Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken

Memorable quotes from the book Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken. In this important work he describes the dynamic of organizations from around the world working toward the common goal of social justice and sustainable practices in an effort to save the planet from destruction.

…you cannot describe possibilities for the future unless the present problem is accurately defined. (Page 1)

A Native American taught me that the division between ecology and human rights was an artificial one, that the environmental and social justice movements addressed two sides of a single larger dilemma. (Page 2)

The way we harm the earth affects all people, and how we treat one another is reflected in how we treat the earth. (Page 2)

Rather than a movement in the conventional sense, could it be an instinctive, collective response to threat? (Page 3)

If you look at the science that describes what is happening on earth today and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t have the correct data. If you meet people in this unnamed movement and aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a heart. (Page 4)

What I see are ordinary and some-not so-ordinary individuals willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in an attempt to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. (Page 4)

The movement can’t be divided because it is so atomized – a collection of small pieces, loosely joined.  It forms, dissipates, and then regathers quickly, without central leadership, command, or control.  Rather than seeking dominance, this unnamed movement strives to disperse concentrations of power.  It has been capable of bringing down governments, companies, and leaders through witnessing, informing, and massing.  The quickening of the movement in recent years has come about through information technologies becoming increasingly accessible and affordable to people everywhere.  Its clout resides in its ideas, not in force. (Page 12)

The movement has three basic roots: environmental activism, social justice initiatives, and indigenous cultures’ resistance to globalization, all of which have become intertwined. (Page 12)

The movement for equity and environmental sustainability comes as global conditions are changing dramatically and becoming more demanding.  We are the first generation to live on earth to witness a doubling of population in our lifetime. (Page 13)

These timeless ways of being human are threatened by global forces that do not consider people’s deepest longings. (Page 15)

For most people, to understand something new requires a cognitive antecedent. (Page 15)

What we already know frames what we see, and what we see frames what we understand. (Page 15)

…ideas question and liberate, while ideologies justify and dictate. (Page 16)

Ecologists and biologists know that systems achieve stability and health through diversity, not uniformity.  Ideologues take the opposite view. (Page 16)

Neoconservatives believe that ordinary citizens cannot be entrusted with the reins of power, that a small group of superior individuals should rule over the majority of inferiors, using religion and the perpetual threat of war to create a Potemkin village of populism. (Page 17)

Supporters of corporate-led globalization want to impose their market-based rules and precepts on the entire planet, regardless of place, history, or culture, in the belief that economic growth is an unalloyed good, and that it is best accomplished with the minimization or elimination of interference from government. (Page 17)

Food has always been at the heart of cultural history.  The loss of its traditional foods is just as devastating to a culture as the loss of its language. (Page 156)

We can engage in the virtual world of iPod music and TV drama, but there is no virtual world of taste.  It is in our mouth, and every day our mouth connects us to place. (Page 156)

The twentieth century saw the greatest rate of destruction to the environment in all recorded history.  It was also the bloodiest century in history.  Eighty million were slaughtered from the beginning of the century through World War II; since then, more than 23 million people (mostly civilians) have been killed in more than 149 wars. (Pages 17 & 18)

For every dollar spent on U.N. peacekeeping, $2,000 is expended for war-making by member nations. Four of the five members of the U.N. Security Council, which has veto power over all U.N. resolutions, are the top weapons dealers in the world: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Russia. (Page 18)

Fixing the intractable problems besetting the world will require a convergence of social intelligence and natural science, two qualities traditional politics lack. (Page 20)

The world seems to be looking for the big solution, which is itself part of the problem, since the most effective solutions are both local and systemic. (Page 20)

Although the movement may appear inchoate or naively ambitious, its underlying structure and communication techniques can, at times, create a collective social response that can challenge any institution in the world. (Page 20)

What its members do share is a basic set of fundamental understandings about the earth, how it functions, and the necessity of fairness and equity for all people dependent on the planet’s life-giving systems. (Page 21)

Slaves, serfs, and the poor are the forests, soils, and oceans of society; each constitutes surplus value that has been exploited repeatedly by those in power, whether governments or multinational corporations. (Page 22)

For indigenous people, in the time that defines one’s life, the relationship one has to the earth is the constant and true gauge that determines the integrity of one’s culture, the meaning of one’s existence, and the peacefulness of one’s heart. (page 22)

The question that continues to reverberate to this day is whether human rights trump the rights of business, or vice versa, a conflict that has been ongoing for more than three hundred years. (Page 59)

From an economic viewpoint, what citizens have been trying to do for two hundred years is to force business to pay full freight, to internalize their costs to society instead of externalizing them onto a river, a town, a single patient, or a whole generation. (Page 62)

When events slip beyond the horizon of media coverage, they disappear from public discourse: abuse of power thrives in silence, shrinks in the light. (Page 62)

Life is the most fundamental human right, and all of the movements with the movement are dedicated to creating the conditions for life, conditions that include livelihood, food, security, peace, a stable environment, and freedom from external tyranny. (Page 68)

Language is nothing less than the living expression of a culture, part of what he (Wade Davis) call an ethnosphere, "the sum total of all the thoughts, dreams, ideals, myths, intuitions, and inspirations brought into being by the imagination since the dawn of consciousness." (Page 94)

Wade David sees languages the way a biologist sees species diversity: “Distinct cultures represent unique visions of life itself, morally inspired and inherently right.  And those different voices become part of the overall repertoire of humanity for coping with challenges confronting us in the future.  As we drift toward a blandly amorphous, generic world, as cultures disappear and life becomes more uniform, we as a people and a species, and Earth itself, will be deeply impoverished.” (Page 96)

