Hawken, Paul G(erard) 1946-

views updated

HAWKEN, Paul G(erard) 1946-

PERSONAL: Born February 8, 1946.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—3B Gate Five Rd., Sausalito, CA 94965. Agent—c/o Joseph Spieler, Spieler Agency, 154 West 57th St., New York, NY 10019. E-mail— hawken@well.com.

CAREER: Entrepreneur, environmentalist, author. Martin Luther King, Jr. (March on Montgomery, AL), press coordinator, 1965; Erewhon Trading Company, Boston, MA, founder, president, 1966-73; Smith & Hawken, founder, CEO, 1979-91; Metacode, San Francisco, CA, cofounder, director, 1994-2000; Natural Step International, cochairman, 1996-98; Groxis, Inc., chairman, cofounder, 2000—. Member of the Global Business Network, 1988—; Interface, Inc., consultant, 1995—. International speaker, member of boards of directors and advisory councils of groups and organizations concerned with sustainability, ecology, conservation, and the environment.

MEMBER: Trust for the Public Land (board of directors, 1983-90), National Audubon Society (board of directors, 1987-88), Second Nature (board of directors, 1994-96), Friends of the Earth (board of directors, 1995-97), and others.

AWARDS, HONORS: Best of a Generation award, Esquire, 1984; Citizen of the Year, Mill Valley, CA, 1988; California Institute of Integral Studies award, 1988; named one of the twelve best entrepreneurs of the 1980s, Inc., 1989; Golden Eagle award, 1989; Design 100 Editorial Award, Metropolitan Home, 1990; American Horticultural Society award, 1990; Entrepreneur of the Year award, Western United States, Small Business Administration, 1990; 1990 Corporate Conscience Award, small companies, environment, 1991; American Center for Design award, 1991; Creative Visionary award, International Society of Industrial Design, 1992; named one of 100 Visionaries Who Could Change Our Lives, Utne Reader, 1995; honorary doctorate, Northland College, 1997; Maggie Award, Western Publications Association, 1998, for article "Natural Capitalism"; Loose Canon award, Utne Reader, for Ecology of Commerce; honorary doctorate, Oregon State University, 1999; honorary doctorate, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, 2002; Shingo Prize, Utah State University, 2001; Golden Peacock Award for Global Ecological Sustainability, presented by the Dalai Lama, World Council for Corporate Governance and the World Environment Foundation, 2002; Green Cross Millennium Award for Individual Environmental Leadership from Global Green, USA, 2003.

WRITINGS:

(With James Ogilvy and Peter Schwartz) Seven Tomorrows: Toward a Voluntary History, Bantam Books (New York, NY), 1982.

The Next Economy, Holt, Rinehart, & Winston (New York, NY), 1983.

Growing a Business (companion volume to the seventeen-part PBS series), Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1987.

The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability, HarperBusiness (New York, NY), 1993.

(With Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins) NaturalCapitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1999.

Contributor to periodicals, including Orion, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, Amicus, Newsweek, Resurgence, Whole Earth Review, Sierra, Harvard Business Review, Mother Jones, Vegetarian Times, Utne Reader, and Inc., and to Web sites, including CommonDreams.org and TomPaine.com.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Uprising: The Forgotten, the Excluded and the Uninvited, for Viking.

SIDELIGHTS: Through his books, lectures, articles, and by his own example, Paul G. Hawken has influenced the way corporations and businesses look at how their operations impact the environment and society. His activism reaches back to the 1960s, when Hawken founded Erewhon, a natural foods store and distribution system that began in Boston, Massachusetts, and quickly crossed the country to the West Coast. Within seven years, Erewhon was contracting with farmers in thirty-seven states to supply its stores and wholesale accounts. It was the first to offer an extensive line of organically produced foods and to produce its own line of products, including organically grown cereals, rice, nut butters, grains, seeds, and many others.

Next, Hawken began Smith & Hawken, a retail and catalogue company that specialized in horticultural products. The company brought to American gardeners the tools and methods used in Europe, and it evolved to offer products in five catalogues: furniture, tools, bulbs, work clothes, and general merchandise. Hawken himself designed the "Monet" bench, which proved to be the most popular outdoor bench in the country. The company was honored for its environmental work, including a 1990 award by the Council on Economic Priority.

