Paul Hawken sees hope in our blessed unrest
Toolbox
Daniel Hecht - Published: November 20, 2007
According to Paul Hawken, there's a global movement, consisting of thousands of organizations and millions of people, working to save the environment and create just societies. It's not a new movement, but it is increasingly energized, and it's our best hope to save the world.
Perhaps America's most influential environmentalist, Hawken is a successful entrepreneur and founder of many organizations and businesses such as Smith & Hawken; he's a journalist and the author of seven books.
His most recent, Blessed Unrest, should be seen as a foundation document for the global movement he describes, essential reading for anyone concerned for the future.
The book begins with a concise history of the environmental and social justice movements. Conservation was America's first "environmental" activism, with Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir, and others working to save America's irreplaceable natural wonders and creating our first national parks.
But the environment doesn't just abide in majestic places like Yosemite. In 1962, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring exposed the damage being done to natural systems everywhere – and to the people who ate, drank, and breathed industrial and agricultural pollutants. Its publication was the first shot of a still-raging war between environmental and corporate interests, and began the next phase of environmentalism. Carson and her successors defended public health and the environmental commons; companies defended what they saw as the basic right to make a profit.
To sketch the clash of corporate rights and human rights, Hawken goes back to the beginning of the industrial revolution and the displacement of farmers and craftspeople by machines. The often-ridiculed Luddite uprising of 1811 was actually a worker's rights movement, skilled weavers protesting both their unemployment and the shoddy quality of machine-made textiles. Almost two centuries later, the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India, exemplified the destructive potential of narrowly profit-obsessed corporate practices.
Environmental and social justice concerns converge most directly in the plight of indigenous peoples. Societies that are materially and spiritually linked with natural ecosystems are injured when their lands are. The examples of cultural and ecological devastation by lumbering, mining, and agribusiness are many and monstrous.
Hawken's criticism of modern corporate theory and practice is fierce, but he is not echoing some tired neo-Marxist ideology. A successful capitalist, he's a believer in market-based solutions. But corporate misdeeds have become ever more egregious, as when pharmaceutical companies draw blood from indigenous peoples and then obtain exclusive-use patents on their disease-resistant genes.
And the World Trade Organization and World Bank only aid and abet the worst such practices. The World Bank provides crucial capital for development, but only for a specific, arguably destructive, type. By requiring privatization of water supply as a precondition for loans, for example, the Bank has caused consumer costs for this necessity to skyrocket in several countries.
Is this just, fair, or even laissez-faire? Being a Vermonter, I'd say, "Come for my genes, Jack, and you'll be the one who 'donates' the blood." Hawken's rebukes are not at all so inflammatory. "Many believe," he concludes mildly, "that the world can do better after 300 years than retrace the Hobbesian dehumanization of the first Industrial Age."
It's simply that "The challenge of civilization has changed, and markets must change accordingly." And the agent of change will be the loose, global community of NGOs dedicated to remedying specific wrongs and creating particular goodnesses. Just as antibodies within our bloodstreams protect our bodies against disease, "The movement is that part of humanity which has assumed the task of protecting and saving itself."
These millions of "social entrepreneurs" measure success not by cash profit but by social profit. The most effective are those which "solve for pattern" – that is, find solutions that address multiple problems simultaneously. In aggregate, Hawken believes the movement emulates many key characteristics of life itself as it builds from the bottom up, assembles into chains, and optimizes rather than maximizes.
To track the activities of this growing groundswell, Hawken's Natural Capital Institute has developed a taxonomy – a naming and ordering scheme – for types of NGOs, and is cataloguing them all through its WISER (World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility) initiative. Blessed Unrest ends with an invaluable appendix that sets forth WISER's activity categories as well as the number of each type of organization currently in the database.
Hawken's prose is elegant, crafted to provoke thought and to inspire. In the end, he considers the effort to be a spiritual one, a matter of acting upon the basic values expressed by all great religions.
The combined quest for human justice, the meeting of sheer human need, and the necessity of environmental preservation may provide us, at last, with the real ordering principles of the good society we all yearn for. There's hope here. As Hawken says, "While so much is going wrong, so much is going right."
You can visit the incredible WISER database at www.wiserearth.org.
Daniel Hecht is a novelist and executive director of Vermont Environmental Consortium. For more information about any Green Grapevine topic, contact vec@norwich.edu.
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