Paul Hawken Quotes

#1. Business is the only mechanism on the planet today powerful enough to produce the changes necessary to reverse global environments and social degradation.

Paul Hawken

#2. 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.

Paul Hawken

#3. Biological diversity is messy. It walks, it crawls, it swims, it swoops, it buzzes. But extinction is silent, and it has no voice other than our own.

Paul Hawken

#4. We are speeding up our lives and working harder in a futile attempt to buy the time to slow down and enjoy it.

Paul Hawken

#5. Most floods are caused by man, not weather; deforestation, levee construction, erosion, and overgrazing all result in the loss of ecosystem services.

Paul Hawken

#6. When you pollute a river, it's a supreme injustice to those who are downstream and those who live in the river who are not human beings.

Paul Hawken

#7. Writing is my way of diving deep into an issue. My approach is to watch, read and listen - sometimes for years - in order to grasp the dynamics, resistance and patterns of thought that repeat and impede progress and breakthrough.

Paul Hawken

#8. Wrong is an addictive, repetitive story; Right is where the movement is.

Paul Hawken

#9. 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.

Paul Hawken

#10. Being in business is not about making money. It is a way to become who you are.

Paul Hawken

#11. Business is correct to defend its right to act in order to produce a vigorous and engaging prosperity. But it is wrong if it forgets that this freedom can only be experienced within the discipline of social responsibility.

Paul Hawken

#12. 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.

Paul Hawken

#13. 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.

Paul Hawken

#14. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity's willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider.

Paul Hawken

#15. 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.

Paul Hawken

#16. 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.

Paul Hawken

#17. If they [companies] believe they are in business to serve people, to help solve problems, to use and employ the ingenuity of their workers to improve the lives of people around them by learning from the nature that gives us life, we have a chance.

Paul Hawken

#18. 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.

Paul Hawken

#19. I'd rather fail at something important than succeed at something trivial.

Paul Hawken

#20. For the developed world, there is a choice to be made: to promote economic policies that despoil indigenous lands or to support cultures and the remaining biological sanctuaries.

Paul Hawken

#21. It costs the same to send a person to prison or to Harvard. The difference is the curriculum.

Paul Hawken

#22. First we need to decide what needs to be done. Then we do it. And then we ask if it is possible.

Paul Hawken

#23. 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.

Paul Hawken

#24. We're trained to see the world in terms of charismatic organizations and charismatic people. That's who we look to for leadership and change, for transformation. We're awaiting the next J.F.K., the next Martin Luther King, the next Gandhi, the next Nelson Mandela.

Paul Hawken

#25. Luck is earned. Luck is working so hard at your craft, service or enterprise that sooner or later you get a break.

Paul Hawken

#26. You can blame people who knock things over in the dark or you can begin to light candles. You're only at fault if you know about the problem and choose to do nothing.

Paul Hawken

#27. 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.

Paul Hawken

#28. In short, industrialism is over.

Paul Hawken

#29. All is connected ... no one thing can change by itself.

Paul Hawken

#30. Seeing the world around you clearly is a critical step in developing an idea for a business, carrying out that idea, and then thriving with an ongoing concern. Through choice, predilection, lack of education, impatience, or other causes, the entrepreneur lives, in a way, outside the mainstream.

Paul Hawken

#31. Somewhere along the way to free-market capitalism, the United States became the most wasteful society on the planet.

Paul Hawken

#32. Healing the wounds of the earth and its people does not require saintliness or a political party, only gumption and persistence. It is not a liberal or conservative activity; it is a sacred act.

Paul Hawken

#33. Really, the proper study of economics is fulfilment, not consumption ... It doesn't even matter if it's a green product or a green house ... It's still consumption. What matters in this world is the fulfilment of people's needs and the fulfilment of their aspirations.

Paul Hawken

#34. Business is destroying the world, with flair, expertise, and panache.

Paul Hawken

#35. You can print money to bail out a bank, but you can't print life to bail out a planet.

Paul Hawken

#36. 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.

Paul Hawken

#37. What a great time to be born, what a great time to be alive, because this generation gets to completely change this world.

Paul Hawken

#38. 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.

Paul Hawken

#39. We have to ask ourselves, 'What kind of world is it where a baby-food executive substitutes artificial flavoring and sugar for apple juice? What kind of businesses have we created when we even lie to infants?'

Paul Hawken

#40. 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.

Paul Hawken

#41. 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.

Paul Hawken

#42. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer.

Paul Hawken

#43. Real change occurs from the bottom up; it occurs person to person, and it almost always occurs in small groups and locales and then bubbles up and aggregates to larger vectors of change.

Paul Hawken

#44. The future belongs to those who understand that doing more with less is compassionate, prosperous, and enduring, and thus more intelligent, even competitive.

