Book review: Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken

It's fitting to be posting this review on the eve of Thanksgiving
because the book portrays many things I am thankful for.
The review is dedicated to my friend Carol Thomas
whose life is truly one of blessed unrest.*

Blessed Unrest - How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice and Beauty to the World. Paul Hawken. Penguin Books (paperback) 2008.

Blessed Unrest website (The website, hardcover book and linked video of a speech by Paul Hawken at the 2006 Bioneers conference have a different subtitle than the paperback edition reviewed here.)
http://www.blessedunrest.com/

WiserEarth website – interactive database of 110,000+ NGOs
http://www.wiserearth.org/

Blessed Unrest originated in a motley assortment of business cards collected by Paul Hawken during hundreds of speaking engagements over the course of 15 years. As a businessman, environmentalist, author, and founder and executive director of the Natural Capital Institute, Hawken is a widely respected spokesperson for socially and environmentally responsible business. After his speeches, small groups would gather to ask questions, share their own insights and experiences – and exchange business cards. In the course of many years and many miles and many, many business cards, Hawken realized that truly there was a movement of unrecognized proportions functioning under the radar screen of general consciousness, unacknowledged by the mainstream media except in isolated reporting on this or that group, this or that issue; a movement just beginning to become conscious of itself, to link up kindred efforts through networking and ever-shifting alliances.

At the Natural Capital Institute Hawken brought together a team of researchers to create a digital database of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and CBOs (community-based organizations) in an attempt to scope out the nature and extent of this civil society movement. Now online with search capabilities on a wide array of categories and keywords, built-in networking and user-enabled interaction similar to Wikipedia, the database WiserEarth contains at this time over 110,000 organizations and thousands of participating individuals. Hawken considers WiserEarth to be the tip of a much greater iceberg.

Blessed Unrest the book is also a result of that research, an attempt not to catalog, but to characterize and place this movement in context. Hawken first defines three broad sectors of activity: social justice, environmentalism, and indigenous culture. (A very large Appendix defines dozens of subcategories.) Throughout the book Hawken draws on images and metaphors of organic life. The movement is an amalgam of cell-like entities, each with a unique function, each seeking to link its efforts to a larger purpose. The movement evolves, adapts, filling in niches of need and opportunity. The movement is an immune system for the planet, complex, responsive, vigilant and protective of earth and its inhabitants in the face of the corporate global juggernaut marauding across the world without accountability, without any ethic except maximizing profit.

Hawken is a businessman. He is not anti-business, but he staunchly opposes corporate recklessness and exploitation, whether of people or the environment, and applauds those who demand - and practice - corporate responsibility and respect for human and ecological diversity and well-being. If organic life is a metaphor for the NGO movement, it also provides a model for how to do business. Drawing on several threads in ecosystem research, in the final chapter “Restoration” Hawken identifies three core principles that mimic natural ecosystems and which, practiced together, can generate clean, green eco-industrial systems: 1) “cradle to cradle” – recycling end products into new production rather than using up virgin resources; 2) “waste is food” – using the waste and byproducts from one process as source material for another process; 3) operating on current solar income.

Blessed Unrest nourishes hope, encourages connection and shines a well-deserved light on the intertwined movements for social justice, environmental sustainability, and cultural diversity. It challenges ideological rigidity with its picture of grassroots self-organizing activity. Paraphrasing an email he received from Wolfgang Sachs, Hawken says: “Some people think the movement is defined primarily by what it is against, but the language of the movement is first and foremost about keeping the conversation going, because ideas that inform it never end: growth without inequality, wealth without plunder, work without exploitation, a future without fear.”

I’ve been an activist off and on since the late 1960s. I’ve been involved in my share of struggling non-profits, small collectives and committees from PTA bake sales to Car-Free Day and 350.org events. I’ve seen – and sometimes been a part of - more factional discord and broken alliances than is comfortable to recollect. Sometimes I get tired of a tendency toward dogmatism on one hand or lack of coherent purpose on the other; sometimes I get depressed by the scale of the problems we face or terrified by what the future may portend; sometimes I get lazy or overwhelmed by life’s circumstances and just don’t do much. As Hawken puts it, “..I am not questioning whether the human condition permeates the movement. It does so, most surely. Clay feet march in all protests.”

But sometimes – at a meeting or a conference or a march or a rally – I look around and see what else Paul Hawken sees: all kinds of people, young and old, men and women, kids and babies, from a myriad of racial and ethnic groups and walks of life. Turtles and Teamsters united at the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle (at which thousands of people participated peacefully). Banners for all kinds of causes and two little girls with a handmade sign “George you are soooooooo embarrassing us” at a peace march in DC. Scientists, writers, politicians and other citizens gathered on Boston Common to express concern about climate change. I hear people speaking out, in a multitude of accents, with polished eloquence and with heartfelt sincerity. I meet urban farmers who teach women from a homeless shelter and inner city kids to grow healthy food on remediated vacant lots; advocates for sustainable transportation who tirelessly attend hearings and planning meetings; members of community land trusts that provide affordable housing; and conservation land trusts that preserve ecosystems and habitats acre by acre, stream by stream.

