And this. A personal hero of mine.

---

Product Description

One of the world’s most influential environmentalists reveals a worldwide grassroots movement of hope and humanity

Blessed Unrest tells the story of a worldwide movement that is largely unseen by politicians or the media. Hawken, an environmentalist and author, has spent more than a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person causes, these organizations collectively comprise the largest movement on earth. This is a movement that has no name, leader, or location, but is in every city, town, and culture. It is organizing from the bottom up and is emerging as an extraordinary and creative expression of people’s needs worldwide.

Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of this movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and centuries-old history. The culmination of Hawken’s many years of leadership in these fields, it will inspire, surprise, and delight anyone who is worried about the direction the modern world is headed. Blessed Unrest is a description of humanity’s collective genius and the unstoppable movement to re-imagine our relationship to the environment and one another. Like Hawken’s previous books, Blessed Unrest will become a classic in its field— a touchstone for anyone concerned about our future.

---

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16802 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Hawken (Natural Capitalism) traces the formation of the environmental and social justice movement from the beginnings of natural science across years and continents in this rousing and "inadvertently optimistic" call to action. Though it's argued that globalization; extinction of species, languages and cultures; and economic policies advantageous to the rich have degraded quality of life worldwide and engendered large scale feelings of fear, resentment and powerlessness, Hawken remains surprisingly hopeful. Strength, he contends, lies in the many thousands (if not millions) of nonprofits and community organizations dedicated to environmental protection and social justice that collectively form a worldwide movement geared toward humanity's betterment. A combination of history, current events, motivation and vision for the future, Hawken's book does a lot of work in its relatively few pages, though his perspective comes across in some passages as naïve (the thousands of protestors at the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization meeting merely wanted to "hold WTO accountable"). The book isn't likely to convert members of the World Bank, but readers already sympathetic to Hawken's position will find much here to chew on.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From AudioFile
If you have the least bit of concern for the environment, and if for some reason you listen to only one audiobook this year, let it be BLESSED UNREST. In brief, the book describes how the social justice movement and the environmental movement are, as they should be, intertwining and says that this trend is the best, and maybe the only, hope we have for saving our beautiful, fragile planet. Nonfiction is a challenge for a performer under the best of circumstances, but Paul Garcia captures the passion and purposefulness of Hawkens writing. Garcia narrates factual information evenly and knows when to dramatize the statements that form the heart of this treatise. M.S.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
*Starred Review* The profusion of good causes and the nonprofit groups that advance them can seem laughably overwhelming, but without altruistic grass-roots efforts, the world would be a far less merciful place. Environmentalist Hawken believes that we are in the midst of a world-changing rise of activist groups, all "working toward ecological sustainability and social justice." Rather than an ideological or centralized movement, this coalescence is a spontaneous and organic response to the recognition that environmental problems are social-justice problems. Writing with zest, clarity, and a touch of wonder, Hawken compares this gathering of forces to the human immune system. Just as antibodies rally when the body is under threat, people are joining together to defend life on Earth. Hawken offers a fascinating history of our perception of nature and human rights and assesses the role indigenous cultures are playing in the quest for ecological responsibility and economic fairness. Hawken also presents an unprecedented map to this new "social landscape" that includes a classification system defining astonishingly diverse concerns, ranging from farming to child welfare, ocean preservation, and beyond. Fresh and informative, Hawken's inspired overview charts much that is right in the world. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

---

Customer Reviews

Inspiring rhetoric, disappointing analysis
Some of my friends found this book really inspiring. I tend to look for things like detailed and balanced analysis of issues, in-depth descriptions of the work of political groups, and sophisticated understanding of the way in which voluntary organizations interact with elite politics and economic factors. This book is weak on all of those - but it DOES have a lot of inspirational rhetoric.

We must work together if life on this planet is going to survive
Paul Hawken has a wonderful gift of pattern recognition that enables him to draw from diverse sources and sew together a patchwork of information that is compelling in its message: We must work together if life on this planet as we know it today is going to survive the threats of devaluation of individual life, depleted resources, pollution and global heating. (Heating is my term. I feel that `warming' is an unacceptable euphemism!)What is most appealing to me after the excellent summary of facts and issues is Hawken's positive spin on the situation.

