Paul Hawken—Innovator / Visionary
Text excerpted from the book: PROTECTING THE PLANET-Environmental Champions from Conservation to Climate Change (ISBN 978-1-63388-225-6)
by
Budd Titlow & Mariah Tinger
When it comes down to personal ingenuity and plans for solving Climate Change, one man stands head and shoulders above all. Entrepreneur Paul Hawken has parlayed a financial empire built on selling garden supplies and materials—through the once world-famous Smith & Hawken Company which he co-founded—into “Project Drawdown”, the world’s most ambitious undertaking for finding and testing solutions to our climate dilemma.
Let’s step back for a moment now and take a closer look at this Climate Change visionary’s background. In 1966, Hawken took over a small retail store in the City of Boston in 1966 called Erewhon (after Samuel Butler’s 1872 utopian novel) and turned it into the Erewhon Trading Company, a natural-foods wholesaler. Next with Dave Smith, he co-founded the Smith & Hawken Garden Supply Company in 1979—a retail and catalog business.
Next with Dave Smith, Paul Hawken co-founded the Smith & Hawken Garden Supply Company in 1979—a retail and catalog business.
In 1999, Hawken co-authored a book with Amory and Hunter Lovins entitled, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution. Natural Capitalism—which has been translated into 26 languages—popularized the idea that Earth’s natural resources should be considered as “natural capital” since they provide “ecosystem services” from which humans derive such benefits as clean water and waste decomposition. Then in 2008, he co-founded Biomimicry Technologies with biologist Janine Benyus, the author of Biomimicry, Innovation Inspired by Nature.
In 2007, Viking Press published Hawken’s New York Times bestseller, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. The book is about the many non-profit groups and community organizations, dedicated to many different causes, which Hawken calls the “environmental and social justice movement”.
In an interview with us, Hawken provides this elaboration: “Blessed Unrest describes what I call humanity’s immune response to ecological degradation, economic disease, and political corruption. All three are intimately intertwined with Global Warming. When I was doing the initial research [for this book], our institute was cataloging the more than 2,000 different types of non-profit organizations in the world according to their purpose, and month after month we saw the climate movement emerge, grow, and differentiate.”
Now we arrive at Hawken’s piece de resistance: His “Project Drawdown” is aimed at reducing—not just stabilizing—Greenhouse Gas (GHG) concentrations in the atmosphere in order to reverse rising global temperatures. “Drawdown” grew out of Hawken’s frustration with actionable, scalable solutions that would make a meaningful dent in the atmosphere’s growing accumulation of GHG. As he saw it, the solutions that had been put forward over the years were all seemingly out of reach—involving either ungodly amounts of solar and wind energy or the mass adoption of futuristic, unproven technologies.
In a conversation with GreenBiz’s Joel Makower, Hawken recalled, “It made me feel like this is intractable, that it requires such Promethean work by such mammoth institutions—with policy changes that are more than structural,” Hawken recalled. “It made me feel like it wasn’t possible to address Climate Change, rather than giving me hope.” In Climate Change activist Bill McKibben’s seminal 2012 Rolling Stonearticle entitled Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math, Hawken asked, “Why aren’t we doing the math on the solutions? Somebody should come up with a list and see what it requires so you get to drawdown.”
In 2013, Hawken began teaching at San Francisco’s Presidio Graduate School, alongside climate activist and entrepreneur Amanda Joy Ravenhill. “One day we were just riffing, and we started talking about drawdown and we said, ‘Let’s do it. No one else is doing it,” Hawken recounted. Today, Ravenhill is “Project Drawdown’s” Executive Director and—with Hawken—the project book’s co-editor. Together, the two recruited more than 80 advisors, partners, scientists, government agencies, and participating universities—plus another 200 graduate students—to work on the project.
Hawken further described his “Project Drawdown” process in his February 2016 responses to our interview questions: “[In Project Drawdown] we are filling this void by doing the math on the atmospheric and financial impacts of state-of-the-shelf solutions if deployed globally and at scale over the next 30 years. State-of-the-shelf refers to techniques that are widely practiced, commonly available, economically viable and scientifically valid.”
He continued: “In Drawdown we identify solutions that are already in place. But we also describe what we call ‘coming attractions,’ solutions so new and incipient that we cannot as yet fully measure and map their impact. Here we see genius and brilliance and humanity at its best.”
True to Hawken’s nature—he’s not likely to be satisfied with simply creating a book, however ambitious and meticulously detailed. Instead, “Project Drawdown’s” plans extend in several directions: The solutions and calculations will be contained in a publicly available database—along with the means for individuals and groups to create customized applications. There are also plans for accompanying educational curricula developed by the National Science Foundation. And possibly some media projects based on the work.
For our interview, Hawken provided the following conclusions: “There are many reasons to believe [that Climate Change can be solved]. In “Drawdown”, we identify over 100 of the most substantive solutions that are in place and expanding globally. We see in our models [that] the moment in time when Greenhouse Gases decline on a year-to-year basis in the upper atmosphere is possible within three decades. “Drawdown” is the only goal that makes sense for humanity. And it is eminently doable. By collectively drawing carbon down, we lift up all of life.”
As author Makower concludes in his October 2014 GreenBiz article: “It’s easy, in today’s divisive and toxic political environment, to view “Project Drawdown” as too good to be true—a quixotic quest for an unattainable goal. But there’s something simple and sane about the project’s collective ingredients: unabashed optimism tempered by sharp-pencil calculations, a bold goal undergirded by scientific pragmatism, immediacy coupled with a 30-year horizon, all leveraging the wisdom of a very smart crowd.”
Author’s bio:For the past 50 years, professional ecologist and conservationist Budd Titlow has used his pen and camera to capture the awe and wonders of our natural world. His goal has always been to inspire others to both appreciate and enjoy what he sees. Now he has one main question: Can we save humankind’s place — within nature’s beauty — before it’s too late? Budd’s two latest books are dedicated to answering this perplexing dilemma. PROTECTING THE PLANET: Environmental Champions from Conservation to Climate Change, a non-fiction book, examines whether we still have the environmental heroes among us — harking back to such past heroes as Audubon, Hemenway, Muir, Douglas, Leopold, Brower, Carson, and Meadows — needed to accomplish this goal. Next, using fact-filled and entertaining story-telling, his latest book — COMING FULL CIRCLE: A Sweeping Saga of Conservation Stewardship Across America — provides the answers we all seek and need.Having published five books, more than 500 photo-essays, and 5,000 photographs, Budd Titlow lives with his music educator wife, Debby, in San Diego, California.
CONSERVING NATURE WITH WORDS & PHOTOS 