Paul Hawken: How to Stop Our Political and Economic Systems From Stealing Our Future

[marmar]

from AlterNet:


Paul Hawken: How to Stop Our Political and Economic Systems From Stealing Our Future

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet. Posted June 26, 2007.



Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest, discusses what he sees as the largest social movement in human history, and why that movement is so invisible to the media -- and itself.

"It will be the stroke of midnight for the rest of our lives. It is too late for heroes. We need an accelerated intertwining of the over 1 million nonprofits and 100 million people who daily work for the preservation and restoration of life on earth. ...The language of sustainability is about ideas that never end: growth without inequality, wealth without plunder, work without exploitation, a future without fear. A green movement fails unless there's a black-, brown-, and copper-colored movement, and that can only exist if the movement to change the world touches the needs and suffering of every single person on earth." --Worldchanging.org 12/26/06

Paul Hawken has spent over a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From multimillion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise a movement that has no name, no leader, no location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing from the bottom up. Hawken's new book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, explores the diversity of the movement, its ideas, strategies and hidden history.

Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, journalist and author. He has been involved in the startup of several businesses, including Erewhon natural foods and Smith & Hawken, the garden and catalog retailer. His six books have been published in more than 50 countries and have sold more than 2 million copies. They include Growing a Business (also a PBS series), The Ecology of Commerce, Natural Capitalism and Blessed Unrest.

Terrence McNally: I've heard you tell a story about how you first awakened to the environment in your early years ...

Paul Hawken: I'm a fourth-generation Californian, so, like any family, there are stories, narratives and memories that are passed on. My childhood was one of growing up and seeing places transformed by industrialization. The best orchard lands in the world were in Santa Clara Valley. My great grandfather used to grow apricots in Cupertino where Apple Computer is today. I remember going down El Camino Real and seeing farm stands and cows and meadows, and people selling fresh eggs and things like that. Now it's all condos and used car lots. So I have in my history this visual and visceral sense of development gone mad and taking over lands that were exquisite. I've seen rivers go, I've seen streams go, I've seen forests go. I've seen the land disappear under development and population growth.

TMN: You did Growing a Business about entrepreneurism, then Ecology of Commerce challenges business to be a solution to environmental ills. In Natural Capitalism, you expressed hope in technology. Now, in Blessed Unrest, you turn to the people. Can you trace the evolution of where you've placed your faith or hope over the years?

PH: I grew up in Berkeley, California, in a culture where business was the last thing you would pursue. In my family the idea of going into the trades was really déclassé. You just didn't do it, you went into academia or something like that.

So for me to start a natural food company in 1967 was unusual, and at first I thought it should be a co-op or something other than a corporation. But finally I made it a corporation because that gave us the most freedom to do what we wanted to do. It's sort of emblematic of this whole culture that corporations have so much freedom.

Growing a Business wasn't about just growing your business, it was a metaphor for growing yourself. It wasn't about growing to be big in size, but about evolution and development. I wrote that you should do the business that is a complete and clear expression of what you want to be and do in the world, that money would necessarily follow. If you led with the urge for money, however, you would fail. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/story/54920/

[CrispyQ]

1. Thanks for the link!

I look forward to reading the complete interview later. I'm going to see if my library has any of his books. B-)


k&r

[marmar]

2. I just picked up "The Ecology of Commerce," which is supposed to be his great one...

Ray Anderson, the carpet company CEO from North Carolina, identifies that book as the one that forced him to look at the environmental damage his carpet company was doing.

[Peace Patriot]

3. "...emblematic of this whole culture that corporations have so much freedom."

But it's more than freedom. Small, ecology-minded companies like his might prosper (until they are eaten by the corporate sharks), but this "freedom"--which is essential, in my opinion, to the fundamental human need of making and trading things--has become a MONSTER in the form of multi-national, global corporate predators, who, a) have destroyed our power--and our right as a sovereign people--to regulate them, and b) are looting, plundering, and trashing environments all over the world, and where they are not killing union organizers and other leftists and throwing them in mass graves (Colombia--Bush's ikon "free trade" country in South America), they are enslaving people in sweatshops ("free trade" zones) and destroying local food production with U.S. Big Ag dumping, pesticides and GMOs.

