Quotes from Paul Hawken

A single rotation of the blades generates the electricity for one household's daily use.

Too often, however, tree planting requires taking over land in the South to offset emissions created by a more affluent and industrialized North. In this sense, it is no different from prior colonization visited upon Africa, South America, and Asia over the centuries.

Similarly, a 2016 World Resources Institute report analyzes a variety of possible dietary modifications and finds that "ambitious animal protein reduction"—focused on reducing overconsumption of animal-based foods in regions where people devour more than 60 grams of protein and 2,500 calories per day—holds the greatest promise for ensuring a sustainable future for global food supply and the planet.

As Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh has said, making the transition to a plant-based diet may well be the most effective way an individual can stop climate change. Recent research suggests he is right: Few climate solutions of this magnitude lie in the hands of individuals or are as close as the dinner plate.

Yet a third of the food raised or prepared does not make it from farm or factory to fork. That number is startling, especially when paired with this one: Hunger is a condition of life for nearly 800 million people worldwide. And this one: The food we waste contributes 4.4 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere each year—roughly 8 percent of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

In too many places, kitchen efficiency has become a lost art.

If cattle were their own nation, they would be the world's third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

Today, 314,000 wind turbines supply nearly 4 percent of global electricity. And it will soon be much more. Ten million homes in Spain alone are powered by wind. Investment in offshore wind was $29.9 billion in 2016, 40 percent greater than the prior year.

Social systems require the same level of care, attention, and kindness as ecosystems.

Money and prices and markets don't give us exact information about how much our suburbs, freeways, and spandex cost. Instead, everything else is giving us accurate information: our beleaguered air and watersheds, our overworked soils, our decimated inner cities. All of these provide information our prices should be giving us but do not.

Business is the only mechanism on the planet today powerful enough to produce the changes necessary to reverse global environments and social degradation.

Being a good human being is good business.

A local company has more accountability.

All is connected... no one thing can change by itself.

The future belongs to those who understand that doing more with less is compassionate, prosperous, and enduring, and thus more intelligent, even competitive.

The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them

At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product.

All is connected... no one thing can change by itself.

We are now heading down a centuries-long path toward increasing the productivity of our natural capital - the resource systems upon which we depend to live - instead of our human capital.

People are naming it the Third Wave, the Information Age, etc. but I would say those are basically technological descriptions, and this next shift is not about technology - although obviously it will be influenced and in some cases expressed by technologies.

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.

Everything is connected... no one thing can change by itself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.

Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.