Living within the biological constraints of the earth may be the most civilized activity a person can pursue, because it enables our successors to to the same. (Page 100)

What WTO seeks to protect is business and growth, not people and the environment, with an underlying assumption that the wealthier a country becomes, the better it is able to protect its people and its environment.  It has not turned out that way. (Page 121)

Tens of thousands of NGOs work toward amending the market policies of globalization because markets are not designed to be surrogates for ethics, values, and justice. (Page 126)

Thought Leaders:

Martin Khor and Vandana Shiva of the Third World Network in Asia, Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians, Tony Clarke of Polaris Institute, Jerry Mander of the International Forum on Globalization, Susan George of the Transnational Institute, John Cavanagh of the Institute for Policy Studies, Lori Wallach of Public Citizen, Anuradha Mittal, Owens Wiwa of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, Chakravarthi Raghavan of the Thrid World Network in Geneva, Debra Harry of the Indigenous Peoples Coalition Against Biopiracy, Jose Bove of the Confederation Paysanne, Tetteh Hormoku of the Third World Network in Africa, Randy Hayes of Rainforest Action Network. (Page 126)

In internationalization, each nation sets its own trade standards and will do business with other nations that are willing to meet those standards.  Do nations abuse this system?  Always and constantly, and the United States is among the worst offenders in that regard.  But where democracies prevail, internationalization does provide a means for people to set their own policy, influence decisions, and determine their own future.  Globalization, in contrast, envisions standardized legislation for the entire world, with capital and goods moving at will superior to the rule of national laws.  Globalization supersedes nation, state, region, and village.  While diminishing the power of nationalism is a good idea, elimination of sovereignty may not be if it is replaced by a corporate boardroom. (Page 127)

When there was an abundant earth supporting relatively few people, it was not necessary for markets to allocate resources with an eye toward the future.  On a crowded earth with failing ecosystems, that lapse will be fatal. (Page 135)

Markets make great servants, but bad leaders and ridiculous religions. (Page 135)

The failure of those making the case for globalized free trade is their inability to adequately address the results of rapid economic change in human and ecological terms, how it creates prosperity and misery and ecological degradation, roughly in equal measure, incomparable though they may seem. (Page 135)

If we accept that the metaphor of an organism can be applied to humankind, we can imagine a collective movement that would protect, repair, and restore that organism’s capacity to endure when threatened.  If so, that capacity to respond would function like an immune system, which operates independently of an individual person’s intent.  Specifically, the shared activity of hundreds of thousands of nonprofit organizations can be seen as humanity’s immune response to toxins like political corruption, economic disease, and ecological degradation. (Page 141)

At the heart of all of this is not technology but relationships, tens of millions of people working toward restoration and social justice. (Page 144)

No culture has ever honored its environment but disgraced its people, and conversely, no government can say it cares for its citizens while allowing the environment ot be trashed. (Page 145)

The ultimate purpose of a global immune system is to identify what is not life affirming and to contain, neutralize, or eliminate it.  Where communities, cultures, and ecosystems have been damaged, it seeks to prevent additional harm and then heal and restore the damage. (Page 145)

Social entrepreneurs are innovative risk takers who use ideas, resources, and opportunities to tackle problems and produce social benefit. (Page 151)

Slow food supports the re-creation of networks of traditional food producers with customers to that both may thrive.  It is about conserving the heritage of the exquisite variety of tastes humankind has created, which means organizing farmers markets and ensuring both that varieties of fruits and vegetables and rare breeds of animals do not become extinct, and that the people who are artisans of food are supported and can pass on their craft to future generations. (Page 155)

To those who argue that gastronomy is a privilege of the affluent and hardly a suitable environmental cuase, (Carlo) Patrini replies that food lovers who are not environmentalists are naive, and an ecologist who does not take time to savor his food and culture leads a deprived life. (Page 155)

Food has always been at the heart of cultural identity.  The loss of its traditional foods is just as devastating to a culture as the loss of its language. (Page 156)

We can engage in the virtual world of iPod music and TV drama, but there is no virtual world of taste.  It is in our mouth, and every day our mouth connects us to place. (Page 156)

If anything can offer us hope for the future it will be an assembly of humanity that is representative but not centralized, because no single ideology can ever heal the woulds of this world. (Page 163)

Five hundred years of ecological mayhem and social tyranny is a relatively short time for humanity to have learned to understand its self-created patterns of systematic pillage. (Page 165)

The insanity of human destructiveness may be matched by an older grace and intelligence that is fastening us together in ways we have never before seen or imagined. (Page 165)

We live in community, not alone, and any sense of separateness that we harbor is illusion. (Page 171)

People are asked to place their faith in economic and political systems that have polluted water, air, and sea; that have despoiled communities, sacked workforces, reduced incomes for most people in the world for the past three decades, and created a stratosphere sufficiently permeated with industrial gases that we are, in effect, playing dice with the planet. (Page 174)

The movement offers a solution-creating methodology from below that is inclusive, a process that mimics biological adaptation and evolution. Every physical activity the human body sustains is part of a cyclical, biological system with a self-correcting bias. (Page 179)

We are the only species without full employment, again defying the nature of nature. (Page 182)

Life tends to optimize rather than maximize. Maximization is another word for addiction. (Page 183)

A viable future isn’t possible until the past is faced objectively and communion is made with our errant history. (Page 188)

The movement is not coercive, but it is relentless and unafraid. It cannot be mollified, pacified, or suppressed. (Page 188)

All people and institutions, including commerce, governments, schools, churches, and cities, need to learn from life and re-imagine the world from the bottom up, based on first principles of justice and ecology. (Page 189)

What will guide us is a living intelligence that creates miracles every second, carried forth by a movement with no name. (Page 190)