Resources for Teachers and Students on Paul Hawken

Prepare: Paul Hawken is an entrepreneur with a deep commitment to environmental sustainability. Best known, perhaps, as the Hawken in "Smith and Hawken," the garden retail catalogue, he has emerged as one of the world's foremost experts on the relationship between business and the environment. His biography can be found on his personal website.

Read: Paul Hawken wrote an original essay for the Architects of Peace project. In it, he discusses the unique origins of the sustainability movement.

Explore: Paul Hawken founded the Natural Capital Institute, an organization dedicated to researching principles and practices that will lead to social justice and environmental restoration. The institute is particularly concerned with the concept of "green business," exploring how environmental and social-justice concerns can ultimately lead to less costly ways of doing business. The institute's website contains information on their current projects.

Write: At the end of his Architects of Peace article, Hawken claims that sustainability represents a powerful new worldview, and that sustainability is the work of peace. How is this possible? Could sustainability, taken as a worldview, lead to global peace in ways that other worldviews, such as Marxism or Christianity, have not been able to? Are there ethical dimensions of sustainability that extend beyond environmental concerns? Write a three-to-five page reflection paper on these questions in which you conclude with your own definition of sustainability as a worldview.

Expand: Paul Hawken is chair of the United States component of an international organization called the Natural Step, which seeks to educate and consult with corporations regarding sustainability practices. Their website contains an excellent section, called "Why Sustainability?"; that outlines an "upstream approach" to solving environmental problems.

Additional resource: Resurgence, a magazine connecting ecology, art and culture, maintains an online archive of articles from its past issues. One of these articles is the magazine's interview with Paul Hawken, titled "Gold in the Shadow,".

Biography of Paul Hawken