When asked at colleges if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: 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 the people in this unnamed movement and aren't optimistic, you haven't got a heart. 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. (p. 4)

Healing the wounds of the earth and its people does not require saintliness or a political party, only gumption and persistence. It is not a liberal or conservative activity; it is a sacred act. (p. 5)

In total, the book is inadvertently optimistic, an odd thing in these bleak times. I didn't intend it; optimism discovered me. (p. 8)

Hawken points out that the roots of our problems lie in our concepts and attitudes about our world. For instance, production and acquisition of material goods has become the primary focus and goal of the modern world, to the point that they are more important than people. This has shaped our mentality in self-destructive ways. Mass production and distribution of products become more economical and profitable through uniformity. Living systems thrive best on diversity, which provides a gene pool that can adapt to external challenges. However, in the name of enhancing efficiency of food production, distribution and sales, our diversity has been sacrificed and the biological pool of genetic resources has been systematically whittled down to the cheapest and most marketable varieties of edibles. This mind-set is core to the struggles of our modern world between the interests of business and industry and the interests of people and the environment.

In the pursuit of industrial and economic growth that has assumed the proportions of an ideology, natural resources have been over-exploited to the point that they are depleted. Our fish, trees, land and waters have been wantonly exploited, with little if any thought to the needs of tomorrow, much less to those of future generations. Similarly with people:

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. (p. 22)

Trade is not the salient issue; the critical question is, Who sets the rules and who enforces them? There can be no sustainability when institutions whose primary purpose is to create money are dictating the standards. (p. 135)

As a uniform trading system sweeps over the world, the monetary gains are called GDP, but the losses that are suffered, even in the industrialized West, much less in the Third World, are not tallied, as if one were recording sales at the cash register but ignoring thefts at the back of the warehouse. (p. 118)

The World Trade Organization (WTO) seeks to establish commerce as the basis for governing the world. It is set up without checks and balances, as a dictatorial institution that can override local populations' wishes and needs.

The purpose of the organization could not be simpler: the eliminations of constraints on the flow of trade, including how a product is made, by whom it is made, or what happens after it is made. By doing so, WTO removes individual countries; and regions; ability to set standards, to express values, or to determine what they do or do not support if those standards conflict with WTO rules. (p. 120)

In all WTO rulings one common denominator prevails, and the denominator is money. (p. 129)

The severity of the challenges has spawned both awareness and action groups. Hawken gives brief discursive summaries of several dozens of these, and many more as annotated references.

The exponential assault on resources and the production of waste, coupled with the extirpation of cultures and the exploitation of workers, is a disease as surely as hepatitis or cancer. It is sponsored by a political-economic system of which we are all a part, and any finger-pointing is inevitably directed back to ourselves. There may be no particular they there, but the system is still a disease, even if we created and contracted it. Because a lot of people know we are sick and want to treat the cause, not just the symptoms, the environmental movement can be seen as humanity's response to contagious policies killing the earth, while the social justice movement addresses economic and legislated pathogens that destroy families, bodies, cultures, and communities. (p. 145)

Action groups work at different levels to promote a saner, sustainable world:
· Watch organizations - monitor governmental institutions, corporations and geographically sensitive areas
· Keeper groups - advocate for the preservation of waters and all their users
· Networks - combine the information, knowledge and action focus of like-minded groups

For example:
· The US Green Building Council (USGBC) promotes awareness of, use, and distribution of building materials that do not deplete or harm the environment.
· "Slow Food (alimento lento) is the long overdue response to dead food, processed food, fast food, agribusiness..." (p. 155)
· Microloans help to bring hardworking people out of poverty. Kiva.org brokers loans on line.

Hawken points out that every one of us bears a responsibility to participate in addressing these problems. The two basic rules to guide us must be the Golden Rule and the Sacredness of All Life. We must aim for a `zero-waste society" or better, a restorative one.

We will either come together as one, globalized people, or we will disappear as a civilization. To come together we must know our place in a biological and cultural sense, and reclaim our role as engaged agents of our continued existence. (p. 165)

I cannot recommend this book highly enough - to anyone interested in contributing to healing our modern societal illnesses and insanities and saving our world.

A book full of hope
This is a wonderfully documented guide about groups working for social justice and for bringing balance and restoring our planet's seriously damaged environment.

Among many issues, Paul Hawken tells us that fighting for those important objectives, ideology or partisan politics play a secondary role, because civilization survival is on the balance and people's direct involvement is vital.

Saving Earth and bringing social justice to all must have priority over short term goals, such as profit maximizing via externilizing costs to society.

The road for the largest social movement in history is long and full of powerful obstacles. That is why social and ecological education along with democratic participation are crucial. After all, real democracy is built from the bottom up and not the other way around, as the political establishment wants us to believe.