"We are now heading down a centuries-long path toward increasing the productivity of our natural capital - the resource systems upon which we depend to live - instead of our human capital"
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Hawken flips a familiar economic virtue on its head. For two centuries, “productivity” has mostly meant squeezing more output from human labor: longer hours, tighter management, more schooling aimed at employability, more “efficiency” demanded from bodies and minds. He’s arguing that the next long arc has to relocate that obsession onto “natural capital” - a term that’s deliberately provocative because it drags ecosystems into the cold language of balance sheets. The rhetorical move is strategic: if markets only respect what they can price, then call wetlands and topsoil “capital” and force the conversation onto the accountants’ turf.
The subtext is a critique of the industrial bargain. We’ve treated nature as a free subsidy and humans as the adjustable input, burning down forests and burning out workers while congratulating ourselves on growth. Hawken’s “instead of” signals a moral inversion: it’s not anti-innovation, it’s anti-extraction. Make the planet more productive, not by mining it harder, but by restoring the systems that do the real work - pollination, water filtration, carbon storage, soil formation. In that frame, regeneration becomes the new efficiency.
Context matters: Hawken emerges from late-20th-century environmentalism that learned to speak in the idiom of business to gain traction - think natural capitalism, ESG, circular economy. He’s also making a wager about time. “Centuries-long” isn’t hype; it’s a reminder that ecological repair is slow, and that the payoff isn’t quarterly. It’s civilizational.
The subtext is a critique of the industrial bargain. We’ve treated nature as a free subsidy and humans as the adjustable input, burning down forests and burning out workers while congratulating ourselves on growth. Hawken’s “instead of” signals a moral inversion: it’s not anti-innovation, it’s anti-extraction. Make the planet more productive, not by mining it harder, but by restoring the systems that do the real work - pollination, water filtration, carbon storage, soil formation. In that frame, regeneration becomes the new efficiency.
Context matters: Hawken emerges from late-20th-century environmentalism that learned to speak in the idiom of business to gain traction - think natural capitalism, ESG, circular economy. He’s also making a wager about time. “Centuries-long” isn’t hype; it’s a reminder that ecological repair is slow, and that the payoff isn’t quarterly. It’s civilizational.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nature |
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