Paul Hawken | |
|---|---|
 Hawken in 2017 | |
| Born | February 8, 1946 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 American environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, economist, and activist. [1]
Hawken was born in San Mateo, California, and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where his father worked at UC Berkeley in library sciences. [2] He attended UC Berkeley and San 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 of Project Drawdown, a non-profit that describes how global warming can be reversed. [3]
Hawken was active in the civil 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), and Blessed 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 environmentalist Ray Anderson of Interface, Inc. credited The 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 with Amory Lovins, wrote about the idea of natural capital and direct accounting for ecosystem services. [8] Natural Capitalism has been translated into 14 other languages. Together with The Ecology of Commerce these books have been described as being "among the first to point the way towards a sustainable global economy". [9]
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, and indigenous rights organizations. Hawken conceives of this "movement" as developing not by ideology but rather through the identification of what is and is not humane, and has compared it to humanity's collective immune system. [10]
Growing a Business became the basis of a 17-part PBS 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 of Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming , published in 2017. It was collaborative effort involving 200 researchers and advisors who came together to model the most substantive solutions to reverse global warming.
In 2021, Hawken published the New York Times Bestseller, [11] Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation. [12]
Hawken's books have been published in more than 50 countries in 30 languages. [13]
Hawken founded several companies, starting when he took over a small retail store in Boston in 1967 called Erewhon (after Samuel Butler's 1872 utopian 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. [14] When he left the company in the 1970s, it had over 30,000 acres of organically grown food under contract. Hawken co-founded the Smith & Hawken garden supply company in 1979, a retail and catalog business. [15] In 2009, he founded OneSun, an energy company focused on ultra low-cost solar based on green chemistry and biomimicry. [16]
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. [17] The Natural Step was founded in 1989 by Swedish scientist and medical doctor Karl-Henrik Robèrt in order to create shared frameworks for understanding sustainable development. Its purpose is to teach and support environmental systems thinking in corporations, cities, governments, unions, and academic institutions through a dialogue process rooted in basic science. [18]
In 1998, Hawken created the Natural Capital Institute (NCI) located in Sausalito, California. Its main focus was wiser.org, an open-source database of activists and civil society organizations focused on environmental and social justice. [19]
Hawken was previously the executive director of Project Drawdown, which is working towards the drawdown of greenhouse gases to reduce climate change. [20]
In 1965, Hawken worked with Martin Luther King Jr.'s staff in Selma, Alabama, preparing for the Selma 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 the Congress of Racial Equality, focusing on voter registration drives in Bogalusa, Louisiana, and the panhandle of Florida, and photographing the Ku Klux Klan in Meridian, 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 to Federal Bureau of Investigation surveillance and intervention. [21]
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, [22] and received the Green Cross Millennium Award for Individual Environmental Leadership presented by Mikhail Gorbachev in 2003. [24]
Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution is a 1999 book on environmental economics co-authored by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins. It has been translated into a dozen languages and was the subject of a Harvard Business Review summary.
The environmental movement is a social movement that aims to protect the natural world from harmful environmental practices in order to create sustainable living. Environmentalists advocate the just and sustainable management of resources and stewardship of the environment through changes in public policy and individual behavior. In its recognition of humanity as a participant in ecosystems, the movement is centered on ecology, health, as well as human rights.
Natural capital is the world's stock of natural resources, which includes geology, soils, air, water and all living organisms. Some natural capital assets provide people with free goods and services, often called ecosystem services. All of these underpin our economy and society, and thus make human life possible.
Environmental economics is a sub-field of economics concerned with environmental issues. It has become a widely studied subject due to growing environmental concerns in the twenty-first century. Environmental economics "undertakes theoretical or empirical studies of the economic effects of national or local environmental policies around the world. ... Particular issues include the costs and benefits of alternative environmental policies to deal with air pollution, water quality, toxic substances, solid waste, and global warming."
