Paul Hawken > Quotes

“Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.”
― Paul Hawken

“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

“When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.”
― Paul Hawken

“The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them.”
― Paul Hawken

“The bottom line is down where it belongs – at the bottom. Far above it in importance are the infinite number of events that produce the profit or loss. ”
― Paul Hawken

“I believe this movement will prevail.
I don’t mean it will defeat, conquer, or create harm to someone else.
Quite the opposite.
I don’t tender the claim in an oracular sense.
I mean that the thinking that informs the movement’s goals will reign. It will soon suffuse most institutions, but before then, it will change a sufficient number of people so as to begin the reversal of centuries of frenzied self-destructive behavior. Some say it is too late, but people never change when they are comfortable. Helen Keller threw aside the gnawing fears of chronic bad news when she declared, “I rejoice to live in such a splendidly disturbing time!” In such a time, history is suspended and thus unfinished. It will be the stroke of midnight for the rest of our lives.
My hopefulness about the resilience of human nature is matched by the gravity of our environmental and social condition. If we squander all our attention on what is wrong, we will miss the prize: In the chaos engulfing the world, a hopeful future resides because the past is disintegrating before us. If that is difficult to believe, take a winter off and calculate what it requires to create a single springtime. It’s not too late for the world’s largest institutions and corporations to join in saving the planet, but cooperation must be on the planet’s terms. The “Help Wanted” signs are everywhere. All people and institutions including commerce, governments, schools, churches and cities, need to learn from life and reimagine the world from the bottom up, based on the first principles if justice and ecology. Ecological restoration is extraordinarily simple: You remove whatever prevents the system from healing itself. Social restoration is no different.
We have the heart, knowledge, money and sense to optimize out social and ecological fabric.
It is time for all that is harmful to leave. One million escorts are here to transform the nightmares of empire and the disgrace of war on people and place. We are the transgressors and we are the forgivers.
“We” means all of us, everyone. There can be no green movement unless there is also a black, brown and copper movement. What is more harmful resides within is, the accumulated wounds of the past, the sorrow, shame, deceit, and ignominy shared by every culture, passed down to every person, as surely as DNA, as history of violence and greed. There is not question that the environmental movement is most critical to our survival. Our house is literally burning, and it is only logical that environmentalists expect the social justice movement to get on the environmental bus. But is actually the other way around; the only way we are going to put out this fire is to get on the social justice bus and heal our wounds, because in the end, there is only one bus.
Armed with that growing realization, we can address all that is harmful externally.
What will guide us is a living intelligence that creates miracles every second, carried forth by a movement with no name.”
― Paul Hawken

“The bottom line is down where it belongs - at the bottom.”
― Paul Hawken, Growing a Business

“Mother's milk would be banned by the food safety laws of industrialized nations if it were sold as a packaged good.”
― Paul Hawken

“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, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming

“Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night and we watch television.”
― Paul Hawken

“Wrong is an addictive, repetitive story; Right is where the movement is.”
― Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming

“We see global warming not as an inevitability but as an invitation to build, innovate, and effect change, a pathway that awakens creativity, compassion, and genius. This is not a liberal agenda, nor is it a conservative one. This is the human agenda.”
― Paul Hawken, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming

“Always leave enough time in your life to do something that makes you happy.”
― Paul Hawken

“Research by Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman upends the idea that beliefs determine what we do or what we can do. It is the opposite. Beliefs do not change our actions. Actions change our beliefs.”
― Paul Hawken, Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation

“if you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.”
― Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce Revised Edition: A Declaration of Sustainability

“The act I want to talk about is growing some—even just a little—of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t—if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade—look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do—to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.”
― Paul Hawken, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming

“The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn't make sense to be hopeful.”
― Paul Hawken

“When you add up the impact on carbon sequestration and storage, forest protection and tropical and temperate forest restoration together are the most powerful solution available to address global warming.”
― Paul Hawken, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming

“As Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh has said, making the transition to a plant-based diet may well be the most effective way an individual can stop climate change. Recent research suggests he is right: Few climate solutions of this magnitude lie in the hands of individuals or are as close as the dinner plate.”
― Paul Hawken, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming

“Each type of pseudo-populism comes into being to improve or save its respective adherents from the absence of a moral or social framework, which means that even if we don't understand them fully, we are expected to place our faith in them. Although these pseudo-populist organizations are relatively small, they manage to influence governments, invoke terror, and control large sums of capital.”
― Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming

“What is the difference between a squirrel burying acorns across the forest and humans planting potatoes across the globe? Who is master, and who is the servant? Is it the acorn's or potato's idea to be nutritious, or the creature that buries them? Evolution is not about design or will; it is the outcome of constant endeavors made by organisms that want to survive and better themselves. The collective result is intoxicatingly beautiful, rife with oddities, and surprisingly brilliant, yet no agent is in control. Evolution arises from the bottom up--so, too, does hope.”
― Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming

“If cattle were their own nation, they would be the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.”
― Paul Hawken, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming

“A groundbreaking 2016 study from the University of Oxford modeled the climate, health, and economic benefits of a worldwide transition to plant-based diets between now and 2050. Business-as-usual emissions could be reduced by as much as 70 percent through adopting a vegan diet and 63 percent for a vegetarian diet (which includes cheese, milk, and eggs). The model also calculates a reduction in global mortality of 6 to 10 percent.”
― Paul Hawken, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming

“...more than 90 percent of birds feed upon them (moths).”
― Paul Hawken, Carbon: The Book of Life

“Today, 314,000 wind turbines supply nearly 4 percent of global electricity. And it will soon be much more. Ten million homes in Spain alone are powered by wind. Investment in offshore wind was $29.9 billion in 2016, 40 percent greater than the prior year.”
― Paul Hawken, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming

“Bloomberg predicts that wind energy will be the lowest-cost energy globally by 2030.”
― Paul Hawken, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming

“US trucks and automobiles kill more than one million vertebrates daily.”
― Paul Hawken, Carbon: The Book of Life

“In New York City, more than 700 languages are spoken...There are more languages per square mile in Queens than anyplace in the world.”
― Paul Hawken, Carbon: The Book of Life

“Too often, however, tree planting requires taking over land in the South to offset emissions created by a more affluent and industrialized North. In this sense, it is no different from prior colonization visited upon Africa, South America, and Asia over the centuries.”
― Paul Hawken, Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation

“Education also equips women to face the most dramatic climatic changes. A 2013 study found that educating girls “is the single most important social and economic factor associated with a reduction in vulnerability to natural disasters.”
― Paul Hawken, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming