[Sosfbay-discuss] BLESSED UNREST: A Moment of Inspiration

[JamBoi]

Well worth reading!!! Starts slowly (you could safely
skip on down a number of paragraphs), but really comes
to an extremely important point that I entirely agree
with!  Help is on the way!

The Green way will overcome!

Drew
____________________

This was sent to Denise's list by Linda Piera-Avila. 
I finally got around to reading it....and just in time
for the GA, already darkened by hovering storm clouds.
 

Genevieve Marcus

HAWKEN - excerpt from BLESSED UNREST:

I HAVE GIVEN NEARLY ONE THOUSAND TALKS ABOUT the
environment in the past fifteen years, and after every
speech a smaller crowd gathered to talk, ask
questions, and exchange business cards. The people
offering their cards were working on the most salient
issues of our day: climate change, poverty,
deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation,
human rights, and more. They were from the nonprofit
and nongovernmental world, also known as civil
society. They looked after rivers and bays, educated
consumers about sustainable agriculture, retrofitted
houses with solar panels, lobbied state legislatures
about pollution, fought against corporate-weighted
trade policies, worked to green inner cities, or
taught children about the environment. Quite simply,
they were trying to safeguard nature and ensure
justice.

After being on the road for a week or two, I would
return with a couple hundred cards stuffed into
various pockets. I would lay them out on the table in
my kitchen, read the names, look at the logos,
envisage the missions, and marvel at what groups do on
behalf of others. Later, I would put them into drawers
or paper bags, keepsakes of the journey. I couldn't
throw them away.

Over the years the cards mounted into the thousands,
and whenever I glanced at the bags in my closet, I
kept coming back to one question: did anyone know how
many groups there were? At first, this was a matter of
curiosity, but it slowly grew into a hunch that
something larger was afoot, a significant social
movement that was eluding the radar of mainstream
culture.

I began to count. I looked at government records for
different countries and, using various methods to
approximate the number of environmental and social
justice groups from tax census data, I initially
estimated that there were thirty thousand
environmental organizations strung around the globe;
when I added social justice and indigenous
organizations, the number exceeded one hundred
thousand. I then researched past social movements to
see if there were any equal in scale and scope, but I
couldn't find anything. The more I probed, the more I
unearthed, and the numbers continued to climb. In
trying to pick up a stone, I found the exposed tip of
a geological formation. I discovered lists, indexes,
and small databases specific to certain sectors or
geographic areas, but no set of data came close to
describing the movement's breadth. Extrapolating from
the records being accessed, I realized that the
initial estimate of a hundred thousand organizations
was off by at least a factor of ten. I now believe
there are over one million organizations working
toward ecological sustainability and social justice.
Maybe two.

By conventional definition, this is not a movement.
Movements have leaders and ideologies. You join
movements, study tracts, and identify yourself with a
group. You read the biography of the founder(s) or
listen to them perorate on tape or in person.
Movements have followers, but this movement doesn't
work that way. It is dispersed, inchoate, and fiercely
independent. There is no manifesto or doctrine, no
authority to check with.

I sought a name for it, but there isn't one.

Historically, social movements have arisen primarily
because of injustice, inequalities, and corruption.
Those woes remain legion, but a new condition exists
that has no precedent: the planet has a
life-threatening disease that is marked by massive
ecological degradation and rapid climate change. It
crossed my mind that perhaps I was seeing something
organic, if not biologic. Rather than a movement in
the conventional sense, is it a collective response to
threat? Is it splintered for reasons that are innate
to its purpose? Or is it simply disorganized? More
questions followed. How does it function? How fast is
it growing? How is it connected? Why is it largely
ignored?

After spending years researching this phenomenon,
including creating with my colleagues a global
database of these organizations, I have come to these
conclusions: this is the largest social movement in
all of history, no one knows its scope, and how it
functions is more mysterious than what meets the eye.

What does meet the eye is compelling: tens of millions
of ordinary and not-so-ordinary people willing to
confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in
order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and
beauty to this world.

The movement can't be divided because it is
atomized-small pieces loosely joined. It forms,
gathers, and dissipates quickly. Many inside and out
dismiss it as powerless, but it has been known to
bring down governments, companies, and leaders through
witnessing, informing, and massing.