Ecological economics, bioeconomics, ecolonomy, eco-economics, or ecol-econ is both a transdisciplinary and an interdisciplinary field of academic research addressing the interdependence and coevolution of human economies and natural ecosystems, both intertemporally and spatially. By treating the economy as a subsystem of Earth's larger ecosystem, and by emphasizing the preservation of natural capital, the field of ecological economics is differentiated from environmental economics, which is the mainstream economic analysis of the environment. One survey of German economists found that ecological and environmental economics are different schools of economic thought, with ecological economists emphasizing strong sustainability and rejecting the proposition that physical (human-made) capital can substitute for natural capital.
The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to green politics:
Eco-capitalism, also known as environmental capitalism or (sometimes) green capitalism, is the view that capital exists in nature as "natural capital" on which all wealth depends. Therefore, governments should use market-based policy-instruments to resolve environmental problems.
A green economy is an economy that aims at reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities, and that aims for sustainable development without degrading the environment. It is closely related with ecological economics, but has a more politically applied focus. The 2011 UNEP Green Economy Report argues "that to be green, an economy must not only be efficient, but also fair. Fairness implies recognizing global and country level equity dimensions, particularly in assuring a Just Transition to an economy that is low-carbon, resource efficient, and socially inclusive."
Sir Jonathon Espie Porritt, 2nd Baronet, CBE is a British environmentalist and writer. He is known for his advocacy of the Green Party of England and Wales. Porritt frequently contributes to magazines, newspapers and books, and appears on radio and television.
L. Hunter Lovins is an American environmentalist, author, sustainable development proponent, co-founder of Rocky Mountain Institute, and president of the nonprofit organization Natural Capitalism Solutions.
Regeneration refers to rethinking and reinventing business models, supply chains, and lifestyles to sustain and improve the earth's natural environment and avoid the depletion of natural resources. Regeneration includes widespread environmental practices such as reusing, recycling, restoring, and the use of renewable resources.
Ariel Salleh is an Australian sociologist who writes on humanity-nature relations, political ecology, social change movements, and ecofeminism.
This page is an index of sustainability articles.
Resource productivity is the quantity of good or service (outcome) that is obtained through the expenditure of unit resource. This can be expressed in monetary terms as the monetary yield per unit resource.
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming is a 2007 New York Times bestseller by Paul Hawken. The book is about the many non-profit groups and community organizations, dedicated to many different causes, which Hawken calls the "environmental and social justice movement". Hawken explains that this is a diverse movement with no charismatic leader. The movement follows no unifying ideology, and is not recognized by politicians, the public and the media. But, Hawken argues, it has the potential to benefit the planet.
Wiser.org, formerly WiserEarth.org, was a user-generated online community space for the social and environmental movement. As one of the social networks for environmental sustainability and social change, Wiser.org was the primary initiative of the non-profit organization WiserEarth, which tracks the work of non-profits around the world. The site mapped and connected non-governmental organizations (NGOs), businesses, governments, groups, and individuals addressing global issues such as climate change, poverty, the environment, peace, water, hunger, social justice, conservation, human rights, and more.
The Rachel Carson Award is awarded each spring by the National Audubon Society's Women in Conservation to recognize "women whose immense talent, expertise, and energy greatly advance conservation and the environmental movement locally and globally". Honorees are drawn from diverse backgrounds, including the worlds of journalism, academics, business, science, entertainment, philanthropy and law.
Ecomodernism is an environmental philosophy which argues that technological development can protect nature and improve human wellbeing through eco-economic decoupling, i.e., by separating economic growth from environmental impacts.
Climate drawdown refers to the future point in time when levels of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere stop climbing and start to steadily decline. Drawdown is a milestone in reversing climate change and eventually reducing global average temperatures. Project Drawdown refers to the nonprofit organization with the mission to help the world reach drawdown and stop catastrophic climate change quickly, safely, and equitably. In 2017, a publication titled "Drawdown" became a New York Times bestseller, which highlighted and described different solutions and efforts available to help reach this goal.
Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming is a 2017 book created, written, and edited by Paul Hawken about climate change mitigation. Other writers include Katharine Wilkinson, and the foreword was written by Tom Steyer and (paperback) Prince Charles.
Ending the climate crisis in one generation
the ecology of commerce.
growing a business.
Media related to Paul Hawken at Wikimedia Commons
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