Paul Hawken

#45. 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.

Paul Hawken

#46. The responses that environmentalists evoke - fear, anxiety, numbness, despair - are not helpful, even if they are understandable. It should be fascinating, even enthralling, to be in the milieu of environmental change.

Paul Hawken

#47. How much harm does a company have to do before we question its right to exist?

Paul Hawken

#48. We subsidize the disposal of waste in all its myriad forms from landfills to Superfund cleanups, from deep-well injection to storage of nuclear waste. In the process, we encourage an economy where 80 percent of what we consume gets thrown away after one use.

Paul Hawken

#49. The atmosphere does not fathom whether CO2 comes from U.S. oil or Chinese coal, nor do hurricanes lose force because the Heritage Foundation doesn't believe global warming is a problem. Living systems operate on laws over which we have no say.

Paul Hawken

#50. We can no longer prosper by increasing human productivity. The more we try to do, the more poverty we will create.

Paul Hawken

#51. Don't go to business school.

Paul Hawken

#52. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product.

Paul Hawken

#53. Only caring individuals can restore the places we inhabit. The 'simple act of planting a tree' not only restores the places we live, but makes us whole and powerful again.

Paul Hawken

#54. Natural capitalism is not about making sudden changes, uprooting institutions, or fomenting upheaval for a new social order. Natural capitalism is about making small, critical choices that can tip economic and social factors in positive ways.

Paul Hawken

#55. 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.

Paul Hawken

#56. It is possible for the assembly-line worker consigned to tightening the bolts on the transmission and the office worker who processes medical insurance claims to work with pride and efficiency, but it's not easy to maintain that attitude.

Paul Hawken

#57. 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

#58. Trees are being saved because of the Kindle.

Paul Hawken

#59. While there may be no "right" way to value a forest or a river, there is a wrong way, which is to give it no value at all. How do we decide the value of a 700-year-old tree? We need only to ask how much it would cost to make a new one, or a new river, or even a new atmosphere.

Paul Hawken

#60. The self-owned and -operated business is the freest life in the world.

Paul Hawken

#61. The promise of business is to increase the general well-being of humankind through service, a creative invention and ethical philosophy.

Paul Hawken

#62. There is no polite way to say that business is destroying the world.

Paul Hawken

#63. We have the capacity to create a remarkably different economy: one that can restore ecosystems and protect the environment while bringing forth innovation, prosperity, meaningful work, and true security.

Paul Hawken

#64. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich

Paul Hawken

#65. What we already know frames what we see, and what we see frames what we understand.

Paul Hawken

#66. There is no cost difference between incarceration and an Ivy League education; the main difference is curriculum.

Paul Hawken

#67. 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.

Paul Hawken

#68. Yes, population is a huge problem - birth rates are too high. And in order to take care of the environment, we have to make sure that every child that comes here, that arrives, knows that he or she is welcome, is going to be cared for and honored.

Paul Hawken

#69. Don't be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

Paul Hawken

#70. Sustainability, ensuring the future of life on Earth, is an infinite game, the endless expression of generosity on behalf of all.

Paul Hawken

#71. If you look at the science that describes what is happening on earth today and aren't pessimistic, you don't have the correct data. If you meet people in this unnamed movement and aren't optimistic, you haven't got a heart.

Paul Hawken

#72. We are the only species on this planet without full employment.

Paul Hawken

#73. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy Earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it.

Paul Hawken

#74. Green business is not about tie-dyed T-shirts. It's about transforming the industrial system itself into one that looks at all the connections.

Paul Hawken

#75. Capitalism, as practiced, is a financially profitable, non-sustainable aberration in human development.

Paul Hawken

#76. You are Brilliant and the Earth is Hiring

Paul Hawken

#77. Natural capital is easy to overlook because it is the pond we swim in. One can live perfectly well without ever giving a thought to the sulfur cycle or wetland functions. Only when the benefits nature provides are disrupted do we take notice.

Paul Hawken

#78. The United States prides itself on being the richest country in the world. Yet we can't balance the budget, pay for education, or take care of the aged and infirm.

Paul Hawken

#79. Being a good human being is good business.

Paul Hawken

#80. A local company has more accountability.

Paul Hawken

#81. If there is to be an ecologically sound society, it will have to come the grass roots up, not from the top down.

Paul Hawken

#82. Mother's milk would be banned by the food safety laws of industrialized nations if it were sold as a packaged good.

Paul Hawken

#83. This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Civilization needs a new operating system.

Paul Hawken

#84. 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.

Paul Hawken

#85. What we are missing, utterly and completely, in this government is accountability.

Paul Hawken

#86. 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.

Paul Hawken

#87. The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them.

Paul Hawken