There was no one remotely like him, nor will
there ever be.

The following eulogy was delivered by Paul
Hawken at the memorial service honoring Ray Anderson, the founder of Interface,
held 11 August 2011 in Atlanta, and reprinted from Green Biz.

We, who were so fortunate to know Ray
Anderson, were in awe. He was many people: a father, executive, colleague,
brother, speaker, writer, leader, pioneer. He could walk into an audience and
leave listeners transfixed by a tenderness and introspection they never
expected or met.

Was he really a businessman? Yes. Was he a
conservative southern gentleman with that very refined Georgia drawl. Yes. Was
he successful? For sure.

He was also courageous. He stood up again and
again in front of big audiences and told them that pretty much everything they
knew, learned, and were doing was destroying the earth. He meant every word he
spoke and those words landed deeply in the hearts and minds of the hundreds of
thousands of people he addressed. There was no one remotely like him, nor will
there ever be. Read More

When we featured Ray Anderson in a Profile in
the last issue – which was emailed from Singapore on Sunday 7 August – we
obviously had no idea what was to befall the “greenest CEO of all
time”. He died in Atlanta, USA, on 8 August, succumbing to liver cancer’s
fatal blow. We dedicate this issue to the memory of Ray and in recognition of
his company’s achievements. Significantly, this issue also presents the first
100 Global Sustain Abilities Leaders list. He would have had a primary place on
that list had he survived a few more weeks. But in his place are many who have
followed his example, or at least attempted to tread in his footsteps. May his
Ray of sunshine continue to light the way and lighten the load.

“Reimagining
the World Was a Responsibility”

By Paul
Hawken

Published
August 11, 2011 in Green Biz

The
following eulogy was delivered at the memorial service honoring Ray Anderson,
held today in Atlanta, and reprinted with permission.

We, who
were so fortunate to know Ray Anderson, were in awe. He was many people: a
father, executive, colleague, brother, speaker, writer, leader, pioneer. But I
am not sure any of us quite figured him out. On the outside, Ray was
deceptively traditional, very quiet sometimes, an everyman, all-American,
down-home. He was so normal that he could say just about anything and get away
with it because people didn’t quite believe what they heard. He could walk into
an audience and leave listeners transfixed by a tenderness and introspection
they never expected or met. Business audiences in particular had no defenses
because they had no framework for Ray.

Was he
really a businessman? Yes. Was he a conservative southern gentleman with that
very refined Georgia drawl. Yes. Was he successful? For sure.

Well,
then where did these radical statements come from? Ironically, because people
could not connect the dots, he was extraordinarily credible. He was also
courageous. He stood up again and again in front of big audiences and told them
that pretty much everything they knew, learned, and were doing was destroying
the earth. He meant every word he spoke and those words landed deeply in the
hearts and minds of the hundreds of thousands of people he addressed. There was
no one remotely like him, nor will there ever be.

People
called Ray a dreamer. To be sure, he was, but he was also an engineer. He had
definitely seen the mountain, but he also dreamed in balance sheets, thermodynamics,
and resource flow theory. He dreamed a world yet to come because dreams of a
livable future are not coming from our politicians, bankers, and the media. For
Ray, reimagining the world was a responsibility, something owed to our
children’s children, a gift to a future that is begging for selflessness and
vision.

Proverbs
reminds us that though all good people die, goodness does not perish. The
metaphorical spear in his chest was not an injury but an awakening that led Ray
to give talks all over the world and in so doing he became a great teacher. He
used business as a means to educate and transform, but his life was not about
money or carpets. Ray’s life was about the sacred. His covenant was with God;
the marketplace is where he labored. He gently laid down that spear this Monday
morning but his teachings are a lineage that will live for centuries to come.

