Paul Hawken

Paul Hawken
Paul Hawkenis an environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, and activist ...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEnvironmentalist
Date of Birth8 February 1946
CountryUnited States of America
focus trying pessimistic
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.
trying poverty humans
We can no longer prosper by increasing human productivity. The more we try to do, the more poverty we will create.
future vision trying
The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them
either wallpaper
There's no in-between. Either Audible will be wallpaper or it will be a billion-dollar-plus company.
class decline figure human last means paper published rate refute system thirty time
Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on Earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation... but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement.
beings human movement ridiculed
Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists.
becoming coherent either forces minority plurality represent rising shift systems threatened top
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.
bail life money print
You can print money to bail out a bank, but you can't print life to bail out a planet.
cheaper destroy rather sustain tells time
We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy Earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it.
along became society somewhere states united wasteful
Somewhere along the way to free-market capitalism, the United States became the most wasteful society on the planet.
full planet species
We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant.
business
There is no polite way to say that business is destroying the world.
ecological financial gives information masked measured money
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.
capital considered economists exclusion factor industrial marginal money natural perceived principal seem sheets throughout
Throughout the industrial era, economists considered manufactured capital - money, factories, etc. - the principal factor in industrial production, and perceived natural capital as a marginal contributor. The exclusion of natural capital from balance sheets was an understandable omission. There was so much of it, it didn't seem worth counting.