Latest news with #PaulHawken
NDTV
11 hours ago
- Business
- NDTV
Lead The Change: The Strategic ESG Certification Program By NDTV And TERI
असतो मा सद्गमय । तमसो मा ज्योतिर्गमय । "Lead us from the unreal to the real. Lead us from darkness to light." Today, these ancient words echo with urgency. Climate anxieties, social divides, and ethical dilemmas are no longer distant threats - they're the realities we live with every day. And who has the power to shift the course of this story? Businesses. As environmentalist Paul Hawken profoundly stated, "Business is the only mechanism on the planet today powerful enough to produce the changes necessary to reverse global environmental and social degradation." The question is: are you ready to step up and lead that change? NDTV, TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute) & ZENORA, have united to answer this call. NDTV, a beacon of truth and responsibility in Indian media, and TERI, a global pioneer in sustainability and climate action, have launched the Strategic ESG Certification Program. A 3-month hybrid journey that's more than a course; it's a movement to transform how businesses operate in a world that demands accountability. The program is supported by National Institute of Solar Energy (NISE), an autonomous institution of the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), Government of India. What's in It for You? This 13-week program is designed for action, not just ideas. Here's what you'll gain: Purpose Meets Practice: Learn to embed ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) into your organization's core. With global frameworks, live case studies, and hands-on labs, you'll turn risks into opportunities and good intentions into measurable impact. Leadership at Every Level: ESG isn't just for sustainability teams-it's for every decision-maker. When leaders embrace it, it becomes the heartbeat of your business. Data with Meaning: Transparent KPIs tell your story. Master how to measure and communicate your progress with clarity and credibility. Collaboration for Impact: Build alliances with NGOs, academia, and peers. Real change thrives on connection, not isolation. Who's It For? Tailored for CXOs, board members, ESG/CSR leaders, and policymakers, this program fits the schedules of busy professionals with its flexible, hybrid format. It's your chance to lead with purpose-and see the rewards. Did you know companies with strong ESG performance enjoy a 20% higher valuation, better access to capital, and deeper customer loyalty? This isn't just about doing good; it's about thriving for your business, your people, and the planet. A Timely Call to Action As we look toward World Environment Day 2025 on June 5th, it's a moment to reflect: what role will you play in shaping a sustainable future? Starting in July 2025, the Strategic ESG Certification Program offers you the tools, the network, and the vision to be part of the solution. Will you wait for change to come, or will you help build it? The choice is yours. Join us. Learn. Lead. Transform. Together, let's turn intention into impact. Program Details: Duration: 13 weeks, hybrid format For: CXOs, board members, ESG/CSR leaders, policymakers Starts: July 2025 Learn More: NDTV TERI ESG Program: Strategic ESG for business sustainability and growth. Log on to for details. Let's make sustainability not just a goal, but a reality. The time is now.
Forbes
21-03-2025
- General
- Forbes
These Books Explore How Deeply Food Matters To People And The World
Farmer hands take care young sprout plant in the soil. The food system is about so much more than the food on our plates and in our bowls. Yes, I'm a nerd—and proud of it!—and the books I love reading about the food system, including many new ones out this spring, understand this fact. As these authors write, food can be so much bigger than what shows up on our tables: We're not just talking about bananas, we're talking about imperialism and agricultural destruction. Understanding soda means unpacking corporate influence over food and health, and discussing wheat can bring us into complex conversations about diaspora. Food can highlight conflict but also resilience, as Hawa Hassan writes beautifully in her new book. And on the other hand, the food system can be minuscule. In his book on carbon, Project Drawdown Founder Paul Hawken explores how intertwined carbon is with not just being alive but with the human experience more broadly. And Jack Lohmann helps us understand how the element phosphorus (and its phosphate form) has shaped our past and possibly our future. But something else I believe deeply—and probably also say all the time!