Paul Hawkens on Humanity’s Immune Response
Q & A with Owen Lipstein
Paul Hawken's books have achieved the status of classics for
their visionary prescriptions for sustainability and for outlining ways of
living that honor the earth and its inhabitants
Owen Lipstein: You speak about Emerson, Thoreau, and the
early environmentalists who are both "iconoclastic and radical." How did we
fall so far, so fast from people like that?
Paul Hawkens: I ask that question myself. I plunged into the
literature and biographies of the transcendentalists to write this book, and
was agog at how brilliant and prescient their thinking was then. We read
Thoreau and Emerson as youth and we rarely revisit as adults. I am not sure
someone in high school can comprehend Emerson, because it takes a certain
number of years in the world to fully grasp his thinking.
OL: In your earlier work, you addressed the care and feeding
and development of small business; some of the solutions you are proposing for
the world seem to spring from some of those entrepreneurial models. Please
explain.
PH: In Growing a Business, and the PBS series that
accompanied it, I addressed how to grow a business in a social, ethical, and
responsible way, not business just for the sake of business. Entrepreneurialism
at its heart is about problem solving, and the hundreds of thousands of social
benefit organizations we call non-profits are also problem solvers.
OL: You speak of "cognitive antecedent”—that groups of
educated, urbanized people pay no attention to unfamiliar objects directly in
front of them if they focus too strongly on familiar ones. Does that partly
explain why most people are still dimly aware of the problems we face with our
planet?
PH: I think the problem rests in the fact that environmental
problems tend to be longer term, over-the-horizon issues, and most people focus
on more immediate needs, because they are hard pressed economically. Another
reason is the corruption of our political processes by corporations, which has
created a situation where politicians pander to voters' fears to get elected
but actually serve their donor base. Finally, the media has been reluctant to
weigh in early because advertisers put pressure on them to steer away from
issues like climate change. That is changing thankfully.
OL: In your book, you actually list companies that impose
their will with adverse consequences on the world and on indigenous cultures.
It takes a certain amount of courage (yours and your publisher's) to name names
like this. Do you think if we did more of this we would be better off?
PH: I truly believe that most people are good, and want to
do good in the world. What we lack is tighter feedback loops so that we can see
and comprehend the effect of our purchases, investments, and actions. Even
though most large companies are public, most of what they do is hidden to the
public, and thus unaccountable. There are scandals here and there, but I am not
referring to illegal activity but actions that most people would deem
unethical.
OL: One of the problems you mention in understanding our
habitat is that most people fail to grasp, for instance, "how minute
changes in CO2 levels can magnify to have potent effects." Most people
have very limited technical training. Do you have any ideas about how people
can be made to imagine what our true impact in the world is?
PH: Well, we have one of the most imaginative and creative
sectors in the world called Madison Avenue, and it is able to make people want
things they never heard of, to fret about diseases that are created by drug
companies, and to want to appear completely different than their genetic
make-up. Therefore, the talent and ability to inject ideas into society are
there. It is just that these skills are used to make the problems worse, not
better, by cultivating a culture of consumption rather than transformation. I
am not pointing fingers because this cycle of delusion is something we all take
part in. In the meantime, the impacts we all have are cumulatively increasing.
OL: You quote Oppenheimer by "reminding us
technological insight does not confer self-insight." So what do you think
our forward thinking has taught us?
PH: When it comes to innovation, technological prowess,
literature, language, and creativity, we are brilliant. It is when we measure
America by its treatment of indigenous and first peoples, its squandering of
the environment, and the way we currently treat our children and elderly, we
are an embarrassment. We pour advertising into our young people offering 42 oz
of soda pop at McDonalds for sixty-nine cents, and are now faced with the fact
that type-2 diabetes may eventually bankrupt the health-care system in the US.
I am clear that this will be eventually seen as a crime against children, just
as the exploitation of children in the industrial revolution is now seen as
repugnant and horrific. And our treatment of first peoples and those we
enslaved from Africa remains an open wound upon our land that cannot be healed
unless we take responsibility for the past.
OL: You write that we live in a world where electricity,
food, and water come to our houses, as if by magic. What are the consequences
of people not knowing how to provide for themselves?
PH: It goes back to accountability; without knowing our
metabolic footprint we cannot imagine our impact upon the world. I am not sure
we need a world where each or us provides for ourselves; no culture does that.
