| Main Feature Story - Friday, June 8, 2007
Feature: Progressive movements
'Blessed Unrest' author Paul Hawken says Marin has a way to go before being seen as an environmental leader
by Jordan E. Rosenfeld
Marin environmentalist Paul Hawken has so many credits and skills to his name that it's almost impossible to sum him up in a title. To Marinites, Hawken may be best known as the other half of the well-loved gardening store Smith and Hawken, which he co-founded with Dave Smith in 1979. (Before that he co-founded the Erewhon Trading Company, the country's first natural-foods business.) To college students and academics, he is best known for his groundbreaking 1987 book The Ecology of Commerce, which was 14 years ahead of its time in pointing out ways for businesses to save money and the environment by adapting more sustainable practices. Hawken has also written six other books, numerous articles and spoken on issues of sustainability to heads of state, from the king of Sweden to President Bill Clinton. He has founded (or co-founded) numerous companies and is presently the head of the Pax Group, an engineering company that has been granted exclusive global rights to air movement technologies developed by PAX Scientific, Inc., of San Rafael.
Hawken has donned his author hat again with a new book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. The "movement" at the center of the book refers to the spontaneous and non-hierarchical grassroots environmental and social justice movements—which he argues are becoming one and the same—comprised of millions of small organizations and individuals all working toward redefining our relationships to the planet and each other—to ensure our survival.
The Pacific Sun spoke to Hawken recently about his book and his vision for the future of the planet and its people.
• • • •
Tell us about your inspiration for the book, and what impact you hope it will have on readers.
I am not trying to convince anyone of anything in this book; I am trying to describe the largest social movement in history, a movement that has been hidden even to itself. In the early 1990s I was giving as many as 100 speeches or talks a year, and after every event people would come up to talk further and give me their card. They were from civil society organizations around the world and I would take them home, read the names of the organizations and put the cards away. When the bag in my closet was full, I asked myself a simple question: How many organizations are there in the world working on environmental and social justice issues?
What would you generally hear from these groups?
However you define the social and environmental problems that we face in this country and globally, we are all in this together and what we hear mostly is the problem statement. The constant repetition of what is going wrong is understandable, the earth is in tatters and society is not far behind, but a litany of travails can wear us out and create despair. We also need to know that humanity is responding, and that response is broader, greater and more profound than most of us imagine.
You've always been ahead of the curve when it comes to environmental and sustainable practices. Now that the trend has caught on to "go green" and "invest green" you see that kind of language everywhere. Yet when your book 'The Ecology of Commerce' was published, this was a shocking new way of thinking. Why do you think it took so long for mainstream culture to get on the "green" bandwagon?
There is a lag time because the current economic system has such overwhelming inertia. Everything changes—businesses actually thrive because there is change—but we tend to resist change, which causes delays in awareness and implementation. On top of that, we probably have the worst media in any developed country with respect to environmental and scientific literacy, and that has delayed widespread social acceptance of problems such as climate change.
How did the media respond to your early books?
When Ecology of Commerce was published, it was a pariah book. My two prior books, The Next Economy and Growing a Business, were reviewed by hundreds of publications and virtually every business publication in the country at the time. The Ecology of Commerce was reviewed by Forbes, Dun's and BusinessWeek, but those reviews were apparently killed by their editors, because they never ran. Even after it became a bestseller it was studiously ignored. This is the USA, where TV networks sent out memos prohibiting the mention of climate change when reporting on extreme weather events because advertisers complained on the effect it had on viewers. That has changed, but the result is a country that brings up the rear in terms of awareness of climate problems.
The irony is that under the radar, as your book points out, thousands of tiny groups of people have been working toward change since long before the environmental movement "officially" began, but collectively it was hard to see them all as being part of the same movement.
It remains difficult for people to see the variety of organizations as part of a larger movement and, bear in mind, I don't just include the variety of environmental organizations, but social justice and human rights organizations as well. All insults to the environment are issues of injustice. Social justice and environmental organizations confront the same basic problem: a political/economic system that steals the future and resells it in the present—whether it is child trafficking for chocolate plantations, clear-cutting British Columbia forests for lingerie catalogs or exposing workers to toxins in China to make cheap toys for big-box retailers. We call it GDP or corporate profit, but in reality it is a loss.
You write that this movement is not ideological, that it has no charismatic leader. What's driving it?
It is being driven by loss, grief and kindness. The loss of rights, the loss of the commons, the loss of climatic stability, the loss of place, culture, peace, families, health and more. But what undergirds it is generosity—true philanthropy in the original meaning of the word—and the love of human beings for one another. In 1807, 12 people met in a print shop in London and decided to end the trade in slaves. It was an outlandish idea because at that time three out of every four persons in the world was either enslaved or indentured. The abolitionists were reviled, scorned, mocked and derided. They were "do-gooders" who were meddling in affairs they did not understand, denounced in Parliament because their absurd propositions would ruin the British economy. This was the first time in the world that a secular group organized itself to address the suffering of people it would never know and from which it would never receive any indirect or direct benefit. There are now literally hundreds of thousands of those groups in the world.
What drives that?
