Paul Hawken

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

Hawken created Project Drawdown in 2013 and was the creator, author, and editor of Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, published in 2017. It was collaborative effort involving 200 researchers and advisors who came together to model the most substantive solutions to reverse global warming.

Blessed Unrest, How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, published in 2007, argues that a vast "movement with no name" is forming involving environmental, social justice, and indigenous rights organizations. 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.

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

In 1998, Hawken created the Natural Capital Institute (NCI) located in Sausalito, California. Its main focus was wiser.org, an open-source database of activists and civil society organizations focused on environmental and social justice.

From 1994 to 1998, Hawken founded and headed up The Natural Step USA. From 1996 to 1998, Hawken was co-chairman of The Natural Step International. The Natural Step was founded in 1989 by Swedish scientist and medical doctor Karl-Henrik Robèrt in order to create shared frameworks for understanding sustainable development. Its purpose is to teach and support environmental systems thinking in corporations, cities, governments, unions, and academic institutions through a dialogue process rooted in basic science.

Hawken has authored articles, op-eds, and peer-reviewed papers, and seven books, including: The Next Economy (Ballantine 1983), Growing a Business (Simon and Schuster 1987), The Ecology of Commerce (HarperCollins 1993), and Blessed Unrest (Viking 2007).

Hawken founded several companies, starting when he took over a small retail store in Boston in 1967 called Erewhon (after Samuel Butler's 1872 utopian novel) 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. When he left the company in the 1970s, it had over 30,000 acres of organically grown food under contract. Hawken co-founded the Smith & Hawken garden supply company in 1979, a retail and catalog business. In 2009, he founded OneSun, an energy company focused on ultra low-cost solar based on green chemistry and biomimicry.

In 1965, Hawken worked with Martin Luther King Jr.'s staff in Selma, Alabama, preparing for the Selma to Montgomery marches. As press coordinator, he registered members of the press, issued credentials, gave dozens of updates and interviews on national radio, and acted as marshal for the final, March, 21, March to Montgomery. That same year, 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, Hawken was assaulted and seized by Ku Klux Klan members, but escaped due to Federal Bureau of Investigation surveillance and intervention.

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