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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

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Paul Hawken
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: February 8
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
San Mateo
California
Paul Gerard Hawken
Power
Everywhere
World
Despair
People
Ordinary
Incalculable
Grace
Semblance
Willing
Restore
Justice
Confront
Beauty
Odds
Order
Encouragement

More quotes by Paul Hawken

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How is it that we have created an economic system that tells us it is cheaper to destroy the earth and exhaust its people than to nurture them both? Is it rational to have an pricing system which discounts the future and sells off the past? How did we create an economic system that confused capital liquidation with income?
Paul Hawken
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We can no longer prosper by increasing human productivity. The more we try to do, the more poverty we will create.
Paul Hawken
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If they [companies] believe they are in business to serve people, to help solve problems, to use and employ the ingenuity of their workers to improve the lives of people around them by learning from the nature that gives us life, we have a chance.
Paul Hawken
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We are the only species on this planet without full employment.
Paul Hawken
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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
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Healing the wounds of the earth and its people does not require saintliness or a political party, only gumption and persistence. It is not a liberal or conservative activity it is a sacred act.
Paul Hawken
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his planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken.
Paul Hawken
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Don't go to business school.
Paul Hawken
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Mother's milk would be banned by the food safety laws of industrialized nations if it were sold as a packaged good.
Paul Hawken
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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.
Paul Hawken
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It costs the same to send a person to prison or to Harvard. The difference is the curriculum.
Paul Hawken
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That appropriation of resources and the transformation of them into goods and services through the European production system characterized, and characterizes to this day, all industrial systems including the information age.
Paul Hawken
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In short, industrialism is over.
Paul Hawken
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People are naming it the Third Wave, the Information Age, etc. but I would say those are basically technological descriptions, and this next shift is not about technology - although obviously it will be influenced and in some cases expressed by technologies.
Paul Hawken
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When the planes still swoop down and aerial spray a field in order to kill a predator insect with pesticides, we are in the Dark Ages of commerce.
Paul Hawken
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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
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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.
Paul Hawken
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Most floods are caused by man, not weather deforestation, levee construction, erosion, and overgrazing all result in the loss of ecosystem services.
Paul Hawken
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Don't be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.
Paul Hawken
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Being a good human being is good business.
Paul Hawken