By Paul Hawken

I have given nearly one thousand talks about the environment in the
past fifteen years, and after every speech a smaller crowd gathered
to talk, ask questions, and exchange business cards. The people
offering their cards were working on the most salient issues of our
day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger,
conservation, human rights, and more. They were from the nonprofit
and nongovernmental world, also known as civil society.

After being on the road for a week or two, I would return with a
couple hundred cards stuffed into various pockets. Over the years the
cards mounted into the thousands, and whenever I glanced at the bags
in my closet, I kept coming back to one question: did anyone know how
many groups there were? At first, this was a matter of curiosity, but
it slowly grew into a hunch that something larger was afoot, a
significant social movement that was eluding the radar of mainstream
culture.

I began to count. I looked at government records for different
countries and, using various methods to approximate the number of
environmental and social justice groups from tax census data, I
initially estimated that there were thirty thousand environmental
organizations strung around the globe; when I added social justice
and indigenous organizations, the number exceeded one hundred
thousand. I then researched past social movements to see if there
were any equal in scale and scope, but I couldn't find anything. The
more I probed, the more I unearthed, and the numbers continued to
climb. In trying to pick up a stone, I found the exposed tip of a
geological formation. I discovered lists, indexes, and small
databases specific to certain sectors or geographic areas, but no set
of data came close to describing the movement's breadth.
Extrapolating from the records being accessed, I realized that the
initial estimate of a hundred thousand organizations was off by at
least a factor of ten. I now believe there are over one million
organizations working toward ecological sustainability and social
justice. Maybe two.

By conventional definition, this is not a movement. Movements have
leaders and ideologies. You join movements, study tracts, and
identify yourself with a group. You read the biography of the
founder(s) or listen to them perorate on tape or in person. Movements
have followers, but this movement doesn't work that way. It is
dispersed, inchoate, and fiercely independent. There is no manifesto
or doctrine, no authority to check with. I sought a name for it, but
there isn't one.

Historically, social movements have arisen primarily because of
injustice, inequalities, and corruption. Those woes remain legion,
but a new condition exists that has no precedent: the planet has a
life-threatening disease that is marked by massive ecological
degradation and rapid climate change. It crossed my mind that perhaps
I was seeing something organic, if not biologic. Rather than a
movement in the conventional sense, is it a collective response to
threat? Is it splintered for reasons that are innate to its purpose?
Or is it simply disorganized? More questions followed. How does it
function? How fast is it growing? How is it connected? Why is it
largely ignored?

After spending years researching this phenomenon, including creating
with my colleagues a global database of these organizations, I have
come to these conclusions: this is the largest social movement in all
of history, no one knows its scope, and how it functions is more
mysterious than what meets the eye.

What does meet the eye is compelling: tens of millions of ordinary
and not-so-ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and
incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace,
justice, and beauty to this world.

Clayton Thomas-Müller speaks to a community gathering of the Cree
nation about waste sites on their native land in Northern Alberta,
toxic lakes so big you can see them from outer space. Shi Lihong,
founder of Wild China Films, makes documentaries with her husband on
migrants displaced by construction of large dams. Rosalina Tuyuc
Velásquez, a member of the Maya-Kaqchikel people, fights for full
accountability for tens of thousands of people killed by death squads
in Guatemala. Rodrigo Baggio retrieves discarded computers from New
York, London, and Toronto and installs them in the favelas of Brazil,
where he and his staff teach computer skills to poor children.
Biologist Janine Benyus speaks to twelve hundred executives at a
business forum in Queensland about biologically inspired industrial
development. Paul Sykes, a volunteer for the National Audubon
Society, completes his fifty- second Christmas Bird Count in Little
Creek, Virginia, joining fifty thousand other people who tally 70
million birds on one day. Sumita Dasgupta leads students, engineers,
journalists, farmers, and Adivasis (tribal people) on a ten-day trek
through Gujarat exploring the rebirth of ancient rainwater harvesting
and catchment systems that bring life back to drought-prone areas of
India. Silas Kpanan'Ayoung Siakor, who exposed links between the
genocidal policies of former president Charles Taylor and illegal
logging in Liberia, now creates certified, sustainable timber
policies.

These eight, who may never meet and know one another, are part of a
coalescence comprising hundreds of thousands of organizations with no
center, codified beliefs, or charismatic leader. The movement grows
and spreads in every city and country. Virtually every tribe,
culture, language, and religion is part of it, from Mongolians to
Uzbeks to Tamils. It is comprised of families in India, students in
Australia, farmers in France, the landless in Brazil, the bananeras
of Honduras, the "poors" of Durban, villagers in Irian Jaya,
indigenous tribes of Bolivia, and housewives in Japan. Its leaders
are farmers, zoologists, shoemakers, and poets.

The movement can't be divided because it is atomized -- small pieces
loosely joined. It forms, gathers, and dissipates quickly. Many
inside and outside dismiss it as powerless, but it has been known to
bring down governments, companies, and leaders through witnessing,
informing, and massing.

The movement has three basic roots: the environmental and social
justice movements, and indigenous cultures' resistance to
globalization -- all of which are intertwining. It arises
spontaneously from different economic sectors, cultures, regions, and
cohorts, resulting in a global, classless, diverse, and embedded
movement, spreading worldwide without exception. In a world grown too
complex for constrictive ideologies, the very word movement may be
too small, for it is the largest coming together of citizens in
history.

There are research institutes, community development agencies,
village- and citizen-based organizations, corporations, networks,
faith-based groups, trusts, and foundations. They defend against
corrupt politics and climate change, corporate predation and the
death of the oceans, governmental indifference and pandemic poverty,
industrial forestry and farming, depletion of soil and water.

The movement does not agree on everything nor will it ever, because
that would be an ideology. But it shares a basic set of fundamental
understandings about the Earth, how it functions, and the necessity
of fairness and equity for all people partaking of the planet's life-
giving systems.

The promise of this unnamed movement is to offer solutions to what
appear to be insoluble dilemmas: poverty, global climate change,
terrorism, ecological degradation, polarization of income, loss of
culture. It is not burdened with a syndrome of trying to save the
world; it is trying to remake the world.

This movement is relentless and unafraid. It cannot be mollified,
pacified, or suppressed. There can be no Berlin Wall moment, no
treaty-signing, no morning to awaken when the superpowers agree to
stand down. The movement will continue to take myriad forms. It will
not rest. There will be no Marx, Alexander, or Kennedy. No book can
explain it, no person can represent it, no words can encompass it,
because the movement is the breathing, sentient testament of the
living world.

And I believe it will prevail. I don't mean defeat, conquer, or cause
harm to someone else. And I don't tender the claim in an oracular
sense. I mean the thinking that informs the movement's goal - to
create a just society conducive to life on Earth -- will reign. It
will soon suffuse and permeate most institutions. But before then, it
will change a sufficient number of people so as to begin the reversal
of centuries of frenzied self-destruction.

From Orion Magazine:
www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/265