Paul Hawken is a businessman, environmentalist and author. His books include Growing a Business (1987), The Ecology of Commerce (1993), and Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (with Amory & Hunter Lovins, 1999). He was interviewed for A Lot in Common in the Spring of 2000.

Here are some excerpts:

...on the origin of grass lawns

"Lawns were invented in the 17th Century by very wealthy, you know, feudal lords in England who were showing and demonstrating their opulent wealth by having a greensward, a meadow that could be cut by scythes and not be grazed by animals. In other words, it was conspicuous consumption, saying, I have this meadow, upon which I need no animals whatsoever, and I can just cut this grass and throw it away.

Grass was like gold! So valuable. And so we still have, after hundreds of years, we have this American man on Sundays or Saturdays with their little power mowers going back and forth on these little strips of lawn, and they’re clueless as to what a lawn is, what it means, where it came from, except that it’s green and short and clipped.

...on native plants

If you don’t know where you are you don’t know who you are. Once you start to bring in native flora, there is a kind of a grounding and a sensibility because those plants usually have many more uses than say, just visual. They’re food, they’re medicinal, and they are part of the culture of place whether it’s Native American or indigenous people or whatever the culture that preceded the one that is there, the stories, the myths, the legends, the medicines, the names and so forth are all wrapped up in those plants. And again, it’s a way of people finding out who and where they are."