Paul Hawken

I got to hear Paul Hawken speak when he came to Providence and spoke at RISD years ago. I convinced a bunch of friends to come along. We were not disappointed. It was a great day.

It is axiomatic that we are at a threshold in human existence, a fundamental change in understanding about our relationship to nature and each other. We are moving from a world created by privilege to a world created by community. The current thrust of history is too supple to be labeled, but global themes are emerging in response to cascading ecological crises and human suffering. These ideas include the need for radical social change, the reinvention of market-based economics, the empowerment of women, activism on all levels, and the need for localized economic control. There are insistent calls for autonomy, appeals for a new resource ethic based on the tradition of the commons, demands for the reinstatement of cultural primacy over corporate hegemony, and a rising demand for radical transparency in politics and corporate decision making. It has been said that environmentalism failed as a movement, or worse yet, died. It is the other way around. Everyone on earth will be an environmentalist in the not too distant future, driven there by necessity and experience.
- Paul Hawkin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Hawken

http://www.paulhawken.com/

A leading environmentalist and social activist's examination of the worldwide movement for social and environmental change

Paul Hawken has spent over a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing fr om the bottom up, in every city, town, and culture. and is emerging to be an extraordinary and creative expression of people's needs worldwide.

Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of the movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and hidden history, which date back many centuries. A culmination of Hawken's many years of leadership in the environmental and social justice fields, it will inspire and delight any and all who despair of the world's fate, and its conclusions will surprise even those within the movement itself. Fundamentally, it is a description of humanity's collective genius, and the unstoppable movement to reimagine our relationship to the environment and one another.

Blessed Unrest
How the Largest Movement In the World Came Into Being
and No One Saw it Coming
292 pages, Hardcover, Viking Press New York

Published on Earth Day - 03.20.2007

"This is first full account of the real news of our time, and it's exactly the opposite of the official account. The movers and shakers on our planet aren't the billionaires and the generals--they are the incredible numbers of people around the world filled with love for neighbor and for the earth who are resisting, remaking, restoring, renewing, revitalizing. This powerful and lovely book is their story - our story - and it's high time someone's told it. Nothing you read for years to come will fill you with more hope and more determination."

-Bill McKibben

"On one side the four horsemen of the apocalypse; on the other a vast and nameless uprising of peoples and organizations fighting for justice, places, communities, diversity, and health - the planetary immune system. Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest is not just a good book, it is a necessary book, wise, eloquent, perceptive, sober, and timely but above all, hopeful. A landmark!"

-David Orr