Paul Hawken's Vision
April 30, 2002 | Fortune Small Businss | David Whitford
Smith & Hawken founder Paul Hawken believes that business is destroying the world. Maybe that's why the author and environmentalist wants you to turn your small business upside down.

The day I sat down with Paul Hawken for an expansive four-hour conversation in his spare, light-filled office in Sausalito, Calif., was the same day the world learned that an ice shelf the size of Rhode Island had melted and broken loose in Antarctica. For Hawken, it was just additional evidence that global warming, which he first wrote about in his 1993 book, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability [HarperBusiness; $14], is accelerating. For the rest of us, it was a reminder that Hawken, now more than ever, is relevant.

Remember Paul Hawken? He's the original hippie entrepreneur, the merchant of Marin County who got turned on to business when others were still dropping out.

Fresh from a stint as a civil rights crusader in the South, Hawken founded Erewhon Trading Co., an organic grocery store, in 1966. Erewhon didn't last, but its legacy is significant: the $30 billion U.S. natural-foods industry. His second startup, Smith & Hawken, founded in 1979 [Hawken left in 1991], introduced a generation of aging flower children to the joys of gardening with expensive, handmade tools, and created a new literary subgenre: serious catalog nonfiction. He's currently chairman of Groxis, whose data-mapping software, still in beta, aims to enable "the discovery of unknown or unnoticed relationships." ["Green business is not about tie-dyed T-shirts," Hawken says, explaining how his latest venture fits with the ones that came before. "It's about transforming the industrial system itself into one that looks at all the connections."]

In Hawken's parallel life as an author, he has sold more than two million copies of his books, which have been translated into 27 languages. Among his various titles: Growing a Business [Simon & Schuster; $12], which doubled as a 17-part series on PBS in the late '80s and helped elevate entrepreneurialism in the popular imagination; and Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution [Little Brown; $17.95], with Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins. His next, Uprising: Another World Is Possible, due in 2003, will address issues related to globalization. [Hawken was temporarily blinded by pepper spray two years ago at the WTO conference in Seattle; Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop and fellow green entrepreneur, found him stumbling in the street and guided him to safety.]

Today Hawken occupies a unique niche in the American landscape, combining bottom-line business credentials [he regularly addresses corporate audiences] with credibility among environmentalists and social critics. He once wrote, and stands by, the following sentence: "There is no polite way to say that business is destroying the world." Yet he also believes, passionately, that business -- with its restless energy, imagination, and creativity -- will one day get us out of the mess it has made. Says Hawken: "I believe business is on the verge of … a change brought on by social and biological forces that can no longer be ignored or put aside. We have the capacity to create a remarkably different economy, one that can restore ecosystems and protect the environment while bringing forth innovation, prosperity, meaningful work, and true security."

That's a very appealing vision, but I suspect you may be dreaming.

You're darn right I'm dreaming. Was it Mark Twain who said if your imagination is out of focus you can't see clearly? With all due respect, we don't look to financial analysts at Bear Stearns for our aspirations. We have to reimagine everything we do, everything we make, every process, [and] every product in such a way that allows us to improve the quality of our lives and everybody else's.

Now it sounds as if you're reminding us to eat our vegetables.

I am not arguing for the moral high ground. I am arguing for a practical high ground. We can imagine an enterprise system that allows people to be innovative, to go into business, to make money, but which also accumulates toward the common good -- where in fact the act of doing business is actually a restorative act. We need to talk about why it is that we've constructed a system that produces results not in our collective best interest. We're destroying the earth in real time.

Noted. But while you're sounding the alarm, I'm imagining the business owner who is struggling every day just to meet payroll, thinking "I don't have time for this. You're just making me feel guilty and afraid."

Well, guilt and fear are not useful emotions. But at the same time what we know in our life is when we avoid things that don't make us feel good, they just come back and get us later. It's our willingness to face our shadows that allows us to free ourselves and make discoveries. That's not just true personally, but it's also true entrepreneurially. At the same time, we all have a level of fatigue. But if you're stressed and overworked, that tells you a whole lot too.

You talk about the "culture of denial" in business. What exactly do you mean?

The fact of the matter is, businesses are like cults in the sense that cults have certain characteristics. They want to build the tallest building in town. They have charismatic leaders. They have a language that is specific to their culture that outsiders wouldn't necessarily understand. They usually have a dress code. They promote sleep deprivation. And the First Amendment doesn't exist; you're not welcome to speak truthfully, and if you do, you can be punished for it. Everyone knows that. It's why Dilbert is so popular.

And yet you believe that the system, in effect, can heal itself?

I see enormous possibility and need for business, for commerce, for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are people who catch a glimpse of how the world can and will change, and then start to conduct their lives in order to create the products or services that will intersect with that change. We have the means and wherewithal to address and solve these problems within the social and economic frameworks that already exist. I take heart from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Soviet Union, in the sense that both were widely unpredicted. I do believe there are times in society when there is a sudden change that isn't convulsive or violent.

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