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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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Paul Hawken
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: February 8
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
San Mateo
California
Paul Gerard Hawken
Vision
Soil
Came
Planet
Future
Touch
Thermostat
Water
Rules
Overcrowded
Seems
Planets
Misplaced
Earth
Air
Instructions
Important
Broken
Instruction
Like
Seem
Poison

More quotes by Paul Hawken

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In short, industrialism is over.
Paul Hawken
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Being a good human being is good business.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night, and we watch television.
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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.
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The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them
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While there may be no right way to value a forest or a river, there is a wrong way, which is to give it no value at all. How do we decide the value of a 700-year-old tree? We need only to ask how much it would cost to make a new one, or a new river, or even a new atmosphere.
Paul Hawken
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The financial capital is being concentrated by corporations, institutional investors, and even our pension funds, and being reinvested in companies that repeat this process because it provides the highest return on that financial capital.
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.
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It costs the same to send a person to prison or to Harvard. The difference is the curriculum.
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If there is to be an ecologically sound society, it will have to come the grass roots up, not from the top down.
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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 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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Information from destructive activities going back a hundred years right up until today is being incorporated into the system. And as that happens the underlying framework of industrialism is collapsing and causing disintegration.
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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If, as is natural, you focus on the corruption and on those threatened institutions that are trying to prevent change - even though they don't really know what they're trying to prevent - then you can get pessimistic.
Paul Hawken
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What we already know frames what we see, and what we see frames what we understand.
Paul Hawken
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Don't go to business school.
Paul Hawken
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Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us it resides in humanity's willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider.
Paul Hawken
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The problems to be faced are vast and complex, but come down to this: 6.6 billion people are breeding exponentially. The process of fulfilling their wants and needs is stripping earth of its biotic capacity to produce life a climactic burst of consumption by a single species is overwhelming the skies, earth, waters, and fauna.
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We subsidize the disposal of waste in all its myriad forms — from landfills, to Superfund cleanups, to deep-well injection, to storage of nuclear waste. In the process, we encourage an economy where 80 percent of what we consume gets thrown away after one use.
Paul Hawken