18 Facts About Paul Hawken

Paul Gerard Hawken was born on February 8,1946 and is an American environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, economist, and activist.

Paul Hawken attended UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University.

Paul Hawken's work includes founding ecological businesses, writing about impacts of commerce on living systems, and consulting with corporations and governments on economic development, industrial ecology, and environmental policy.

Paul Hawken was the co-founder and executive director of Project Drawdown, a non-profit that describes how global warming can be reversed.

Paul Hawken has authored articles, op-eds, and peer-reviewed papers, and seven books, including: The Next Economy, Growing a Business, The Ecology of Commerce, and Blessed Unrest.

Paul Hawken described reading it as a "spear in the chest experience", after which Anderson started crisscrossing the country with a near-evangelical fervor, telling fellow executives about the need to reduce waste and carbon emissions.

Paul Hawken conceives of this "movement" as developing not by ideology but rather through the identification of what is and is not humane, and has compared it to humanity's collective immune system.

Paul Hawken co-created Project Drawdown in 2013 with Amanda Joy Ravenhill, and was the co-creator, author, and editor of Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, published in 2017.

In 2021, Paul Hawken published the New York Times Bestseller, Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation.

Paul Hawken's books have been published in more than 50 countries in 30 languages.

Paul Hawken founded several companies, starting when he took over a small retail store in Boston in 1967 called Erewhon and turned it into the Erewhon Trading Company, a natural-foods wholesaler, and one of the first in the US that relied solely on sustainable agricultural methods.

From 1994 to 1998, Paul Hawken founded and headed up The Natural Step USA.

From 1996 to 1998, Paul Hawken was co-chairman of The Natural Step International.

In 1998, Paul Hawken created the Natural Capital Institute located in Sausalito, California.

Paul Hawken was previously the executive director of Project Drawdown, which is working towards the drawdown of greenhouse gases to reduce climate change.

That same year, Paul Hawken worked in New Orleans as a staff photographer for the Congress of Racial Equality, focusing on voter registration drives in Bogalusa, Louisiana, and the panhandle of Florida, and photographing the Ku Klux Klan in Meridian, Mississippi, after three civil rights workers were tortured and killed.

In Meridian, Paul Hawken was assaulted and seized by Ku Klux Klan members, but escaped due to Federal Bureau of Investigation surveillance and intervention.

Paul Hawken has been awarded six honorary doctorates, and received the Green Cross Millennium Award for Individual Environmental Leadership presented by Mikhail Gorbachev in 2003.