Hawken's business philosophy grew from his experiences with Erewhon, and his Growing a Business was published as a book and filmed as a series for public television. Published in 1987, the book that advocates socially responsible enterprise was reviewed thirteen years later by Jodi Torpey in the Denver Business Journal. Torpey said the book had been a gift and that upon opening it again, she found it delightful that there was no mention of technology. Torpey said, "I felt like Thoreau heading out for Walden Pond." Torpey said Hawken's advice still holds true, that being in business is not primarily about making money. Torpey wrote that Hawken "explains that having too much money is an easy replacement for creativity. When there's a lot of money, it's tempting to simply buy solutions instead of using the same creativity and imagination that was used to get the business started. . . . There's no replacing good, old-fashioned attention to detail, liberal and honest communication, and long-term relationships with customers."

Hawken, now a recognized spokesman for the environmental movement, was asked to address corporations, nonprofits, governments, universities, and business-oriented organizations worldwide. He served on dozens of advisory boards and became a member of the Global Business Network, a private consulting network of professionals that links governments and corporations with visionaries to address business-related problems and corporate sustainability. After writing The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability, he was asked by Interface, Inc. CEO Ray Anderson to join a group of consultants that would assist the company in becoming the leader in industrial ecology. The goal at Interface was to totally eliminate industrial emissions and waste by remanufacturing them into new product.

The Natural Step (U.S.), founded by Hawken, evolved after he was invited to speak at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Offices were established across the country, and the organization has been supported by the Environmental Protection Agency, a large scientific community, and environmentally conscious corporations, governments, and other organizations dedicated to using sustainability-based principles. Hawken became cochairman of the international group two years later.

Hawken founded two information technology companies, but he also continued to write about sustainability issues. His Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, written with L. Hunter Lovins and Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, is a look into a future wherein the authors project fuel efficiencies of 200 miles per gallon, leased plant-based carpets, molecularly coated solar windows, and reprintable papers and inks. A Publishers Weekly contributor believed that the volume "belongs to the galvanizing tradition of Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet and Stewart Brand's The Whole Earth Catalogue."

The authors note that in the United States, only six percent of materials actually end up as product and that the chemicals used in creating these goods end up as acid rain, pollution, and greenhouse gases. Five strategies are suggested, including resource recovery to eliminate waste of natural resources, ecological redesign to reduce industrial waste and toxic by-products, a shift in the relationship between consumers and producers called a service and flow economy, and investing in natural capital, the restoration and sustenance of the ecosystem upon which business draws.

"The authors pull no punches," noted Larry Edelman in Environmental Law. Edelman said that the volume "unleashes too many concepts to fairly condense into a brief review. The reader, however, can get a feel for the magnitude of the design shifts envisioned by the authors by considering the example of the automobile—including cars, sport utility vehicles, vans, and pickups—provided in chapter two."

The book uses examples of poorly designed and inefficient energy guzzlers, like the standard refrigerator, which, on average, uses one sixth of household electricity. Edelman wrote, "Yet highly efficient, properly designed refrigerators are available today and could be cost competitive if mass produced. If, as the authors persuasively argue, profitable, cost-effective technology and design concepts exist that achieve the extraordinary resource savings envisioned in Natural Capitalism, the obvious question arises: Why are the necessary changes not being applied more rapidly and on a broader scale? The authors suggest that the answer is simply that scores of common practices in both the private and public sectors systematically reward companies for wasting natural resources and penalize them for boosting resource productivity."

Richard L. Ohlemacher reviewed Natural Capitalism in the Journal of International Affairs, saying that much of its strength "stems from the authors' grasp of many disciplines, such as physics, engineering, biology, chemistry, and economics. By drawing on such a wide variety of fields, the authors offer a compelling view of how to improve the design of businesses, buildings, and cities. . . . Natural Capitalism shatters compartmentalized thinking and challenges us to rethink how to take advantage of the myriad opportunities and possibilities that nature and ingenuity present to us."