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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.

Paul Hawken

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Paul Hawken
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: February 8
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
San Mateo
California
Paul Gerard Hawken
Living
Surrendering
Social
Governing
Time
Constitutional
Stability
Systems
Cultural
Losing
Health

More quotes by Paul Hawken

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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.
Paul Hawken
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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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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
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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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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.
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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If there is to be an ecologically sound society, it will have to come the grass roots up, not from the top down.
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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Don't go to business school.
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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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.
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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Business is correct to defend its right to act in order to produce a vigorous and engaging prosperity. But it is wrong if it forgets that this freedom can only be experienced within the discipline of social responsibility.
Paul Hawken
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We are the only species on this planet without full employment.
Paul Hawken
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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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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.
Paul Hawken
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Being in business is not about making money. It is a way to become who you are.
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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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