Paul Hawken | |
|---|---|
 Hawken in 2017 | |
| Born | (1946-02-08)February 8, 1946 (age 80) San Mateo, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Author, entrepreneur, activist |
| Genre | Ecological business |
| Spouse | Jasmine Scalesciani Hawken |
| Website | |
| paulhawken | |
Paul Gerard Hawken (born February 8, 1946) is an Americanenvironmentalist,entrepreneur, author, economist, and activist.[1]
Hawken was born in San Mateo,California, and grew up in theSan Francisco Bay Area, where his father worked atUC Berkeley in library sciences.[2] He attended UC Berkeley andSan Francisco State University. Hawken's work includes founding ecological businesses, writing about impacts of commerce on living systems, and consulting with corporations and governments on economic development, industrial ecology, and environmental policy.[1]
Hawken was the co-founder and executive director ofProject Drawdown, a non-profit that describes how global warming can be reversed.[3]
Hawken was active in thecivil rights movement.[4] He currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Hawken has authored articles, op-eds, and peer-reviewed papers, and seven books, including:The Next Economy (Ballantine 1983),Growing a Business (Simon and Schuster 1987),The Ecology of Commerce (HarperCollins 1993), andBlessed Unrest (Viking 2007).[5]
The Ecology of Commerce was voted the #1 college text on business and the environment by professors in 67 business schools.[6] The businessman and environmentalistRay Anderson ofInterface, Inc. creditedThe Ecology of Commerce with his environmental awakening. He described reading it as a "spear in the chest experience", after which Anderson started crisscrossing the country with a near-evangelical fervor, telling fellow executives about the need to reduce waste and carbon emissions.[7]
Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, co-authored withAmory Lovins, wrote about the idea ofnatural capital[8] and direct accounting forecosystem services.[9]Natural Capitalism has been translated into 14 other languages. Together withThe Ecology of Commerce these books have been described as being "among the first to point the way towards a sustainable global economy".[10]
Blessed Unrest, How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, published in 2007, argues that a vast "movement with no name" is forming involving environmental, social justice, andindigenous rights organizations. Hawken conceives of this "movement" as developing not byideology but rather through the identification of what is and is not humane, and has compared it to humanity's collectiveimmune system.[11]
Growing a Business became the basis of a 17-partPBS series, which Hawken hosted and produced. The program, which explored the challenges and pitfalls of starting and operating socially responsible companies, appeared on television in 115 countries and reached more than 100 million people.[2]
Hawken co-created Project Drawdown in 2013 with Amanda Joy Ravenhill, and was the co-creator, author, and editor ofDrawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, published in 2017. It was a collaborative effort involving 200 researchers and advisors who came together to model the most substantive solutions to reverse global warming.
In 2021, Hawken published theNew York Times Bestseller,[12]Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation.[13]
Hawken's books have been published in more than 50 countries in 30 languages.[14]
Hawken founded several companies, starting when he took over a small retail store in Boston in 1967 calledErewhon (afterSamuel Butler's 1872utopian novel) and turned it into the Erewhon Trading Company, a natural-foods wholesaler, and one of the first in the US that relied solely on sustainable agricultural methods.[15] When he left the company in the 1970s, it had over 30,000 acres of organically grown food under contract. Hawken co-founded theSmith & Hawken garden supply company in 1979, a retail and catalog business.[16] In 2009, he founded OneSun, an energy company focused on ultra low-cost solar based ongreen chemistry andbiomimicry.[17]
From 1994 to 1998, Hawken founded and headed up The Natural Step USA. From 1996 to 1998, Hawken was co-chairman of The Natural Step International.[18] The Natural Step was founded in 1989 by Swedish scientist and medical doctorKarl-Henrik Robèrt in order to create shared frameworks for understandingsustainable development. Its purpose is to teach and support environmentalsystems thinking in corporations, cities, governments, unions, and academic institutions through a dialogue process rooted in basic science.[19]
In 1998, Hawken created the Natural Capital Institute located inSausalito, California. Its main focus waswiser.org, an open-source database of activists and civil society organizations focused on environmental and social justice.[20]
Hawken was previously the executive director ofProject Drawdown, which is working towards the drawdown ofgreenhouse gases to reduceclimate change.[21]
In 1965, Hawken worked withMartin Luther King Jr.'s staff inSelma, Alabama, preparing for theSelma to Montgomery marches. As press coordinator, he registered members of the press, issued credentials, gave dozens of updates and interviews on national radio, and acted as marshal for the final, March, 21,March to Montgomery. That same year, Hawken worked in New Orleans as a staff photographer for theCongress of Racial Equality, focusing on voter registration drives inBogalusa, Louisiana, and the panhandle of Florida, and photographing theKu Klux Klan inMeridian, Mississippi, after three civil rights workers were tortured and killed. In Meridian, Hawken was assaulted and seized by Ku Klux Klan members, but escaped due toFederal Bureau of Investigation surveillance and intervention.[22]
As a speaker, Hawken has given several hundred talks, including keynote addresses to major associations, companies, government agencies. His University commencement addresses have included:
Hawken has been awarded six honorary doctorates,[23] and received the Green Cross Millennium Award for Individual Environmental Leadership presented byMikhail Gorbachev in 2003.[26]
Ending the climate crisis in one generation
the ecology of commerce.
growing a business.
Media related toPaul Hawken at Wikimedia Commons
Quotations related toPaul Hawken at Wikiquote