Paul Hawken
Paul Hawken
Paul Hawkenis an environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, and activist ...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEnvironmentalist
Date of Birth8 February 1946
CountryUnited States of America
sky people water
The problems to be faced are vast and complex, but come down to this: 6.6 billion people are breeding exponentially. The process of fulfilling their wants and needs is stripping earth of its biotic capacity to produce life; a climactic burst of consumption by a single species is overwhelming the skies, earth, waters, and fauna.
dark order water
When the planes still swoop down and aerial spray a field in order to kill a predator insect with pesticides, we are in the Dark Ages of commerce. Maybe one thousandth of this aerial insecticide actually prevents the infestation. The balance goes to the leaves, into the soil, into the water, into all forms of wildlife, into ourselves. What is good for the balance sheet is wasteful of resources and harmful to life.
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.
chief contend distance edible executives fact five fortune house name native nowhere series soil within
I doubt very much that the chief executives of any of the Fortune 500 corporations can name five edible plants, five native grasses, or five migratory birds within walking distance of their homes, or name the soil series upon which their house sits. And I would contend that if you don't know where you are, you are in fact nowhere at all.