Drawing a line between Paul Hawken and the Pope

[GliderGuider]

In 2007 the environmentalist Paul Hawken published a wonderful book called "Blessed Unrest". It told the story of the groundswell of independent grass-roots environmental and social-justice organizations that are springing up spontaneously around the world in response to the distress calls of the biosphere and society.

I found out about the book when Hawken came to speak about it in Ottawa just as it was being published. It was the first thing I’d found since I entered the Shadow of Collapse in 2004 that gave me any reason for hope, and I clung to it like a drowning man. Ultimately the waves of thermodynamic absolutism, evolutionary psychology and genetic determinism proved too strong, and ripped it from my grasp. I cursed it as hopium dream for years afterwards.

Now my inner landscape has shifted. I’m beginning to understand that, solution or not, such ideas are stations on the path of right action. There’s a fine line between seeing something as a forlorn hope and realizing that whether or not it is forlorn is beside the point. Yes, human beings are at least quasi-deterministic products of evolution, environment and history, but we are hardly standard products of that process, if you take my meaning.

The flag-bearers of collective determinism (Guilty as charged, yer Honour!) may be called by their worldview to discount the influence of concepts like personal conscience and nobility. However, that does not mean that those who hold down the other side of the yin-yang circle must follow their lead; quite the contrary, in fact. And for those lucky few who have one foot in the shadow and the other in the light, the poignant awareness of probable failure only adds to the liberating joy of doing it anyway.

This is why I'm so encouraged by reactions to the Pope's encyclical. Certainly, changes to our personal consciousness and behaviour in response to such a clarion call may be seen as a forlorn hope in the face of the unfolding global ecological catastrophe. However, such making such changes anyway speaks to a fundamental goodness lurking in our natures.

In my opinion both Paul Hawken and Pope Francis have touched on something very big – the nobility of the individual human spirit. It would not hurt us to listen.

http://www.blessedunrest.com/

Paul Hawken has spent over a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice.

From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing from the bottom up, in every city, town, and culture. and is emerging to be an extraordinary and creative expression of people's needs worldwide.

Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of the movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and hidden history, which date back many centuries. A culmination of Hawken's many years of leadership in the environmental and social justice fields, it will inspire and delight any and all who despair of the world's fate, and its conclusions will surprise even those within the movement itself. Fundamentally, it is a description of humanity's collective genius, and the unstoppable movement to reimagine our relationship to the environment and one another.

[Delphinus]

1. I remember

reading that back in 2009 or 2010 ... need to revisit it as I'm not remembering my reaction to it.

[GliderGuider]

2. For the sake of clarity

I’m the guy who advocates for thermo-genetic determinism leading humanity through a cycle of unbridled growth into unavoidable dissolution and collapse – remember? I have not abandoned that worldview. And yet, this is not all there is to the human experience. Do we have the right to look at both sides of the human coin? Or is that desire faintly (or not so faintly...) disreputable?

I’m not asking anyone to accept Paul Hawken or the Pope as a saviour. I’m suggesting that we take a look into our own hearts, and acknowledge everything that lives there: the despair, anguish and grief; the contempt, anger and hatred; the sense of self-righteous superiority; the childlike voice pleading for all the bad stuff just to go away; the muzzled and disowned hope; the joy of feeling that “I am better than I even know”; and especially the urge to follow forlorn hopes for the sake of showing up and staking a claim to our place in the universe.

If we cannot look unblinking into our own hearts, what hope do we have of seeing the world as it truly is?