Paul Hawken’s Vision-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.

Fortune Small Business

By David Whitford

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.

For a while during the late 1990s, it was almost possible to believe we were headed
toward change on the scale you’re talking about. Were you at all thrilled or inspired
by the rise of the Internet economy?

I was confused by it. I thought you were supposed to add value to a business, and the value
you added was so great that the money you took in was greater than what you spent. I was
approached by a lot of dot-com companies that wanted me to serve on their boards. I would ask
them, "Do you have any idea what kind of business you’re going into?" This is mail order. It’s a
tough, tough business. Ask Sears Roebuck. Ask Montgomery Ward. It’s a low-margin retail
business, and the Internet made it worse because you could price-compare so easily. I could not
figure out why the VCs were pouring $10 million, $20 million, $30 million into these things.

It sure was a great time to be an entrepreneur in America, though.

Just the opposite. The last five years was actually one of the most difficult times to start a
business. Because there was very little judgment, no real discernment, very little discipline.
Money was too freely available, and therefore it funded follies. To me, nothing kills a good idea
faster than money. Great value-added propositions in this world start not from liberty and license
but from need and want and hunger. Breakthroughs come from limits. So to me, right now is the
best time to start a business. We’re back to a more traditional approach — stay small, make your
mistakes, then grow once you learn.

Yet I’ve heard entrepreneurs say they miss the excitement of those days, the sense
of being swept up in something big and new that was going to change the world.

Yeah, well, swept up in an illusion. If there’s any time, it’s right now and over the next 20 years
when we need people to step up to the plate and actually change the world. Of course,
everybody thinks that about their historical era. But the fact is that we as a civilization have to
radically reduce the throughput of materials and energy — we’re talking about an 80% to 90%
reduction — while improving the quality of life for all people. That’s a pretty interesting agenda!
That catapults you into a whole other category of design and creativity and imagination. And that
is happening already.

Companies are doing it in enzymatic chemistry and biomedics and biomimicry and fuel cells. The
train is at the station, people are getting their tickets punched, and it’s going to leave pretty soon. I
call it the next industrial revolution. The re-imagination of all commercial systems on earth. If
you’re serious about being a player, about creating something of value, about being current, then
it behooves you to check it out.

And you see a big role for small business in this great transformation?

Right. Small business can do a lot, because it can act quickly and decisively. And it’s not just so
much what it does as the spirit in which it’s done. I’ve always thought small business to be
infinitely more open and generous with respect to social and environmental concerns than big
business. The myth is Philip Morris giving to the arts. Yeah, well, guess why?

Do you think there’s time to make the changes you advocate before it’s too late?

Well, it’s a very valid question; I get it all the time. But it’s not a helpful question. What if I said no?
What would you do? The fact is nobody knows how much time there is. So, therefore, what are
you going to do? That’s the question. What are you going to do? For me, we have just enough
time to do what we need to do well. And we always do. Always.

Do you believe, as Paul Hawken does, that the culture of business can heal itself? Write to us
at [email protected] to let us know.

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