Paul Hawken on Curiosity, Soil, and Fire-Triggered Succession
The author of Regeneration and founder of Project Drawdown reflects on what regenerative agriculture actually means — not as branding exercise, but as practice that must be felt, verified, and embodied through direct relationship with land and living systems.
Paul Hawken’s early work founding Erewhon came from a visceral moment: discovering he’d unknowingly lied to a customer about organic oats. His response wasn’t to find better labels — it was to visit every farm himself, walk the land, speak with the people growing food. It’s a telling origin story for someone who would go on to map climate solutions at planetary scale through Project Drawdown, then write Regeneration and Carbon: The Book of Life. The through-line is the same: systems must be known through direct encounter, not abstraction.
In this interview with Kiss the Ground, Hawken offers a useful frame for the current moment. “Where we are right now is where fire and the fire-triggered succession are happening at the same time,” he says, describing both ecological and social breakdown alongside the emergence of regenerative movements worldwide. It’s not optimism — it’s observation of what seeds lie dormant, what heat triggers succession, what new growth appears in ash.
He’s blunt about the limits of techno-solutionism: “Corporations are selling Band-Aid ‘climate tech’ to the highest bidder.” Regenerative agriculture, by contrast, teaches pragmatics — methods that hold up as weather becomes more volatile, as water patterns shift. Not labels or certifications, but relationship with soil as “our mother” — a phrase Hawken insists is “absolutely true,” not sentiment. The work ahead, he suggests, isn’t fighting climate change with “male verbs” but creating more life. That shift — from extraction to generation, from knowing to curiosity — maps uncomfortably well onto the governance challenges The Garden tracks: how do you govern living systems when the paradigm itself treats life as resource?
Hawken notes that “regenerative agriculture” will be misused by large companies “for a while.” The counterweight is organizations that tell the truth — not through critique alone, but by making visible what’s already growing. Ten years from now, he suggests, the question won’t be whether regenerative agriculture exists, but whether we can see it clearly enough to distinguish practice from performance.