What Made Us Stray from Nature?

Paul Hawken was brought to my attention purely by accident. While I was broke and homeless after a two-year stint in Asia and was bouncing around as a house sitter on different houseboats in Sausalito, California, Hawken was riding the wave of his own success. His multi-colored houseboat sat at the end of the dock like a pot of gold that I would eventually land in and included an extensive book collection that gave me a glimpse into his life’s work.

That was five years ago, long after Hawken had left Smith & Hawken, his catalog and store chain, which may very well have started the home and gardening craze. Now Hawken has expanded his passion into making the world a much greener place. His popular books, The Ecology of Commerce and Natural Capitalism, have been published in twenty-seven languages in more than fifty countries and have sold more than two million copies. His newest release, Blessed Unrest: How The Largest Movement In The World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, is an extension of his work up until now. Here he has researched organizations that are committed to restoring the environment and fostering social justice throughout the world.

I ran into Hawken, virtually, at the 15th Digital Be-In in San Francisco on Saturday, April 21, 2007 in honor of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. He was a keynote speaker during the Biomimicry Symposium to talk about his new endeavor, Wiser Earth, a sort of MySpace or DivineCaroline, but for people and organizations who are working toward a greener planet. Biomimicry, the focus of the Be-In, is defined as “the application of methods and systems found in nature to the study and design of engineering systems and modern technology.” What was presented at the event was a literal and virtual gathering of technologists, environmentalists, and scientists to explain what new innovations and ideas have used nature as their model through development.

Speaking live from Hawaii, Hawken explained that there were thousands of organizations around the world that he had never heard of during his fourteen years of speaking on the environment. These organizations were all working toward social justice and bettering the environment and ran as a list projected on a screen like movie credits. Hawken acknowledged the impact of the number of these organizations in the world by saying, “I would have to let this list of organizations run for a whole month before we reached the end of the list. That’s how large this movement is, it’s the largest the world has ever seen.” The real audience clapped and screamed, launching the two-hour long Biomimcry Symposium.

This “Be-In” concept, both real and virtual, originated in 1967 when San Francisco’s intellectual hippies gathered in Golden Gate Park for the first western “Human Be-In.” The cover of San Francisco’s Oracle—which had been the psychedelic newspaper of the city’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood—announced, “A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In.” It featured Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Richard (Ram Dass) Alpert, Dick Gregory, Lenore Kandel, Jerry Ruben, and a sampling of San Francisco’s rock bands, including The Grateful Dead. Thirty-thousand people showed up to see Leary, in his first San Francisco appearance, utter the unforgettable sound bite, “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.” Oracle publisher and Be-In co-organizer Allen Cohen characterized the event as “a necessary meeting-of-the-minds, bringing together the philosophically opposed factions of the late 1966 San Francisco-based counter culture. There were the Berkeley radicals, who had grown militant in response to the U.S. government’s Vietnam war policies, and then there were the Haight-Ashbury hippies, who, with psychotropic compounds and various spiritual guides, saw the cosmic karma in it all, and urged peaceful protest and ongoing joyful celebration.”

Janine Benyus, the founder of Biomimcry Institute, followed with a virtual talk from Costa Rica, and explained how a group of tourists had discovered that nature was more interesting than tourist snapshots.