Paul Hawken

We cannot turn back the clock or return to any prior state on the planet, but we will never know ourselves until we know where we are on the land. There is no reason we cannot build an exquisitely designed economy that matches biology in its diversity and integrates complexity rather than extinguishing it.


                                                                     Paul Hawken

Paul Hawken was born in California in 1946, and attended UC Berkely  and San Francisco State without taking a degree. He was active in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and was Martin Luther King's press coordinator for the Selma march, and staff photographer for the Congress of Racial Equality in Louisiana.

Hawken turned a Boston health food store into a national natural foods brand, Erewhon Foods, and co-founded Smith & Hawken, manufacturer of quality garden tools. These days he heads One Sun LLC, an energy company that works with biomimicry, and Highwater Global, an equity fund that invests in companies working to solve environmental challenges. He is the author of a number of books, including The Next Economy, which came out of essays about economics written in the mid-eighties for CoEvolution Quarterly and interviews with Stewart Brand. Other titles include Natural Capitalism, How to Grow a Business, and The Ecology of Commerce. He has collaborated with Amory and Hunter Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute.

Paul Hawken's current book is Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World. Blessed Unrest describes a movement made of thousands or millions of non-profits acting for the environment, the rights of indigenous peoples, and social justice. It describes this movement as a worldwide social immune system.

http://naturalcapital.org/

http://wiseearth.org/