Self-interest in the largest sense, as well as fierceness, courage and the kindness of strangers.
How do you think the movement will change in 20 years? Do you think that it will become less of a movement and simply a way of life driven by harsh realities like climate change and high oil prices?
Although the book delves into the history of the movement, if there is anything to be learned from the past it is that it provides no guide to the future. If the realities we faced were merely high oil prices and rising sea levels, we would be fortunate indeed. What scientists closer to the issues of climate change are trying to convey is that climate is part of a larger system, including agriculture and hydrological cycles. The food system of the world is hugely dependent on climate and we should really use the term extreme climatic volatility. The future we face does not ensure a steady food supply, a stable economy or international peace. Human beings are trying to re-imagine their relationship to each other and this home we call Earth, and it cannot happen soon enough.
You are a huge proponent of the "systems perspective" in your design work. Can you tell us more about what this is and why you've opted to use it?
The very word "systems" can be daunting, but shouldn't be. We were all born as systems thinkers. If we weren't, we could never have learned language. Think about driving a 4,000-pound car 55 miles per hour down the freeway, listening to the news on the radio and occasionally sipping a hot latte from the cup holder...oh yes, and you talking on your headset to someone at the office. We are amazingly competent systems thinkers. It takes about $250,000 of taxpayer money and 12 years of modern education to take a child who sees the world systemically and transform them into an adult who sees the world linearly.
What is the primary advantage of systems thinking?
It is the only integrative way we can understand the earth and our place in it. Once you re-engage the world from a systems perspective, the issues of water, poverty, corruption, climate change, economic polarization, mountaintop removal in Appalachia and women's rights can be seen as related in every sense of the word, and you begin to look at root causes and solutions, not symptomatic Band-Aids.
The systems perspective also plays a role in the work of your company Pax Group, which has a relationship with Pax Scientific of San Rafael. Can you quickly define the concept of using biomimicry to create fans, and why you chose to get involved in this field?
The Pax technology was invented by Jay Harman, and was based on his observations of flow forms and patterns in turbulent water. Basically, he observed that nature moves in the path of least resistance, and those paths of movement conform to geometries that can be replicated in rotors, turbines, fans and virtually all other industrial applications. Industrial technology tends to force air, water, fluids and combustion gases in mechanical ways that are inefficient and wasteful. We have a license to apply Pax technology to thermal systems in the form of fans and small-scale turbines, and we work closely with Jay and his wife, Francesca Bertone, in San Rafael. I chose to get involved with it foremost because of my respect for Jay's genius and Jay and Francesca's kindness and concern for the world, and secondarily because these—and other technologies that Jay has not yet commercialized or announced—offer great promise for radically reducing our energy use, as well as generating energy in innovative ways.
How have you seen Marin change since 1983, when you moved here?
Marin is changing in that significant parts of it are a bastion of wealthy people, and the shops and services we see cater to their wants. The more diverse populations are either contained within Marin City, the Canal district or in some of the houseboat communities in Sausalito—or are being strung out along the Sir Francis Drake corridor from Fairfax to West Marin. Because of its beauty and virtual no-growth policies, it is very difficult to buy and rent here, and that financial pressure is exacerbated by people who comb the real estate listings for relatively inexpensive properties that can be torn down or remodeled into expensive properties. What is being lost is ease and a diverse community.
Some people say Marin should be a model for other parts of the world with its green/sustainable practices—from biodiesel proponents to people installing solar and wind power for their homes. Do you agree?
From my travels, I do not see Marin as leading in any particular way with respect to environmental issues, nor do I see it as a model. I know that [Supervisor] Charles McGlashan and [Assemblymember] Jared Huffman are doing extraordinary things with respect to the environment, as is Marin Organic, Warren Weber and the Marin Agricultural Land Trust. But if you compare what is happening here, overall, to other parts of the U.S., Marin is not a leader and it is not ahead of the curve. It is a liberal voting community—but that has not translated into better public transport, better bike routes, better energy policy or greener building codes. At least not yet.
What's Paul Hawken's role? Activist? Environmentalist? Humanitarian?
I am not sure I ever asked myself that question. I don't feel a responsibility to help change people's attitudes about social and environmental issues so much as I feel a joy in exploring those issues. Writing is how I learn. For example, Blessed Unrest allowed me to plunge back into the literature and journals of the Transcendentalists, which is endlessly fascinating. A friend in New Hampshire shared photostats of his copy of A Manual of Buddhism by R. Spence Hardy that was owned by Henry David Thoreau, complete with marginalia. This was the book that was on the shelf above his bed at Walden Pond, and is part of a larger influence of Eastern religion on Emerson, the Alcotts and others.
Do you feel a responsibility to help change people's attitudes about the environment and other social issues?
What I find fascinating is how our deepest longings and values have been so skewed and distorted by work, governments, corporations and media, and how people awaken and find their way back to the original self. It is brilliant. People change when they awaken to what is inside them already, and the art of change is to create the context for that transformation. That is done through stories, narratives, humor, the exploration of one's grief, but not by actually trying to change someone's views. That never works.
Other than the environment, what would you say is your next biggest priority in terms of investing your own personal energy and money?
