Top 80 Paul Hawken Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “We see global warming not as an inevitability but as an invitation to build, innovate, and effect change, a pathway that awakens creativity, compassion, and genius. This is not a liberal agenda, nor is it a conservative one. This is the human agenda.”

— Paul Hawken

53. “I think an old style of addressing environmental problems is ebbing, but the rise of the so-called conservative, political movement in this country is not a trend towards the future but a reaction to this very broad shift that we are undergoing.”

— Paul Hawken

54. “The bottom line is down where it belongs – at the bottom.”

— Paul Hawken

55. “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

56. “Information from destructive activities going back a hundred years right up until today is being incorporated into the system. And as that happens the underlying framework of industrialism is collapsing and causing disintegration.”

— Paul Hawken

57. “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

58. “Wrong is an addictive, repetitive story; Right is where the movement is.”

— Paul Hawken

59. “Only caring individuals can restore the places we inhabit. The ‘simple act of planting a tree’ not only restores the places we live, but makes us whole and powerful again.”

— Paul Hawken

60. “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

61. “We can no longer prosper by increasing human productivity. The more we try to do, the more poverty we will create.”

— Paul Hawken

62. “Research by Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman upends the idea that beliefs determine what we do or what we can do. It is the opposite. Beliefs do not change our actions. Actions change our beliefs.”

— Paul Hawken

63. “Mother’s milk would be banned by the food safety laws of industrialized nations if it were sold as a packaged good.”

— Paul Hawken

64. “How much harm does a company have to do before we question its right to exist?”

— Paul Hawken

65. “Local companies don’t have to internalize their costs, and few actually do, but they tend to more often because the owners live there and they have to show their face in town, and their kids play with other kids.”

— Paul Hawken

66. “The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful.”

— Paul Hawken

67. “Molecules of methane that make their way into the atmosphere create a warming effect up to thirty-four times stronger than carbon dioxide over a one-hundred-year time horizon.”

— Paul Hawken

68. “Research to date suggests silvopasture far outpaces any grassland technique. That is because silvopastoral systems sequester carbon in both the biomass aboveground and the soil below. Pastures that are strewn or crisscrossed with trees sequester five to ten times as much carbon as those of the same size that are treeless. Moreover, because the livestock yield on a silvopasture plot is higher.”

— Paul Hawken

69. “Girls’ education, it turns out, has a dramatic bearing on global warming. Women with more years of education have fewer, healthier children and actively manage their reproductive health.”

— Paul Hawken

70. “When you add up the impact on carbon sequestration and storage, forest protection and tropical and temperate forest restoration together are the most powerful solution available to address global warming.”

— Paul Hawken

71. “As Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh has said, making the transition to a plant-based diet may well be the most effective way an individual can stop climate change. Recent research suggests he is right: Few climate solutions of this magnitude lie in the hands of individuals or are as close as the dinner plate.”

— Paul Hawken

72. “Today, 314,000 wind turbines supply nearly 4 percent of global electricity. And it will soon be much more. Ten million homes in Spain alone are powered by wind. Investment in offshore wind was $29.9 billion in 2016, 40 percent greater than the prior year.”

— Paul Hawken

73. “If you do not provide your body with true nourishment, it becomes obese, diseased, and disabled. If a farmer does not provide nourishment to the soil, it becomes infertile, diseased, and deadened.”

— Paul Hawken

74. “Yet a third of the food raised or prepared does not make it from farm or factory to fork. That number is startling, especially when paired with this one: Hunger is a condition of life for nearly 800 million people worldwide. And this one: The food we waste contributes 4.4 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere each year – roughly 8 percent of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.”

— Paul Hawken

75. “Rice provides a full one-fifth of calories consumed worldwide, more than wheat or corn, and is the essential staple in the daily diet of 3 billion people, many of them poor and food insecure.”

— Paul Hawken

76. “Our goal is to present climate science and solutions in language that is accessible and compelling to the broadest audience, from ninth graders to pipe fitters, from graduate students to farmers.”

— Paul Hawken

77. “In too many places, kitchen efficiency has become a lost art.”

— Paul Hawken

78. “In 2015, Brazil earned the final $100 million payment of a $1 billion grant from Norway, which had set up the fund in 2008 to reward countries that achieved targeted goals of reducing their rate of deforestation.”

— Paul Hawken

79. “Education also equips women to face the most dramatic climatic changes. A 2013 study found that educating girls “is the single most important social and economic factor associated with a reduction in vulnerability to natural disasters.”

— Paul Hawken

80. “A single rotation of the blades generates the electricity for one household’s daily use.”

— Paul Hawken

81. “Too often, however, tree planting requires taking over land in the South to offset emissions created by a more affluent and industrialized North. In this sense, it is no different from prior colonization visited upon Africa, South America, and Asia over the centuries.”

— Paul Hawken

82. “Similarly, a 2016 World Resources Institute report analyzes a variety of possible dietary modifications and finds that “ambitious animal protein reduction” – focused on reducing overconsumption of animal-based foods in regions where people devour more than 60 grams of protein and 2,500 calories per day – holds the greatest promise for ensuring a sustainable future for global food supply and the planet.”

— Paul Hawken

83. “Each type of pseudo-populism comes into being to improve or save its respective adherents from the absence of a moral or social framework, which means that even if we don’t understand them fully, we are expected to place our faith in them. Although these pseudo-populist organizations are relatively small, they manage to influence governments, invoke terror, and control large sums of capital.”

— Paul Hawken

84. “Bloomberg predicts that wind energy will be the lowest-cost energy globally by 2030.”

— Paul Hawken

85. “If cattle were their own nation, they would be the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.”

— Paul Hawken