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“Grief is a blessing, a guide; it’s us being our best self when we feel grief,” says climate OG Paul Hawken on Climate Curious. With the rise of global conflict, Climate Curious co-hosts Ben Hurst and Maryam Pasha turn to environmental juggernaut Paul Hawken for a much needed pep talk. He shares tips for navigating the modern media landscape, how grief can help us tap into ideas and solutions, and why he likes to focus on courage over hope.
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Created by TEDxLondon
Executive produced by Josie Colter
Produced by Ben Beheshty
Curated by Deesha Chandra
Hosted by Maryam Pasha and Ben Hurst
Communications by Tara Cooper and Issey Gladston
00:00 Welcome and Big Question
00:53 Paul on Grief as Truth
02:03 Faith in People Over Power
02:39 Hosts React and Seek Hope
03:51 Personal Grief and Iran Imagery
06:19 Hope vs Courage
07:55 Disillusion and Media Truth
09:32 Closing and Credits
Welcome and Big Question
[00:00:00] Ben Hurst: Welcome to Climate Curious Quickies, bite-sized Nuggets of Climate. Goodness. From our TEDx experts in under 10 minutes,
[00:00:09] Ben Beheshty: Climate Curious Producer Beheshty here. In this week’s climate Curious, we’re asking, how do we keep our [00:00:15] hearts open to a world that feels like it’s breaking? Joining us to answer that mammoth question is Environmental juggernauts and Climate OG Paul Hawken.
[00:00:24] Ben Beheshty: Paul shares tips for how he navigates the modern media landscape. How grief can help us tap into new [00:00:30] ideas and solutions and why it’s not hope that we all need, but courage, this one hits close to home for climate curious. So if you warned, it may be a bit of a tear jerker on how grief can help you identify new roots forward.
[00:00:42] Ben Beheshty: Here’s Paul Hawken. Stay [00:00:45] curious
[00:00:49] Paul Hawken: to me. There’s very simple. I, I don’t mean.
Paul on Grief as Truth
[00:00:53] Paul Hawken: Binary ways, but but a way of being and seeing the world that say, yeah, look, I, I mean, it’s hard to wake up this morning and listen to the news about Iran. Okay? It’s very, very difficult for me to listen to that and my heart aches. But you mentioned something, Ben, about grief, and to me grief is a fantastic, wonderful blessing as an emotion.
[00:01:19] Paul Hawken: You wanna feel grief? If you’re not feeling grief, then I don’t think you’re really aware of what’s going on. You know? Uh, and grief comes from the [00:01:30] heart, right? It comes from the heart. And the heart is the one organ that always tells the truth. Count on it. You wanna know the truth. So grief is a blessing.
[00:01:43] Paul Hawken: It’s a guide. [00:01:45] It’s, it’s a signal. It’s us being our best self when we feel grief, uh, because it’s our heart. Uh, and that’s what’s missing. You know, when we open the page or listen to the news, that where’s the, where’s the [00:02:00] heart in all this, you know? It’s not there, it’s gone. It’s absent.
Faith in People Over Power
[00:02:03] Paul Hawken: Um, but not in, not in most people in the world, you know?
[00:02:06] Paul Hawken: So I have faith, a tremendous faith in people in the world, uh, who are mothers and fathers and [00:02:15] children, and care and act on that, based on that care, and do the best they can and, uh, they will. Uh, surmount, you know, the concentrations of power that exists today that are destroying, uh, our cultures and [00:02:30] our places and our land, and our oceans and our seas and our forests, and, you know, yeah, they will.
[00:02:37] Ben Hurst: Yeah, this is incredible.
Hosts React and Seek Hope
[00:02:39] Ben Hurst: I, sorry, Paul, this must be a, a really weird experience for you. Normally when we do these interviews, like we are like laughing and joking and like making, making wi observations, but, and for the listeners, I, but you can’t see what we are seeing in this moment. Merriam’s having a very visceral reaction to this conversation.
[00:02:58] Ben Hurst: I, I, [00:03:00] I’m getting like goosebumps because I, it feels like you are in lots of ways speaking to us maybe from the future. I don’t know. I, it feels like you are, you are able to embody something in this conversation that [00:03:15] feels like it is completely lacking for most of us in this moment, which is lack hope.
[00:03:20] Ben Hurst: And it’s, it’s hope that’s not based in, um. Uh, a fairy tale of like, what could happen. It’s, it’s a hope that is [00:03:30] rooted in a very, like, honest and accurate and in some ways, like quite brutal, um, uh, like analysis of the situation that we are in. But it feels so, uh. Necessary. It feels so true, um, [00:03:45] to what we’re going through Merrim.
[00:03:46] Ben Hurst: I don’t know if you want to respond, you don’t have to, but No,
[00:03:49] Maryam Pasha: I just
[00:03:49] Ben Hurst: might wanna ask a
[00:03:50] Maryam Pasha: action you Yeah.
Personal Grief and Iran Imagery
[00:03:51] Maryam Pasha: Um, I’ll say that I have done so many of these, I mean hundreds of these interviews with Ben and I don’t think I’ve like cried like this in any of them. So, Paul apologies. Um, I am Iranian and so I feel that grief that you speak about at the moment, and I think what has become so evident and what I hear from you.
