Editor's note: Green Options is pleased to welcome Robin Schidlowski to the writing team. Robin is a feature writer and co-editor for the Urban Alliance for Sustainability's newsletter, and lives in the Bay Area. She'll be covering happenings in that part of the world, as well as writing about urban and general sustainability, and "zero waste."
Paul Hawken spoke in San Francisco last Friday on the final stop of his book tour, as a part of the Long Now Foundation seminar series. In his new book, Blessed Unrest, Hawken describes the global movement, which he declines to give a name, toward environmental and social justice. In a 60 minute speech and Q&A session, Hawken proffered an explanation for what is transpiring.
Hawken told a story of how Ralph Waldo Emerson was inspired by Antoine and Bernard Jussieu in Paris and subsequently wrote Nature. He then told how a college-aged Henry David Thoreau was inspired by Emerson and wrote Civil Disobedience
Hawken observed that the common thread between the literally millions of organizations in the movement is that, although they all have different ways of expressing their goals, none have contradictory values. They are all, in unique ways, exhibiting moral opposition to an unjust state. He quoted Thoreau: "If the government is unjust, the just man is in jail." Hawken described an atomized, bottom-up collection of organizations working to put down the injustice that permeates every institution, everywhere. He told of how the movement, like the immune system, categorically identifies and destroys disease (or the disease destroys it).