Paul Hawken
A pioneering environmentalist, entrepreneur, journalist and author, Mr. Hawken is one of the world’s foremost environmental leaders. He has invested his life translating his commitment to justice into action. Starting his activism during the civil rights expansions in Selma, Alabama when he was 19 years old, he has founded multiple businesses including Smith & Hawken and now heads the Natural Capital Institute. He is an widely sought speaker internationally, has contributed to and appeared in countless media outlets, has written international classics include The Ecology of Commerce, Natural Capitalism (with Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins), and Growing a Business, which Mr. Hawken also took to television. He calls California home.
We are witnessing an enormous transition from a world created by and for privilege to a world created by and for community, says environmentalist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken. Small actions and big ideas are at the heart of what Mr. Hawken describes as a movement that has no name. It is bottom-up because, he says simply, the top-down world is corrupt and this is the only way to prevent the end of life on earth. Yes, crises abound. Add fundamentalisms, especially free market fundamentalism, to peak oil, peak water, peak soil, peak fish, peak everything.
But he says, in response, people are beginning to realize that our friends and solutions lie close by and are on all sides of us, among our neighbors and our communities; that in order to be resilient, durable, strong, meaningful and able to absorb the shocks that may be coming in the future, we need to re-organize. Stop importing our lives. Recognize what we have always known -- our lives and all meaningful culture are homegrown. Create a world without inequality, wealth without plunder and a future without fear.
He calls this response a social movement because it involves people and society, but it is like no other and he’s seen many. So he has reached for biological metaphors like “quickening” to describe what is happening -- the largest movement the world has ever seen. He’s certain it exceeds one million organizations and may be as large as two million -- that’s organizations -- people in every culture and city and country in the world addressing mega-problems and confronting mega-institutions while recreating life the way nature does: from the bottom up and using information.
This movement is about dispersing power, not concentrating it, Mr. Hawken says. He’s convinced this is why corporate mass media has neither seen nor reported this massive movement. Instead of a few rigid ideologies like those that consumed the 20th century and cost 120 million lives, he says, this movement is fueled by many ideas which in turn are open to more ideas. It is arising, recreating and reimagining what true democratic process is.
Today’s moribund top-down stories have Americans grappling with helplessness, hopelessness, depression, oppression and suppression of self, Mr. Hawken knows. He offers new stories of individuals and groups controlling the only thing any of us can control – our own intentions, guiding our own actions, in our own lives. Seemingly inconsequential acts piling on top of each other over time, he reminds us, are part of the many, many, many, many, many, many small acts that do change history. It works the same way biological evolution does, he says -- tiny shifts culminating in great changes.
Consider how slavery was abolished in the British Empire. It began when 12 people gathered in 1787, convinced it was time, in spite of the fact that 3 out of 4 people on earth at that moment were either slaves or indentured servants. Or think of Joanne Robinson. Few know her name, but this Alabama college teacher created the context from which the pivotal Montgomery Bus Boycott launched the great civil revolution in America, eventually bringing the Jim Crow era to an end.
We are now at the end of an age of giants, he concludes, citing mega-statistics from Big Oil’s Exxon-Mobil to Wal-Mart to neo-conservatives. Remember, he says. In evolutionary terms, giantism usually is the end of the line, the end of power and not its beginning.
[This Program was recorded May 23, 2007, in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.]