[00:04:10] Maryam Pasha: Is that we have like lost our ability to see each [00:04:15] other’s humanity and, and that connection to the world around us. Like I think there’s nothing more symbolic that I’ve, that I’ve heard that, you know, um, [00:04:30] will have seen this in the news, but when they bombed the oil refineries in Iran, that then followed by days of, uh.
[00:04:40] Maryam Pasha: Oils basically raining from the sky, [00:04:45] followed by one foot of snow landing on Tehran and this kind of symbolism of how we’ve lost our connection to each other, you know, so deeply. And [00:05:00] the nature is like of like kind of coming in and trying to. Um, do what we seem to be failing at. You know, it just, it just felt to me very symbolic to see those things happen [00:05:15] in succession and.
[00:05:18] Maryam Pasha: Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s, yeah, it’s very moving, hence why I’m in this state.
[00:05:24] Paul Hawken: Yeah, I mean the, what you described in Tehran, you know, with the, the snow and the oil, I mean the [00:05:30] black and the white, so to speak, you know, um, the heat of. Oil not, you know, hasn’t been burned yet, but it was bombed in, that’s heat. And then, you know, the contrast to the frozen water, uh, um, is [00:05:45] beyond mythical.
[00:05:46] Paul Hawken: You know, it, it, it’s like. It’s indescribable for, I think, period, but for the people who live there and who then, by the way, the second other part of that is to [00:06:00] breathe enormously toxic air. I mean, not just smog, you know, when you bomb an oil refinery and oil tanks and so forth, that oil, uh, I, I is poison.[00:06:15]
[00:06:15] Paul Hawken: It, it is poison air. It’s not like all toxic or bad air. No, it’s poison.
Hope vs Courage
[00:06:19] Paul Hawken: And so people are being poisoned and, um, but you know, you said something about hope, Ben, and you know, people, I mean, maybe this will make you laugh, maybe not, but people ask me said, are you hopeful? I’m saying, no, not at all. And they go, they’re like, whoa, you’ve just gotten this whole thing about da da da da da and you’re not hopeful.
[00:06:39] Paul Hawken: I said, no, I’m not. And I said, my Buddhist background. Is that [00:06:45] teaches that hope is the pretty mask of fear now that you don’t hope unless you’re afraid. And I said, what we need now is courage. I don’t wanna hear about hope. I wanna hear about courage [00:07:00] and, uh, ’cause courage, courage. Courage, you know, is the heart.
[00:07:05] Paul Hawken: That’s the root of the word, you know? And so we need, that’s what we need, that’s what we need to be ourselves and so forth. And I don’t mean to [00:07:15] disabuse hope and all what that, all that, you know, that brings to people, you know, but I’m just saying is what we need is courage and uh, and, and to be fearless.
[00:07:25] Paul Hawken: And in who we are, what we do, and why we’re here. And so to me, [00:07:30] the environmental crisis, the climate crisis, all these things that are called crises and so forth, you know, what we’re experiencing and seeing and so forth, you know, is, you know, is, uh, brings us to life or not. Or [00:07:45] not, it’s your choice. Our choice, but it changes the whole fabric and quality of our life and what it means to be a human being right now.
Disillusion and Media Truth
[00:07:55] Paul Hawken: And, um, and you look at the, you know, the panorama of [00:08:00] things that are dangling out there in terms of trying to seduce this or get us to buy experience, do or go and you realize it’s just like. Silly trinkets, you know, and it doesn’t, those things aren’t important. They’re [00:08:15] not, and they’re harming, they’re harmful, and we harm ourselves when we’re attracted to them, or, you know, beguiled by them or think that somehow we’ll have a better life if we buy this or look this way and we won’t.
[00:08:28] Paul Hawken: And, and, uh, so it. [00:08:30] It’s a really interesting time of disillusion as well, which I think is actually, uh, um, what the activists and the, uh, you know, whether on the streets or whether in the schools or whether the, whatever they’re doing, what they’re doing is [00:08:45] really a, a thing of stripping away illusions.
[00:08:46] Paul Hawken: People don’t like their illusions stripped away. You know, ’cause they clinging to them, you know, it’s their identity, you know, and basically, you know, our, our media with all due respect, you know, our [00:09:00] television, the B, B, C, so forth, we’re creating false identities. Uh, and uh, because they’re not telling, they’re not being, uh, the b, BC never that I know of.
[00:09:12] Paul Hawken: You know, I read it. [00:09:15] Faithfully and so forth. It’s very factual. I don’t, I trust they’re fact checking, but they’re not telling us the truth. That doesn’t mean they’re lying or telling us untruth. No. [00:09:30] It’s just they’re not telling us the truth.
Closing and Credits
[00:09:32] Ben Hurst: Thanks for listening to this quickie.
[00:09:34] Maryam Pasha: This episode was created by our superstar podcast team at TEDxLondon.
[00:09:38] Maryam Pasha: Until next time,
[00:09:39] Ben Hurst: stay curious.[00:09:45]
[00:09:45] I.
