Find Out Where You Live | Paul Hawken

You love what you know and take care of what you love.

“Discovering the beauty of the world that you inhabit...I feel like that sense of falling in love is the most important thing you can do," says Paul.

Perhaps we take Paul's advice.

Pay attention for a second to discover what’s right around us.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

What is the one thing I should do? People ask what’s the one thing I should do?

I think I disappoint most people when I tell them what it is. But, it’s really to find out where you live.

Find out where you live, the soils, the migratory birds that are coming and where they come from and where they are going to and what are they eating while they’re there?

Same with the pollinators—what are the wild bees and what are the Italian bees. What are the names of the plants, the native plants, what are the ones that are invasive and introduced? What are the names of the trees?

Who lived on that land? You’re living on probably unceded land from one of the 500 indigenous cultures in North America, or actually just America itself.

You know where that hummingbird nests, you know how it nests, you know how it sleeps at night, you know it sleeps upside down. You know it goes down 60 miles an hour when it’s trying to show off in front of females. And you know how long it lives and it has the same amount of heartbeats as an elephant, but it lives two years and the elephant lives over a hundred.

I mean discovering the beauty of the world that you inhabit, even if it’s in a suburb, or the beauty of the world that got covered over and destroyed but wants to come back.

And I feel like that sense of falling in love, is the most important thing you can do. You want to protect what you love. That’s so, so human.

And it’s a matter of expanding that love beyond one’s kin and family and partner, and maybe your home, to the unseen.

You see it, you look at it, but really, the unseen world around you. What is it saying to you, what it is manifesting, how it works, and the mystery of it, that’s what I mean.

I kind of do some of that every day, trying to figure out, you know, wow.

There’s just so much beautiful literature on this. So yeah, that’s what you should do.

Find out where you live.

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The complete conversation with Paul Hawken can be found here. The transcription included above has been edited for concision and clarity.

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