An inspirational message from Paul Hawken

In a complete thirst for something new, interesting, and innovative I was thumbing threw Metropolitan Home, The Design100 issue, to see if sustainability was showing up and ran across an ad for Objectified. A documentary by Gary Hustwit that I had heard of and not seen yet. SOON. This synapse led me to youtube to see a trailer of the movie which led me to a collection of design blogs one of which was Tim Brown's designthinking which led me to Paul Hawken's commencement address @ the University of Portland. I pause and admit  ALL should take ten minutes out of your life and read this address and possibly change your perspective if not inspire to do something ingenious.  Read the address!

Just one quote:

The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What

do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life

creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no

better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of

abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned

people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed

regulators on how to save failed assets. Think about this: we are the

only species on this planet without full employment. Brilliant. We

have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in

real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money

to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At

present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and

calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an

economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We

can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the

future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And

whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold

suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way

to be rich.