—is that the food we eat does matter! While we work to understand the broader social forces shaping the food system, we cannot forget to prioritize the ways food can bring us joy, cultural connectedness, and health. That's why I love when chefs like Nina Compton bridge these worlds, as she does in her forthcoming book 'Kwéyòl / Creole: Recipes, Stories, and Tings from a St. Lucian Chef's Journey,' which I cannot wait to cook from when it comes out. So here's a sneak peek at the list of books I'm enjoying this season (These titles are listed in alphabetical order.) ● 'Banana Capital: Stories, Science, and Poison at the Equator' by Ben Brisbois ● 'Carbon: The Book of Life' by Paul Hawken ● 'Dodge County, Incorporated: Big Ag and the Undoing of Rural America' by Sonja Trom Eayrs ● 'Eat Pacific: The Pacific Island Food Revolution Cookbook' by Robert Oliver ● 'Gardens of Hope: Cultivating Food and the Future in a Post-Disaster City' by Yuki Kato (forthcoming May 2025) ● 'Gluten Free for Life: Celiac Disease, Medical Recognition, and the Food Industry' by Emily K. Abel ● 'How the World Eats: A Global Food Philosophy' by Julian Baggini ● 'How to Feed the World: The History and Future of Food' by Vaclav Smil ● 'Kwéyòl / Creole: Recipes, Stories, and Tings from a St. Lucian Chef's Journey: A Cookbook' by Nina Compton (forthcoming April 2025) ● 'México Between Feast and Famine: Food, Corporate Power, and Inequality' by Enrique C. Ochoa (forthcoming April 2025) ● 'On Gold Hill: A Personal History of Wheat, Farming, and Family, from Punjab to California' by Jaclyn Moyer ● 'Regenerative Farming and Sustainable Diets: Human, Animal and Planetary Health' edited by Joyce D'Silva and Carol McKenna ● 'Setting a Place for Us: Recipes and Stories of Displacement, Resilience, and Community from Eight Countries Impacted by War' by Hawa Hassan ● 'Silvohorticulture: A Grower's Guide to Integrating Trees into Crops' by Ben Raskin and Andy Dibben ● 'Sweet and Deadly: How Coca-Cola Spreads Disinformation and Makes Us Sick' by Murray Carpenter ● 'The Apple: A Delicious History' by Sally Coulthard ● 'The Fishwife Cookbook: Delightful Tinned Fish Recipes for Every Occasion' by Becca Millstein and Vilda Gonzalez ● 'The Kidney and the Cane: Planetary Health and Plantation Labor in Nicaragua' by Alex M. Nading (forthcoming May 2025) ● 'The Quinoa Bust: The Making and Unmaking of an Andean Miracle Crop' by Emma McDonell ● 'In the Global Vanguard: Agrarian Development and the Making of Modern Taiwan' by James Lin ● 'White Light: The Elemental Role of Phosphorus—in Our Cells, in Our Food, and in Our World' by Jack Lohmann A full list of books to inspire the movement for sustainable food systems, along with descriptions, can also be found on Food Tank by clicking here.
Yahoo
21-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
The climate movement is talking about carbon all wrong, a new book argues
Burning oil, gas, and coal — literal fossil fuels, made from the compressed remains of ancient plants and plankton — has released carbon into Earth's atmosphere, where it traps heat and alters the climate. That process has caused massive destruction and loss of life, and it will continue to do so. As a result, carbon came to be seen as something to 'fight,' 'combat,' and 'capture.' Paul Hawken, the author of the new book Carbon: The Book of Life, argues that the climate movement is thinking about its work, and messaging, all wrong. 'Those who call carbon a pollutant might want to lay down their word processor,' Hawken writes. Carbon, he notes, is after all the building block of life, the animating force behind trees, rhinos, eyelashes, hormones, bamboo, and so much more. Without it, Earth would just be a lonely, dead rock. So much for decarbonizing. Hawken has come to believe that treating carbon as something to tackle, liquefy, and pump into geological formations not only reflects the same mindset that caused climate change in the first place, but also further alienates people from the living world. There is no 'climate crisis,' he argues, but a crisis of human thinking and behavior that's degrading the soil, wiping out entire species, and changing the weather faster than people can adapt. 'From a planetary view,' he writes in Carbon, 'the warming atmosphere is a response, an adjustment, a teaching.' The book records a shift in his thinking. In 2017, Hawken published Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, a book that ranked 100 climate solutions by how much they could reduce carbon emissions, from refrigerant leaks to food waste. The nonprofit Project Drawdown, which he launched, continues to implement these kinds of fixes around the world. But now, Hawken is forgoing straightforward metrics to focus on what he sees as a deeper cultural problem. 