The subject of the book is how two seemingly disparate types of nonprofit movements are coming together to become one movement: environment and social justice. This is a critical point because I do not believe the environmental movement actually is an environmental movement. It is a justice movement and because it has been promulgated by wealthier people, mainly white, who did not experience issues concerning rights and justice, the environmental movement finds itself in a demographic cul-de-sac without the requisite understanding and support needed to make the necessary changes in society, industry and patterns of consumption.
What's more important: climate change or social change?
What you see right now is the environmental movement focus on climate change as the mother of all issues, saying in effect that the house is burning and that we all need to get on the climate/environmental bus or all else is for naught. I believe that the cause of massive carbon emissions relates to deeper issues of privilege and rights and you cannot solve the climate issue by being Chicken Little. I think the environmental bus needs to slow down and stop, and all of those aboard need to get onto the social justice bus because in fact there is only one bus. There is a deep wound in this and other countries, a wound that has not been addressed or healed: the treatment of Native-, African-, Hispanic- and other Americans who have suffered greatly at the hands of invaders, exploiters and conquerors. I believe we need to heal this wound in order to address the social and environmental damage that is growing worldwide, because they have a common source.
What do you believe has to happen next?
Two lenses will likely dominate our future: social justice and humanity's relationship to the environment. Both focus on exploitation, and both are the history of people's attempts to free themselves from abuse. We face a crossroad as to what constitutes the most salient evidence of progress. Will it be single measures of material accumulation such as GDP, or will it be the condition of the earth and its inhabitants? Social justice and attending to the needs of planet proceed in parallel; the abuse of one entails the exploitation of the other. Refugees, peasants and the poor are the forests, soils and oceans of society; each constitutes surplus value that has been taken repeatedly by those in power, whether governments or multinational corporations.
You are quoted as saying that "we're moving from a world created by privilege—which is a top down world—to one created by community, which is a bottom up world." This seems to come in contrast to what you hear about a disappearing middle class, the rich getting richer, etc. What are some of the signs that we're moving toward the "bottom up" world?
The middle class is in crisis in this country, but not in China, India and most of the rest of the world where it's growing. The entire movement is an expression of a world re-creating itself from the bottom up, organizations forming to address the salient issues of our time because the top of society is corrupt. Governments have failed us. We would not be here had they been responsive to people, science and core values. We knew everything needed to mount a response to climate change in the early 1970s, and oil companies and conservatives made sure that it was mocked and belittled. National, state and local governments have been responsive for too long to money and corporations. The reason that there are so many non-governmental organizations is because Washington, D.C. is the true non-governing organization, and these small nonprofits are filling the breach, acting as surrogates until truly responsive and intelligent government is restored. An example is an NGO in Seattle who is so impressed with the initiatives being undertaken by Mayor Greg Nichols, that they are questioning their need to exist. This is a watershed moment.
Do you think you'll ever get involved in politics directly? Run for an office?
There are some really great people who are going to run for office all across the country in the next election cycle. The Iraq invasion, the singeing rhetoric and demonization by right-wing shock jocks of progressive ideas, and the complete disregard of the Constitution and human rights by the Bush administration has galvanized people all over the country to run for office who never would have done so. I think the wheels are coming off the political establishment and it couldn't happen fast enough for my taste. I believe that a new crop of people who speak truthfully, without guile, who do not represent moneyed interests, is going to make the 2008 election year a plebiscite on power and responsibility. And I will do whatever I can to support those people.
Tell me about Wiser Earth—an online social networking database that you helped create. What is the goal of that site?
WiserEarth.org serves the people who are transforming the world. It is a collaboratively written, free content, open-source networking platform that links NGOs, funders, business, government, social entrepreneurs, students, organizers, academics, activists, scientists and citizens. Wiser creates the space for civil society, the private sector and government to collaboratively define, address and solve social and environmental problems. The more than 1 million organizations and the 100 million individuals who actively work toward ecological sustainability, economic justice, human rights and political accountability work on issues that are systemically interconnected and intertwined. Their effectiveness to prevent harm and institute positive change is undermined by the lack of a collective awareness, duplicative efforts and poor connectivity. Because we are moving from a world that is shaped by privilege to a community-created world, we need new tools for communication and collaboration. This massive change in the loci of power calls for a new system of awareness, support, communication and collaboration. That is the purpose of WiserEarth.org.
Are you hopeful or cautious about the future of human fate on this planet?
It will be the stroke of midnight for the rest of our life. How we respond will depend greatly on what we do now. If you look at the data and are hopeful, then you are not understanding the data. If you look at the people and are not heartened, you don't have a pulse. Evolution arises from the bottom up—so too does hope. When fire destroys a forest, the species and plants that were lost will reassert themselves over time. Seeds that have lain dormant for decades and that germinate only when subjected to intense heat will burst into foliage and bloom in the spring. These plants may have deep taproots that bring up minerals, or broad leaves that create a canopy to help preserve topsoil from sun and rain. The older the forest, the more resilient its capacity to regenerate. Humanity is older than the oldest forest. Its capacity to adapt and restore is vastly underestimated.
|
Send this story
Print this story
