Writing Hawken has authored articles, op-eds, and peer-reviewed papers, and seven books, including:
The Next Economy (Ballantine 1983),
Growing a Business (Simon and Schuster 1987),
The Ecology of Commerce (HarperCollins 1993), and
Blessed Unrest (Viking 2007).
The Ecology of Commerce was voted the #1 college text on business and the environment by professors in 67 business schools. The businessman and environmentalist
Ray Anderson of
Interface, Inc. credited
The Ecology of Commerce with his environmental awakening. He described reading it as a "spear in the chest experience", after which Anderson started crisscrossing the country with a near-evangelical fervor, telling fellow executives about the need to reduce waste and carbon emissions.
Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, co-authored with
Amory Lovins, wrote about the idea of
natural capital and direct accounting for
ecosystem services.
Natural Capitalism has been translated into 14 other languages. Together with
The Ecology of Commerce these books have been described as being "among the first to point the way towards a sustainable global economy".
Blessed Unrest, How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, published in 2007, argues that a vast "movement with no name" is forming involving environmental, social justice, and
indigenous rights organizations. Hawken conceives of this "movement" as developing not by
ideology but rather through the identification of what is and is not humane, and has compared it to humanity's collective
immune system.
Growing a Business became the basis of a 17-part
PBS series, which Hawken hosted and produced. The program, which explored the challenges and pitfalls of starting and operating socially responsible companies, appeared on television in 115 countries and reached more than 100 million people.
Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation. Hawken's books have been published in more than 50 countries in 30 languages.
Business Hawken founded several companies, starting when he took over a small retail store in Boston in 1967 called
Erewhon (after
Samuel Butler's 1872
utopian novel) and turned it into the Erewhon Trading Company, a natural-foods wholesaler, and one of the first in the US that relied solely on sustainable agricultural methods. When he left the company in the 1970s, it had over 30,000 acres of organically grown food under contract. Hawken co-founded the
Smith & Hawken garden supply company in 1979, a retail and catalog business. In 2009, he founded OneSun, an energy company focused on ultra low-cost solar based on
green chemistry and
biomimicry. From 1994 to 1998, Hawken founded and headed up The Natural Step USA. From 1996 to 1998, Hawken was co-chairman of The Natural Step International. The Natural Step was founded in 1989 by Swedish scientist and medical doctor
Karl-Henrik Robèrt in order to create shared frameworks for understanding
sustainable development. Its purpose is to teach and support environmental
systems thinking in corporations, cities, governments, unions, and academic institutions through a dialogue process rooted in basic science. In 1998, Hawken created the Natural Capital Institute located in
Sausalito, California. Its main focus was
wiser.org, an open-source database of activists and civil society organizations focused on environmental and social justice. Hawken was previously the executive director of
Project Drawdown, which is working towards the drawdown of
greenhouse gases to reduce
climate change.
Activism In 1965, Hawken worked with
Martin Luther King Jr.'s staff in
Selma, Alabama, preparing for the
Selma to Montgomery marches. As press coordinator, he registered members of the press, issued credentials, gave dozens of updates and interviews on national radio, and acted as marshal for the final, March, 21,
March to Montgomery. That same year, Hawken worked in New Orleans as a staff photographer for the
Congress of Racial Equality, focusing on voter registration drives in
Bogalusa, Louisiana, and the panhandle of Florida, and photographing the
Ku Klux Klan in
Meridian, Mississippi, after three civil rights workers were tortured and killed. In Meridian, Hawken was assaulted and seized by Ku Klux Klan members, but escaped due to
Federal Bureau of Investigation surveillance and intervention.
Speaking As a speaker, Hawken has given several hundred talks, including keynote addresses to major associations, companies, government agencies. His University commencement addresses have included: •
University of California, Berkeley commencement •
University of Portland 2009 commencement speech ("You Are Brilliant and the Earth Is Hiring") •
Urban Land Institute •
Yale University and Yale University commencement ==Recognition==