To we
who remain, Ray’s passing is startling, a summons, maybe even a provocation.
Before we die, may we know that to be alive is astounding, inconceivably
precious, a privilege beyond reckoning. When we know and cherish this
existence, the rest of our life is a shimmering field of light because we have
come to recognize one unalterable truth—that we are one with all living
entities and beings, and that we are never alone. The consciousness of
interdependence and connectedness, and its attendant responsibility to do no
harm, was Ray’s epiphany.

Seventeen
years ago he had a realization. At that time, Ray came home. He rediscovered a
sacred earth with all its complexity, beauty and mystery, free from the
constraints of this or that ideology, free from narrow-minded thinking, and he
was freed to reimagine the relationship between humanity and nature with
Interface as the model. No longer were there human systems and ecosystems. They
were one system and he understood that the laws of physics and biology
prevailed. He believed in Emerson’s words, that there is an innate morality in
the laws of nature: I have confidence in laws of morals as of botany. I have
planted maize in my field every June for seventeen years and I never knew it to
come up strychnine. My parsley, beet, turnip … acorn, are as sure. I believe
that justice produces justice, and injustice injustice. Ultimately, Ray’s work
was not about making a sustainable business, it was about justice, ethics, and
honoring creation. Zero waste was the path to 100% respect for living beings.

Like
Ray, when we become literate in the sweet treasures of creation, there arises a
sense of awe, wonder, and gratitude for one’s very existence and the swirl of
living beings around us. Do you remember the videos of the Chilean miners
coming out of the elevator shaft one-by-one from the San Jose mine in Copiapo,
Chile last October? The miners arose from a half a mile below the earth after
being trapped for 69 days, and when they emerged they danced, they sang, they
kissed the earth, they kissed their wives, kissed their mistresses—sometimes
both—and they were ecstatic. They knew what they had nearly lost: the sun and
the moon and the stars, cool air made sweet by plants and trees, the succulent
foods that come from the soil, the sound of a child’s voice; they were
rapturous and joyful and deeply grateful. Although it was a real event, the San
Jose miners are metaphors for being reborn in this life to what we overlook and
take for granted. Ray woke up and saw what we will lose unless we change.

We
don’t know exactly what happened to Ray in 1994. Yes, he read a book. But
something remarkable was already there within his being that came to life. What
we do know is that from that point seventeen years ago, Ray could see. He saw
benevolence and beauty, the tightly knit longleaf pine forests, the undulant
riverine corridors of the Chattahoochee, the tantalizing pure light of life
reflected on bracts and fronds, the drifting silvery spider silk that takes
tiny passengers to new forests. Once your eyes open to the magnificence of
creation, you cannot unsee.

Ray
never looked back. He did not ponder long. He went to work. He was not
satisfied by being able to see, he was destined to do one thing only, and that
is serve life itself, for what else is there to do once you see how
phenomenally we are stitched together by the living world?

He did
not see nature as an abstraction to be worshiped but as the matrix of
reformation, the source of goodness, the architecture of our spirit, the
template of a future delineated by people who know that business has no purpose
lest it serve and honor all of life, that our lives rely upon the kindness of
strangers and the damp forest floor and spirited grasses and on you, his
family, friends and fiercest admirers who loved this man. He loved us all.

His
life is a testament to that love. He passed on Monday morning but it is up to
us as to whether he will die. Actually, that is not even a question. He will
live. His physical presence has vanished into a mystery we will all follow but
never fully understand. His dream, his yearning for commerce that regenerates
life and does no harm, his intention to re-conceive what it means to be a
manufacturer, to bring industry and biology together into one entity, burned in
him, a flame that never seared or ceased, and it will live on in his company
and thousands more.

Ray has
now traveled to a new forest. We who gather know that the greatest man of
industrial ecology, the businessman who defined and showed us how commerce will
be for centuries to come if we are to continue our life here on earth, was our
friend, patron, and teacher, and we are the most blessed people in the world
for having known him.

Paul
Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, and author. His work includes
starting ecological businesses, writing about the impact of commerce on living
systems, and consulting with heads of state and CEOs on economic development,
industrial ecology, and environmental policy.

Source:
www.greenbiz.com