Paul Hawken

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'Business is destroying the world, with flair, expertise, and panache,' says Paul Hawken, 48, a former businessman who writes and lectures in aid of a new environmental pedagogy that he hopes will inspire a willing, uncoerced, even joyous 'redesign' of the way we do business and live upon the earth.

'The responses that environmentalists evoke--fear, anxiety, numbness, despair--are not helpful, even if they are understandable,' Hawken says. 'It should be fascinating, even enthralling to be in the milieu of environmental change.' And his critique of business arises from the nuanced disillusion of an insider who struggled to make Green principles work in the corporate world.

Hawken's early life, an intriguing mix of Horatio Alger hardscrabble and hippie-era anything goes, took him to the Haight-Ashbury music scene, to Japan for macrobiotic studies, and to Boston, where he founded the natural-foods giant Erewhon Trading Company. In 1979 he cofounded Smith and Hawken, a California mail-order gardening-supply company that was soon a byword for ecological responsibility.

Eventually, however, Hawken came to feel that he was rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. 'The recycled toner catridges, the sustainably harvested woods, the replanted trees, the soy-based inks...were all well and good,' he wrote in his main theoretical book, The Ecology of Commerce (1993), 'but basically we were in the junk mail business....All the recycling in the world would not change the fact that doing business in the latter part of the 20th century is an energy-intensive endeavor that gulps down resources.'

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