Paul Hawken Quotes

We punk fans have so much energy to give to the fight against injustice, i.e. the abuse of the poor by the rich, i.e. climate change.

I felt cheated by the way grown-ups told me that the future of the world was bleak when I became a teenager in the 1970s. The pollution explosion was unstoppable. Global famine was inevitable. I genuinely want the next generation, my own kids, to know that actually it's possible that the future might be better than the past.

It angers me when sustainability gets used as a buzz word. For 90 percent of the world, sustainability is a matter of survival.

Urban residents, most of them middle class, have a much better sense of their environmental rights, and they're willing to take to the streets.

My mom was an environmental activist in Australia in the late '60s and '70s, and I guess I've inherited that awareness from her.

The fundamental driving force for me is to create a change in the world we live in... It is about exploitation, plundering and degradation. I have a small possibility to participate in the resistance. Most of the things that I do are part of a resistance, a form of solidarity work.

It is not enough to celebrate the earth and all its inhabitants, we must restore what we have destroyed.

You must become an activist if you are going to live the natural life.

I found myself reading about this 16-year-old kid inventing a micro-organism to save the ocean. It made me realise that we can do anything if we put our minds to it. Even with all the damage and destruction, things can heal if we let them.

I began to lead two lives... one being a kid and the other starting to speak internationally about the environment... and advocating for social and environmental justice.

I'm a social justice supporter, but there is no social justice on a dead planet.

I am only a child. Yet I know that if all the money spent on war was spent on ending poverty and finding environmental answers, what a wonderful place this would be.

there's no harm in hoping for the best as long as you're prepared for the worst.

Part of the reason I had such a drive to be an activist, and support other activists, is because I was raised Quaker and my parents kept us very much informed and involved as kids in civil rights and the conservation movement.

Just when you think it can't get any worse, it can. And just when you think it can't get any better, it can.

Where solar energy is concerned - and wind energy and battery storage and electric vehicles and efficiency technologies - that is what we are now seeing. So, yes, I'm very optimistic, but anyone who works on the climate crisis has an internal struggle between hope and despair. I won't deny that, but hope has always prevailed in my outlook.

Optimism....is neither weak nor naive. It can be tough and pure and earned just as clearly as any brooding existential despair.

One may as well be optimistic. The road to catastrophe will be rougher if it's paved with dread.

Invincible is never how I felt, but optimistic... yes.

I'm not as optimistic as Gene Roddenberry was. I fall somewhere in the middle. But as a romantic, I like to think things are going to get bigger rather than worse.

I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist. One often feels helpless in the face of the confusion of these times, such a mass of apparently uncontrollable events and experiences to live through, attempt to understand, and if at all possible, give order to; but one must not withdraw from the task if he has some small things to offer - he does so at the risk of diminishing his humanity.

Because we don't know that much about what has happened before, it's useful. But either we will recover and progress, or the alternative is that it's all downhill from here. So I would just as soon believe, in my optimistic Midwestern American way, that we will recover and maybe even make lemonade out of the lemons that we are faced with.

Not being optimistic falls a long way short of predicting that all is finished.

If you look at the science that describes what is happening on earth today and aren't pessimistic, you don’t have the correct data. If you meet the people in this unnamed movement and aren't optimistic, you haven’t got a heart.

I am an optimist. Anyone interested in the future has to be otherwise he would simply shoot himself.