NEWS FLASH: Paul Hawken, environmentalist and author coming to Australia

NEWS FLASH: Paul Hawken, environmentalist and author as well as one of the
key presenters in the Symposium is coming to Australia in October 2011 - see
www.paulhawken.com for details and select 'speak' for dates and locations. 

Paul Hawken is a pre-eminent environmentalist and entrepreneur,
but his greatest impact has been as an author who had helped
organisations re-think their impact on the environment. He first
challenged corporate thinking with his 1993 book The Ecology of Commerce,
which argued for ‘full-cost accounting’: that in order to truly gauge
the impact of a business decision, businesses must analyse all costs –
social, environmental and economic. The book was widely used in
business schools as the authority on environmental strategy within
businesses.

Hawken called for a restorative economy and proposed other achievable
goals besides maximising shareholders’ wealth: stop accelerating the
rate that we draw down capacity; refrain from degrading other people’s
environment; and avoid displacing other species by taking over their
habitats.

In 1998, the phrase ‘triple bottom line’ (TBL) was coined by John
Elkington and had since become part of mainstream business lexicon. And
with the ratification of the United Nations and ICLEI TBL standard for
urban and community accounting in early 2007, full-cost accounting
became the dominant approach to worldwide public sector reporting.

In 1999, Hawken co-authored Natural Capitalism with Amory
Lovins and Hunter Lovins. The book argued that business decision-making
must take account of the Earth’s limits and carrying capacity. Former
U.S. President Bill Clinton called it one of the five most important
books in the world.

Hawken’s most recent best-seller is Blessed Unrest, the
culmination of over a decade researching non-profit groups and community
organisations dedicated to restoring environmental health and fostering
social justice.

Comprising billion-dollar non-profits and single-person ventures, the
“environmental and social justice movement” has no charismatic leader
and follows no unifying ideology, but expresses ‘humanity’s collective
genius’ and is becoming an unstoppable force in redefining people’s
relationship with the environment and with one another.
Hawken has founded several companies including some of the first
natural food companies in the U.S. that relied solely on sustainable
agricultural methods. He currently heads OneSun LLC, an energy company
focused on ultra low-cost solar based on green chemistry and biomimcry;
and Highwater Global, a social impact fund that employs the highest
standards of corporate social, ethical and environmental behavior. Paul
also founded the Natural Capital Institute, a research whose main
project is the creation of the first open source platform for global
social change, WiserEarth. He has seven honorary PhDs and a clutch of
awards on a shelf somewhere. 

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