Pass it to the Left

by Tracy Giesz-Ramsay

Given the opportunity to hear environmentalist and author Paul Hawken speak, one would be hard pressed to leave without feeling equally hopeful and inspired about the future of humanity. Hawken is the author of “Blessed Unrest, How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming” and although a gentle speaker, his words vivaciously seize your attention and don’t let it go as he takes you on a phonetic tour through the histories of true grassroots movements, starting from the abolitionists in the 1700’s leading up to today’s smaller-scale, non-governmental organizations that are working for environmental and social justice. Hawken is the founder of wiserearth.org, a database of these NGOs that aims to present a platform of necessary issues that they collectively agree must be addressed in order to sustain and save our planet.

For Hawken, this historical journey and subsequent documentation began on his first book tour when people from non-profits kept handing him their organization’s business cards. Never getting rid of them, he found himself one day with literally thousands from all types of environmental and social justice organizations around the world. This led him to the realization that the social justice and human rights movements were really just different expressions of one movement that included the environmental movement.

He found there are currently around 2 million organizations with 100-200 million people working every single day towards preserving, and restoring some semblance of grace and justice to this world with what they do in their daily activity, affecting billions of people. As he states, it’s a massive network composed of: students, peasant workers, tribal villagers, doctors, engineers, mediators, peace makers, mothers, activists, immigrants, children, refugees, tree planters, poets, farmers, biologists, Muslims, Christians and Buddhists. It includes every culture, every tribe, and every language in the world today. And the notable thing is that this movement has no leader. We’re so accustomed to a movement or a revolution having a singular, often charismatic leader, and while there are certainly spokespeople all over the world, there is no defined leader.

What also distinguishes this movement from anything else that we’ve ever seen, is that it is not ideological. It is a movement of ideas and solutions; a movement of both trying to stop the harm and resist what’s going on by providing new ways of imagining this relationship between the two most complex systems there are, which are human culture and the earth’s living ecosystems.

Hawkens states that if you look back at the 19th century, you’ll see the birth of ideologies and isms. And then taking a look at the 20th century, you’ll see total war of these ideologies; one hundred and twenty million people died while the advocates of each ideology battled one another trying to figure out who was right.

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