Paul Hawken Biography Quotes 24 Report mistakes

Early Life and Formative Years
Paul Hawken was born on February 8, 1946, in San Mateo, California, and grew up in the United States at a time when social movements and ecological awareness were coming to the fore. As a young man he became engaged with civil rights work, an early education in moral courage that shaped his lifelong conviction that business, society, and nature are inseparable. He nurtured twin passions for writing and the natural world, interests that would eventually converge into a career devoted to ecological entrepreneurship and public scholarship.

Pioneering Natural Foods
In the late 1960s Hawken became a leading figure in the nascent natural foods movement. He helped build Erewhon Trading Company, a pioneering importer and distributor of whole and organic foods. Working closely with Aveline Kushi and Michio Kushi, who were advancing macrobiotic principles, he helped connect small growers and millers to consumers at a time when the infrastructure for organic sourcing barely existed. Erewhon fostered standards for quality and transparency, and it demonstrated that values-driven supply chains could achieve scale. The experience gave Hawken firsthand insight into how purchasing could shape farming practices, soil health, and rural livelihoods, lessons that would echo through his later writing.

Smith & Hawken
After his early work in natural foods, Hawken co-founded Smith & Hawken with Tom Smith in the late 1970s, creating a company known for durable, well-crafted garden tools and a devotion to the culture of horticulture. The venture popularized a standard of quality inspired by traditional makers and small workshops, and it blended catalog storytelling with retail experiences that celebrated the pleasures and responsibilities of tending the land. As the brand grew nationally, Hawken advocated for product lifecycles that honored materials, craftspeople, and long-term use. He later exited the company, but the enterprise remains a reference point for how values, design, and stewardship can coexist in commerce.

Author and Public Communicator
Hawken emerged as a prominent public voice with a series of influential books. The Next Economy (1983) explored how markets could be aligned with ecological and social needs rather than set against them. Growing a Business (1987) distilled the practical and human dimensions of starting and sustaining a mission-centered enterprise; it was adapted into a PBS series that Hawken hosted, bringing entrepreneurial stories and lessons to a wide audience. The Ecology of Commerce (1993) crystallized his critique of extractive business models and his call for companies to become restorative by design. The book deeply influenced business leaders, notably Ray C. Anderson of Interface, who credited it with catalyzing a transformative shift toward sustainability in his company.

Natural Capitalism and Collaboration
In 1999 Hawken co-authored Natural Capitalism with Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, a landmark work that argued economies depend on stocks of natural capital just as much as manufactured and financial capital. The book proposed strategies such as resource productivity, biomimicry-inspired design, and service-based business models to reduce waste, cut emissions, and improve competitiveness. This collaboration stretched across disciplines, uniting engineers, ecologists, and executives in a shared framework for industrial redesign. Its ideas helped shape corporate sustainability agendas, green design education, and policy conversations about efficiency and innovation.

Blessed Unrest and Movement-Building
Hawken's Blessed Unrest (2007) mapped a vast, decentralized movement of environmental and social-justice organizations working toward a livable planet and fairer societies. He argued that this constellation of groups formed the largest movement in history, even if it was largely invisible to itself. To help those actors find one another, he led efforts at the Natural Capital Institute to create WiserEarth, an online directory and networking platform that connected tens of thousands of organizations. Through this work, Hawken moved from diagnosing problems to scaffolding collaboration among people creating solutions.

Project Drawdown and Climate Solutions
Seeking rigorous, actionable pathways to reverse global warming, Hawken founded Project Drawdown and led an international research effort to identify, quantify, and rank climate solutions. The results were presented in Drawdown (2017), a book he edited that synthesized peer-reviewed analysis from a global team, including colleagues such as Katharine K. Wilkinson. The project assembled solutions across sectors, clean energy, food systems, land use, transport, buildings, materials, and health and education, and demonstrated that measures such as refrigerant management, reduced food waste, regenerative agriculture, tropical forest protection, and educating girls and expanding family planning offer substantial, cost-effective potential to reduce emissions while improving lives. Drawdown became a touchstone for city planners, investors, educators, and community leaders seeking evidence-based roadmaps.

Regeneration and Later Work
Hawken followed Drawdown with Regeneration (2021), a practical guide for activating climate solutions that heal ecosystems and communities. He emphasized place-based action, justice, and the co-benefits of climate work, cleaner air and water, healthier food, and more resilient local economies. Through Regeneration.org and allied networks, he championed tools that people could use immediately, bridging the distance between scientific assessment and everyday practice. This period also saw Hawken mentoring entrepreneurs, advising nonprofits and institutions, and continuing to write and lecture on the intersection of ecology and enterprise.

Ideas, Influence, and Relationships
Throughout his career, Hawken wove together the commitments of activists, the ingenuity of engineers, and the pragmatism of business builders. Partnerships and dialogues with figures such as Tom Smith, Aveline and Michio Kushi, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins, Katharine Wilkinson, and Ray C. Anderson illustrate the collaborative arc of his work: from building supply chains and companies, to developing frameworks for sustainable industry, to mobilizing global networks around climate solutions. He has argued that addressing environmental crises is not only a matter of technology or policy but also of culture, design, and imagination. By insisting that commerce can be a restorative, life-supporting system, and by providing concrete strategies to move in that direction, Hawken helped reframe what it means to do business in the United States and beyond. His blend of entrepreneurship, research, and movement-building has made him one of the enduring voices of environmentalism in the modern era.

Our collection contains 24 quotes who is written by Paul, under the main topics: Wisdom - Justice - Deep - Nature - Equality.