan Home Design 100 Editorial Award for the 100 best people, products and ideas that shape our lives
The Cine Golden Eagle award in video for the PBS program Marketing from Growing a Business
California Institute of Integral Studies Award For Ongoing Humanitarian Contributions to the Bay Area Communities
Esquire Magazine award for the best 100 People of a Generation (1984)
(according to http://www.paulhawken.com/biography.html)
Video
Paul Hawken interview from Democracy Now! program, May 23, 2007
Hope: an interview with Paul Hawken by elephant journal
