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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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Paul Hawken
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: February 8
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
San Mateo
California
Paul Gerard Hawken
Upon
Systems
Heading
Natural
Environmental
Headings
Live
Resources
Resource
Human
Toward
Productivity
Humans
Depends
Increasing
Long
Instead
Centuries
Century
Depend
Path
Capital

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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.
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Business is the only mechanism on the planet today powerful enough to produce the changes necessary to reverse global environments and social degradation.
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Intelligent policies will be largely self-regulating in the sense that the system of incentives and standards makes it absolutely ludicrous to not move towards clean, internalized systems of cost and production.
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Interestingly, the oil companies know very well that in less than 30 years they will not only be charging very high prices, but that they will be uncompetitive with renewables.
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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.
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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.
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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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We are losing our living systems, social systems, cultural systems, governing systems, stability, and our constitutional health, and we're surrendering it all at the same time.
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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.
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Businesses who are members of Businesses for Social Responsibility or the Social Venture Network are internalizing costs on a voluntary basis and therefore raising their costs of doing business, but their competitors are not required to.
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Always leave enough time in your life to do something that makes you happy, satisfied, even joyous. That has more of an effect on economic well-being than any other single factor.
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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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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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Being a good human being is good business.
Paul Hawken
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We are the only species on this planet without full employment.
Paul Hawken
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Don't go to business school.
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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.
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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If you look at the science that describes what is happening on earth today and aren't pessimistic, you don’t have the correct data. If you meet the people in this unnamed movement and aren't optimistic, you haven’t got a heart.
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In short, industrialism is over.
Paul Hawken