Paul Hawken gave a keynote address in Seattle last month at the Sustainable Industries Economic Forum. I recommend you take 50 minutes and watch it all. I’ve seen nothing like it for a usable perspective on the challenge and the opportunity facing us.
Hawken gives the state of play of our global footprint as humans, and a view of how rapidly we’re using up the legacy sunlight easily available to us as fossil fuels. From this he outlines the steps we’ll need to take to replace these fuels with real-time solar – and nuclear – energy.
Hawken has an uplifted lightness of spirit combined with a scientific and business understanding of where we are as a race, combined again with an engineering realism that generates solutions.
His ideas are so far-ranging that one can’t help but be inspired by something out of all the possibilities he covers – the business opportunities of sustainable world are immense. His view is heartening because he believes that stepping up to the limits of growth doesn’t mean deprivation – rather it means innovation. Abundance remains in the new world just as in the old.
Among the solutions Hawken proposes are local everything – make small bigger, produce everything locally: chemicals industrial products, transportation. Get out of the import economy.
And much of the energy we need can be gained from efficiency in the way we use energy. We can easily convert waste into resource, even to the extent that sewage plants can be profit centers. And retrofitting buildings can be the biggest job creator ever known to our economy.
Give yourself the fifty minutes.