Regarding "a"--our power to regulate these corporate monsters--see Kpete's post today--the most important post you will ever read. The death of our election system has just been sealed by a Florida appellate court, which has ruled that the "trade secret," proprietary programming code in all the new electronic voting systems is a sacred corporate "right" that trumps the right of the voters to know how their votes have been counted.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x475245

You may be familiar with the case--FL-13, a 2006 Congressional race, in which ES&S (brethren to Diebold) voting machines 'disappeared' 18,000 votes for Congress in Democratic areas, in an election that was "won" by the Republican (naturally!) by only 300 or so votes. The lawyers for the Democrat (Christine Jennings) have asked two Florida courts, now, for access to ES&S's "trade secret" code, to try to figure out what happened to those 18,000 'disappeared' votes. Both courts have said that the voters have NO RIGHT TO REVIEW THE CODE. The corporate "right" to profit from our election system (--and, unsaid, to fiddle our elections) TRUMPS the rights of the voters!

There are many things wrong with our election system, but this is the coup de grace. This is why we are wasting billions and billions of dollars killing people in Iraq, instead of, say, growing trees in Iraq to restore the local environment and save the planet--or converting our economy to "green" energy, or other such projects. This is why we can't move the political system. RIGHTWING BUSHITE CORPORATIONS are 'COUNTING' ALL OUR VOTES with TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code--in extremely insecure and INSIDER HACKABLE voting systems--with not even a whisper of objection from our Democratic Party leadership, cause they're in on it, the bastards.

I fully understand Hawken's information and point of view. I have been part of this quiet "green" revolution that he speaks of--small protests, small projects, small groups, small "greenings," multiplied hundreds of thousands of times the world over. (See his web site/gathering place for it: -- www.wiserearth.org --) This is the driving force behind the peaceful democracy revolution that is occurring all over South America. It is the foundation of that movement, and of a worldwide 'third world' rebellion against "free trade" (global corporate piracy). And Hawken's is a profound and well-informed thinker on this subject. He understands that the dispersed, leaderless, unentrenched nature of the movement is SOMETHING NEW. It is huge. It is non-ideological. And it is some kind of "immune response" of the human race, as a whole, in the face of grave danger to our species and our planet, which addresses two major crises, the environment and human rights, and is averse to "pathological concentrations of power," as he puts it. It is NEW THOUGHT in the struggle between the powerful few and the powerless many, between the rich elite oppressors and exploiters, and their victims. He also correctly identifies big business as the wrecker of the planet and the biggest threat to human rights.

But to explain "How to Stop Our Political and Economic Systems From Stealing Our Future," without addressing the theft of our elections here in the U.S., which deprives us of the power to control the monster corporations that operate from our shores--and that are polluting the planet and oppressing people everywhere--is to leave out a crucial element of people power and of our communal responsibility, especially as the citizens of the U.S., enclave of the Dark Lords. The South Americans did not begin to make progress on first world "free trade" and World Bank/IMF oppression until they had done years of hard work on transparent vote counting and other democratic institutions.

The truth is we must do both--small "greenings" everywhere, AND curtailment of global corporate predators--and the latter must be centered in the U.S. and in the movement to RESTORE our democracy, first of all by throwing these corporate election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor.' They are democracy-killers. They are WHY we cannot begin to control our government. Removal of "trade secret" voting counting from our election system must be Priority #1. And Hawkens may be pointing to the way to do it: small protests, small groups, small transparent vote counting projects, all over the country, in every precinct, in every county. Change is NOT going to come from DC. It is NOT going to come from the Democratic Party, which has totally suppressed information about "trade secret" vote counting, and has colluded with the Bushites to put this non-transparent voting system in place (--in common purpose with them, to thwart the huge antiwar majority--56% just before the war started, now grown to over 70%). Change has to come from US, the people, in our own local groups, each in our own unique way.