Paul Hawken Quotes

GDP tells you nothing about sustainability

We are borrowing money from future generations. We are borrowing the carbon impact, the resource impact from future generations to get stuff cheap now. We have swept the dirt and dust from our society under the carpet - but this carpet is on other side of the planet.

What's it like to envision the ten-thousand-year environmental impact of tossing a plastic bottle into the trash bin, all in the single second it takes to actually toss it? Or the ten-thousand-year history of the fossil fuel being burned to drive to work or iron a shirt? It may be environmentally progressive, but it's not altogether pleasant.

We've raped our homelands to maintain our economies.

For every person in the world to reach the present U.S. level of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet earths.

My main argument is that environmental destruction comes when people externalise their costs and pass them on to future generations. That is obviously something that large enterprises do and they become large by doing it.

We treat a planet at crisis point as an externality that can be shunted into a future generation. We continue to act as if we had the natural resources of several planets, not one.

What we are doing is, rather than living on the interest of our basic biological capital, we're using up our capital, so we're dipping into our capital. We're using up what should be our children's and grandchildren's legacy.

We're not going to persuade people in the developing world to go without, but neither can we afford a planet on which everyone lives like an American. Billions more people living in suburbs and driving SUVs to shopping malls is a recipe for planetary suicide. We can't even afford to continue that way of life ourselves.

This is suicidal... our home is the biosphere. That's a very thin layer of air, water and land where all life exists. It's fixed, it can't grow, and yet we cling to this idea that the economy can grow forever. And it must. Well, it can't.

We assume that everything's becoming more efficient, and in an immediate sense that's true; our lives are better in many ways. But that improvement has been gained through a massively inefficient use of natural resources.

Like all animals, human beings have always taken what they want from nature. But we are the rogue species. We are unique in our ability to use resources on a scale and at a speed that our fellow species can't.

The human world is a long way from meeting the needs of the present, and it is borrowing massively from the future - not only by piling up money debt, but also by degrading the resources from which all real wealth ultimately comes.

We say we need to clean up the environment; to clean up the environment, we need to be richer. But maybe getting richer is actually making us poorer.

The Industrial Age is not sustainable. It's not sustainable in ecological terms, and it's not sustainable in human terms.

The way I see it, the earth is going to be here after we're dead and gone. Even if it's a polluted planet, and they messed it up. Where do they go from here - to another planet so they can mess that up too?

There is no polite way to say that business is destroying the world.

Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that any way of living that's based on the use of non-renewable resources won't last.

The narrative of progress is no longer sustainable.

At an ever accelerating rate we are now squandering the capital of metallic ores and fossil fuels accumulated in the earth’s crust during hundreds of millions of years. How long can this spending spree go on?

If the rest of the world aspires to our way of life ... we'll bury ourselves in waste.

Every time there is an economic intensification, there is an ecological impact.

We are living beyond our means. As a people we have developed a life-style that is draining the earth of its priceless and irreplaceable resources without regard for the future of our children and people all around the world.

Humanity stands ... before a great problem of finding new raw materials and new sources of energy that shall never become exhausted. In the meantime we must not waste what we have, but must leave as much as possible for coming generations.