Quote

What we already know frames what we see, and what we see frames what we understand.

Paul Hawken

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Paul Hawken
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: February 8
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
San Mateo
California
Paul Gerard Hawken
Frames
Insight
Already
Understand

More quotes by Paul Hawken

Image
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
Image
It costs the same to send a person to prison or to Harvard. The difference is the curriculum.
Paul Hawken
Image
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
Image
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
Image
What a great time to be born! What a great time to be alive! Because this generation gets to essentially completely change the world.
Paul Hawken
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Mother's milk would be banned by the food safety laws of industrialized nations if it were sold as a packaged good.
Paul Hawken
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Paul Hawken
Image
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
Image
We can no longer prosper by increasing human productivity. The more we try to do, the more poverty we will create.
Paul Hawken
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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