Paul Gerard Hawken (b.1946) is an American environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, and activist. He is best known for founding ecological businesses, writing about consumerism’s adverse impacts, and consulting on environmental sustainability.
Born in San Mateo, California, Hawken attended the University of California-Berkeley and San Francisco State University. A civil works activist, Hawken worked with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s organization in Selma, Alabama, before his historic March on Montgomery. In 1965, Hawken was assaulted and captured in Meridian, Mississippi, by Ku Klux Klan members; he later escaped due to FBI intervention.
Hawken’s influential writing has helped businesses’ and governments’ economic development, industrial ecology, and environmental policy. His works include The Next Economy (1983,) Growing a Business (1987,) The Ecology of Commerce (1993,) Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (1999,) and Blessed Unrest (2007.)
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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
Topics: Management
Natural capitalism is not about making sudden changes, uprooting institutions, or fomenting upheaval for a new social order. Natural capitalism is about making small, critical choices that can tip economic and social factors in positive ways.
—Paul Hawken
Topics: Capitalism
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