The movement has three basic roots: the environmental
and social justice movements, and indigenous cultures'
resistance to globalization-all of which are
intertwining. It arises spontaneously from different
economic sectors, cultures, regions, and cohorts,
resulting in a global, classless, diverse, and
embedded movement, spreading worldwide without
exception. In a world grown too complex for
constrictive ideologies, the very word movement may be
too small, for it is the largest coming together of
citizens in history.

There are research institutes, community development
agencies, village- and citizen-based organizations,
corporations, networks, faith-based groups, trusts,
and foundations. They defend against corrupt politics
and climate change, corporate predation and the death
of the oceans, governmental indifference and pandemic
poverty, industrial forestry and farming, depletion of
soil and water.

Describing the breadth of the movement is like trying
to hold the ocean in your hand. It is that large. When
a part rises above the waterline, the iceberg beneath
usually remains unseen. When Wangari Maathai won the
Nobel Peace Prize, the wire service stories didn't
mention the network of six thousand different women's
groups in Africa planting trees. When we hear about a
chemical spill in a river, it is never mentioned that
more than four thousand organizations in North America
have adopted a river, creek, or stream. We read that
organic agriculture is the fastest-growing sector of
farming in America, Japan, Mexico, and Europe, but no
connection is made to the more than three thousand
organizations that educate farmers, customers, and
legislators about sustainable agriculture.

This is the first time in history that a large social
movement is not bound together by an ???ism.??? What
binds it together is ideas, not ideologies. This
unnamed movement's big contribution is the absence of
one big idea; in its stead it offers thousands of
practical and useful ideas. In place of isms are
processes, concerns, and compassion. The movement
demonstrates a pliable, resonant, and generous side of
humanity.

And it is impossible to pin down. Generalities are
largely inaccurate. It is nonviolent, and grassroots;
it has no bombs, armies, or helicopters. A charismatic
male vertebrate is not in charge. The movement does
not agree on everything nor will it ever, because that
would be an ideology. But it shares a basic set of
fundamental understandings about the Earth, how it
functions, and the necessity of fairness and equity
for all people partaking of the planet's life-giving
systems.

The promise of this unnamed movement is to offer
solutions to what appear to be insoluble dilemmas:
poverty, global climate change, terrorism, ecological
degradation, polarization of income, loss of culture.
It is not burdened with a syndrome of trying to save
the world; it is trying to remake the world.

THERE IS FIERCENESS HERE. There is no other
explanation for the raw courage and heart seen over
and again in the people who march, speak, create,
resist, and build. It is the fierceness of what it
means to know we are human and want to survive.

This movement is relentless and unafraid. It cannot be
mollified, pacified, or suppressed. There can be no
Berlin Wall moment, no treaty-signing, no morning to
awaken when the superpowers agree to stand down. The
movement will continue to take myriad forms. It will
not rest. There will be no Marx, Alexander, or
Kennedy. No book can explain it, no person can
represent it, no words can encompass it, because the
movement is the breathing, sentient testament of the
living world.

And I believe it will prevail. I don't mean defeat,
conquer, or cause harm to someone else. And I don't
tender the claim in an oracular sense. I mean the
thinking that informs the movement's goal-to create a
just society conducive to life on Earth-will reign. It
will soon suffuse and permeate most institutions. But
before then, it will change a sufficient number of
people so as to begin the reversal of centuries of
frenzied self-destruction.

Inspiration is not garnered from litanies of what is
flawed; it resides in humanity's willingness to
restore, redress, reform, recover, reimagine, and
reconsider. Healing the wounds of the Earth and its
people does not require saintliness or a political
party. It is not a liberal or conservative activity.
It is a sacred act.

Learn more at paulhawken.com and at wiserearth.org
**********************

___________________

JamBoi: Jammy, The Sacred Cow Slayer
The Green Parties' #1 Blogger
http://dailyJam.blogspot.com

"To the brave belong all things"
Celt's invading Etrusca reply to nervous Romans around 400BC

"Live humbly, laugh often and love unconditionally" (anon)


       
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