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Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken, (How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming). Viking Penguin, 2007

Paul Hawken is a long time environmentalist and author who decided to attempt an understanding of the roots, breadth and nature of the present environmental movement. Blessed Unrest is the result. The book is deeply researched but well and simply written with 190 pages of text and 152 pages of appendices, notes, bibliography and index. I found it a fascinating read.

In ‘The Beginnings’ Hawken reviews his attempts in presentations to balance the ‘doom and gloom’ stories of environmental degradation with the small but plentiful glimmerings of hope from individuals and groups like ours doing positive productive work at the community level. The book is peppered with great little stories, one of which refers to an ancient rabbinical teaching: If the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, you first plant a tree and then see if the story is true – among other things, a reminder of the human need for critical thinking even in the face of crisis.
One of Hawken’s main themes is the necessary connection between the environmental and social justice movements. Both have roots stretching a long way back but the modern environmental movement he traces to the the first space satellites and especially the first moon shot in which the astronauts looked back and we saw for the first time the world as the beautiful but surely limited, small space ship that it is.

In ‘The Long Green’ Hawken looks back to the roots of the environmentalism in the work of earlier naturalists, thinkers and authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries –Muir, Leopold, Emerson, Frost and others.

‘The Rights of Business’ traces the on-going battle between such ‘rights’ and individual and environmental ‘rights’. The well known efforts on the part of some (not all by any means) large corporate bodies to suppress, confuse and distort the evidence of their destructive greed, stupidity and corruption are indeed horror stories and bear repeating. They cannot help but raise the ire of the reader all over again.

The chapter called ‘Indigine’ digs deeper into the European/ American contacts throughout history and reminds us of the frailty of human intelligence but also reminds of the knowledge and wisdom found in native traditions thankfully undergoing something of a renaissance today all across the Americas.

In ‘We Interrupt This Empire’ Hawken outlines the past efforts on the part of the ‘Western World’ to dominate and control development in the rest of the world by all the well known techniques of military and naval power, capital and resource flows, even slavery.
The more recent version of all this is of course the phenomenon known as ‘globalization’ sponsored by the major western nations and their corporate bodies: The World Bank and The World Trade Organization and the largest of the corporate giants bent on replaceing smaller scale economies with larger scale. One author quoted states: ‘there is no economy of scale, there is only nature’s economy’. Hawken aims serious criticisms at the practices of the WTO and the World Bank. Referring to the protests in Seattle which were very badly handled and many protesters were badly beaten by police, he says the people are still here and we are not going away.
This depressing chapter however ends with a wonderful Inuit story about hubris called ‘Skeleton Woman’

‘Restoration’ is Hawken’s more positive view of the present and future apparent trends toward effective well funded cooperative partnerships between awakening corporate bodies and environmental and social justice groups. These partnerships are already sponsoring beneficial and restorative change which may just bring about the survival of our species. His view is that the environmental movement’s lack of structure, its diversity of huge numbers of small groups with a loose, always changing network is actually our strength giving us flexibility, constant renewal and freedom from the constraints of an ossifying body of obtuse dogma.

We may not agree with everything in Blessed Unrest but it may present us with some different thoughts and some encouragement to continue our work which we now realize is not in isolation after all.

Don McIlraith