Paul Hawken

Ecologists and biologists know that systems achieve stability and healthy through diversity, non uniformity. Ideologues take the opposite view.

he was one of the first to recognize the dispersed nature of knowledge and the effectiveness of localization and of combining individual understanding. Since one person's knowledge can only represent a fragment of the totality of what is known, wisdom can be achieved when people combine what they have learned. ... viable social institutions had to evolve ... to confront the problems at hand rather than reflect theories at mind. ... a remedy for the basic expression of the totalitarian impulse: ensuring that information and the right to make decisions are co-located. To achieve this, one can either move the information to the decision makers, or move decision making rights to the information.

You can try to determine the future, or you can try to create conditions for a healthy future. To do the former, you must presume to know what the future should be. To do the latter, you learn to have faith in social outcomes in which citizens feel secure, valued, and honored.

Just as democracies require an informed and active citizenry to prevent abuse, markets require constant tending to prevent them from being diverted or exploited. A free market, so lovely in theory, is no more feasible in practice than a society without laws. Democracies can sustain freedom because their citizens and representatives continually adjust, maintain, and as necessary enforce standards, rules, and laws. Markets are unequaled in providing feedback, fostering innovation, and allocating resources. Market competition is ultimately a matter of financial capital: those activities that most efficiently accrete and concentrate money gain market advantage; those that don't are marginalized. But there is no comparable competition to improve social or natural capital, because markets for such commodities simply don't exist. The only way those issues are dealt with is through legislation, regulation, citizen activity, and consumer pressure. Removing the laws and regulations that create market constraints leaves the body politic with very few means to promote economic democracy.

"If you have children, I don't see how you can fail to do everything in your power to ensure that you win your bet, and that they, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren's grandchildren, will inherit a world whose perfection can never be accomplished by creatures whose imagination for perfecting it is limitless and free"

Ideologies exclude openness, diversity, resiliency, and multiplicity, the very qualities that nourish life in any system, be it ecosystem, immune system, or social system. ... Ideas are living things; they can be changed and adapted, and can grow. Ideas do not belong to anyone, and require no approval.

By definition, evolution produces creatures and systems that have the greatest ability to persist over time, and resilience allows an organism to withstand the greatest range of disturbances. This is as true for social systems as it is for environmental ones, for governments and corporations as it is for fisheries and reefs. The more resilient a system, the more shocks and impacts it can withstand and still recover. Conversely, as systems lose diversity and thus functional redundancy, they become vulnerable to disruption or collapse.

The opposite of learning is a runaway system where mistakes are relegated to file cabinets and ignored. When a government, corporation, financial institution, or religious organization insulates itself, its initiatives, however well intended, create uncontrolled outcomes and second-order effects that generate newer problems.