'The living world is a complex interactive system and doesn't lend itself to simple solutions,' he said. The new book frames carbon as a flow — a cycle that moves through the atmosphere, oceans, soil, with the element absorbed by growing plants and exhaled in every animal breath. Hawken's book is a lesson in what's sometimes called 'unlearning,' or letting go of old assumptions, like the idea that nature is something to fix or control. The book explores ways to repair a broken relationship with the natural world, drawing inspiration from Indigenous cultures and new scientific discoveries. Hawken marvels at how much remains unknown about carbon, which he dubs 'the most mysterious element of all.' The book's poetic language offers a stark contrast to the warlike terms climate advocates tend to use to describe carbon. Hawken argues that the typical metaphors are not only inaccurate — how exactly do you battle an element? — but also provide fuel for right-wing narratives that carbon has been unfairly demonized. Last week, E&E News reported that the Trump administration is planning a federal report making the case that a warming world would be a good thing, a pretext for weakening climate regulations. 'Carbon dioxide is not an evil gas,' David Legates, a former Trump official, said in a recent video put out by the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank. 'Rather, it's a gas beneficial to life on Earth. It'll increase temperatures slightly, and warmer temperatures are certainly better than colder temperatures.' Read Next How the Klamath Dams Came Down Anita Hofschneider & Jake Bittle Hawken wants a broad shift in how people talk about the natural world, though, not just a rethinking of the climate movement's metaphors. He points to how financial institutions increasingly refer to nature as a commodity. In January, BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, declared 'natural capital' an investment priority. In February, Goldman Sachs launched a 'biodiversity bond fund' turning ecosystems into investment products. The jargon used in scientific reports and global climate conferences also creates a sense of detachment that dulls the living things it refers to. Hawken describes the word 'biodiversity' as 'a bloodless term' and 'carbon neutrality' as an absurd 'biophysical impossibility.' 'We are numbed by the science, puzzled by jargon, paralyzed by predictions, confused about what actions to take, stressed as we scramble to care for our family, or simply impoverished, overworked, and tired,' Hawken writes. 'Most of humanity doesn't talk about climate change because we do not know what to say.' Even plainspoken terms like 'nature' are suspect, in Hawken's view: The concept only seems to exist to mark a separation between humans and the rest of the world. He points out that the Chicham language of the Achuar people in the Amazon doesn't have a word for nature, nor do other Indigenous languages. 'Such words would only be needed if the Achuar experienced nature as distinct from the self,' he writes. English, by contrast, he describes as a 'rootless' language, borrowing terms from so many places that it struggles to teach the kind of deep, reciprocal relationships that are born from living in one place and caring for it over many generations. Hawken hopes to mend that separation by helping people discover the flow of carbon in their daily lives and kindle a sense of wonder about it. Carbon delves into mind-bending scientific discoveries about the kind of marvels that carbon makes possible. Bees, with their two-milligram brains, appear able to count, learn by observation, feel pain and pleasure, and even recognize their own knowledge. The rye plant senses the world around it with more than 14 million roots and root hairs, a network that one plant neurobiologist described as a type of brain. Hawken's book is a reminder that carbon — despite all the problems caused by releasing too much of it into the atmosphere — is actually a gift. The goal of Carbon isn't to map out a plan for saving the Earth, but to rekindle a sense of relationship with it. Where Hawken lives in California, his community recently restored a salmon stream, breaking down a concrete barrier under a bridge that had blocked the fish on their final journey up the stream to spawn. 'The core of it is about care, and kindness, and connection, and compassion, and generosity,' Hawken said. 'That's where regeneration starts.' This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The climate movement is talking about carbon all wrong, a new book argues on Mar 21, 2025.
