First Look

Blessed Unrest

By Paul Hawken
Viking, May 2007

Hawken, the renowned entrepreneur, environmentalist, author, documentarian, and visionary, brings coherence to the disparate grassroots efforts trying to save the planet in his latest book. An excerpt:

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. What I was seeing was three different types of groups--environmental, social justice, and indigenous--tentatively emerging as a global humanitarian movement arising from the bottom up.