These moments are magic, not in any supernatural sense, but for the connection with the deep and vibrant harmony this movement embodies. There is a fundamental truth in the currently popular slogan: “This is what democracy looks like.” In his introduction to the book’s Appendix Hawken says: “It is axiomatic that we are at a threshold in human existence, a fundamental change in our relationship to nature and each other. We are moving from a world created by privilege to a world created by community…. The world is a system, and it will soon be a very different world, driven by millions of communities who believe that democracy and restoration are grassroots movements that connect us to values that we hold in common.”

I read this book during the final days of the 2008 presidential campaign. I couldn’t help but think that there is something very fitting and resonant in the fact that Barack Obama cut his political teeth as a community organizer in the blessed unrest of the movement for social justice. The administration’s progress has not been smooth. President Obama inherited many intractable problems. His organizer’s instinct to reach across partisan divides has been rebuffed and counter-movements have erupted. This too is what democracy looks like – a clash and clamor of ideas and interests. In this climate of crisis and shifting political winds it is all the more important to keep faith with those who share our values and our visions and who strive and struggle to build that different world created by community rather than privilege.

*In this spirit I lovingly dedicate this review to Carol Thomas whose life is truly one of blessed unrest. I just learned that Carol will receive the Quiet Courage Award on Sunday 11/29/2009 from the Gainesville, FL, Rosa Parks Quiet Courage Committee. This award is richly deserved although I don’t really think of Carol as quiet. Her life has been a whirlwind of meetings and rallies and picket lines, a houseful of family and friends, mixed with some jail time for non-violent resistance to injustice. This award comes 40 years after Carol left Gainesville because of threats against her life for her civil rights activities. Now retired she is back in Florida, living near Gainesville and still going strong at 75 years old. In between Carol lived in Louisville, KY, and Boston, MA. I knew her in both cities. I could never begin to keep up with her energy or match her unflagging commitment, but she is one of those people with whom I must keep faith to keep my soul intact.

© Laurie Dougherty 2009

http://www.gainesville.com/article/20091123/ARTICLES/911231011

Meeting Hansen & Gore (briefly, but still a thrill)

Now that you mention it - after having brunch with my son and doing a few errands (by bike on a beautiful but too warm for November autumn day), I met Jim Hansen. Briefly, but still. That email Tenney sent yesterday mentioned that he would be at two events in Boston, and I went to one of them Sunday afternoon and hope to go to the other one Monday morning before going to work.

Hansen was invited to Boston by a group of students who are camping out on their campuses during the week to demand that Massachusetts take steps to be 100% on renewable energy by 2020. On Sunday nights many of these students are camping out on Boston Common in front of the Massachusetts State House and taking their message to the state legislature on Monday mornings. They invited Jim Hansen to join them this weekend, and on Monday the Global Warming Committee of the MA Senate will have a hearing that Hansen will speak at. He said he is going to sleep out with the students, but I hope not. He is still recovering from surgery (read Tenney's email about this). He looked pale but very happy to be among these dedicated young people. The kids tossed an earth ball through the crowd and every time it came his way Hansen would give it a good swat with a big smile.

http://www.theleadershipcampaign.org/

Hansen spoke to the group about how we are approaching climate tipping points, about the accelerating loss of ice mass in Greenland and Antarctica, about the increasing accuracy of paleontological climate research, about species being pushed to extinction as habitats change, about the potential loss of color in the autumn leaves - which have been just stunning this year in New England.

He also talked about putting a price on carbon - his tax and rebate proposal. I still don't agree with his hostility to cap and trade, and I think any attempt to impose a carbon tax would face the same onslaught in Congress from the fossil fuel industry, provide innumerable opportunities for loopholes, and as for simplicity and transparency - have you spent any quality time with the US tax code lately? He said he was attracted to the idea that Massachusetts could lead the country in energy conversion because it's a progressive state and the place where the American Revolution started. (The logo of the student group is a Minuteman with a wind turbine.) Ironically, Massachusetts and several other states in the Northeast have taken leadership in forming the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the first US-based cap and trade system.

Whatever disagreements I have about cap and trade vs. tax, Jim Hansen is a hero. I was thrilled to be able to thank him for his work.

On Saturday, as I mentioned before somewhere in this barrage of messages, I heard Al Gore speak and got a signed copy of his new book. Next weekend, Bill McKibben will be speaking at a conference I plan to attend and also spending time with the students on Boston Common.

Gore and Hansen are two very different men, but both are so committed and so willing to express a clear and compelling message about climate change, so dedicated to teaching and to learning. These were not Hollywood-style events. Gore spoke in a middling size church across the street from Harvard Yard that hosts many lectures and meetings and a soup kitchen in the basement; the event was sponsored by a venerable - and still independent - Harvard Square bookstore that Gore, speaking as a Harvard grad, said is one of his favorites - and is one of my favorites too since high school days. On Boston Common where Hansen spoke, a softball game was going on at the far side of the park, homeless people were staking out their benches for the night, a clatch of dog walkers hung out while their dogs played off leash in a patch of grass. A group of tourists gathered around their guide for a mini history lesson, people passed by going about their business. Countless rallies and festivals have been held on these grounds.

I'm getting off on a tangent, but what I'm trying to express is that there is something about the very ordinariness of these settings and the way these men are caught up, not in themselves, but in the realities they are seeking to understand and seeking to communicate that is very compelling and so not the way they are portrayed by the denier cabal.

I feel a deep need to keep faith with people like Al Gore, Jim Hansen, Bill McKibben and so many people I know who just don't quit.

------Laurie