It is community that provides for its members and vice versa. It is a question
of place, of understanding that our lives rest upon long and fragile supply
lines of natural gas, fuel, electricity. And food, and that one of the most
vital and helpful movements that exists right now is the localization of our
economy. Bill McKibben writes eloquently of this in his new book Deep Economy.
OL: You write about how the body is a miracle of restoration
and recovery. Please comment on the relevance of this as a metaphor for the sustainability
of the earth.
PH: Well on one hand, many people simply do not understand
their impact or the potential consequences we face in the very near future with
respect to climate, food, the economy, water, etc. On the other hand, there are
many people who do grasp the problem but many of them feel quite hopeless if
not in despair. These two poles are the equivalent of Scylla and Charybdis,
denial and despair, and neither is helpful. The metaphor I employ in the book
is one of the human immune system, the most complex system in the human body. I
see this huge unnamed movement that I write about as humanity's immune response
to political corruption, economic disease, and ecological degradation. When you
better understand the immune system, you can imagine that this movement has a
collective wisdom that is as mysterious and powerful as the one we carry inside
us.
OL: You consider Slow Food one of the world's evolving and
(more evolved) responses to globalism and consumerism. Please comment.
PH: In the book, I tried to provide people with a sense of
the scope of the movement, and briefly outlined some of the initiatives, one of
them being Slow Food. It relates to localization, but also restoration of a
sense of place that is cultivated by food, taste, and, yes, even pleasure. The
farmers and chefs, the craftsman and gentle makers of the real foods that are
beginning to re-emerge are not mere artisans or horticulturists providing us by
their unstinting and vastly underpaid labor with so much pleasure: they are in
fact a vanguard of a movement that is reclaiming our land, our place, our culture.
How we let our biology end up in the hands of Nestles and Unilever and General
Foods I will leave to cultural historians, but we now know that if we are to
take back ownership and responsibility for our health and the biological
integrity of our land, then we have to literally take back our mouths, take
back our taste buds from those who would use them to accumulate financial
capital and return it to those who create our biological capital, away from
people who steal from the future, to those who heal the future, and to offer
our trust to those people who, in Adrienne Rich's words, treasure the
"enormity of the simplest things," who hold a universe of humility
and humus in safekeeping for a world that literally has a jaded palette, jaded
because so much has been lost, a group of people who understand that without our
farms, without our exquisite connection to dandelions and thistle honey,
huckleberry and heirlooms, to mizuno and miner's lettuce, to our watersheds and
soils, that we will live in a world with "no memory, no faithfulness, no
purpose for the future, nor honor to the past."
OL: You are clearly passionate about words and use quite
sophisticated language in your book. Shakespeare may have used 50,000 words;
well-educated American may use 1500 to 2000. Half of the conversation
vocabulary of an American teenager consists of fewer than forty words. How do
you understand this in light of your book, and in particular the weighty
appendix?
PH: Languages are living things that grow and evolve, or
they can be killed off. The most biologically diverse areas of the world
contain the most languages, and one disappears every fortnight. The back of my
book is indeed a taxonomy of this movement. When we say
"environmental" or "social justice" organization, we think
Sierra Club or Amnesty International, two venerable organizations, but in the
process we overlook the incredible degree of specificity, science, and
granulation that hundreds of thousands of organizations and tens of millions of
people represent, and we do not see the disciplines they are bringing to bear
on the problems we face as a civilization. The taxonomy is meant to be browsed,
grazed, taken in, and appreciated for what it is. It is not text to be read
like the bulk of the book, but definitions, keywords, and categories, what I
would call the curriculum of the 21st century. Consider it a catalog of restoration.
There are no quizzes. This "list" is our immune response and those
readers who go onto the accompanying website, WiserEarth.org, can see the
organizations and people who serve all of us.
OL: Though your book is ultimately hopeful, you clearly also
believe things might be worse than most people want to believe. How do you
think this might play out?
PH: I think what I was trying to say is that it is a
Dickensian world, it is the best and worst of times at the same time. If you
look at the scientific data, you may well turn pale as some of my scientist
friends do. However, if you immerse yourself in the resourcefulness, innovation,
and creativity of people who want to restore beauty, justice, and grace to the
world, then you can't help but feel hopeful. Both are true.
