One of the best lecture series online is the Long Term Thinking Series hosted by the Long Now Foundation, an organization I and others have mentioned a great deal here. For me it's personal and professional having been profoundly influenced by its founders -- especially Stewart Brand, Peter Schwartz, and Kevin Kelly -- whom I got to work with during my GBN days. As the website puts it,
the purpose of the series is to build a coherent, compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking, to help nudge civilization toward Long Now's goal of making long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare.
I've listened to most of the lectures and highly recommend them. Just last night I heard Paul Hawken's talk called the "Long Green" (October 15, 2004). I've always enjoyed hearing Paul's often caustic, clever and passionate descriptions of the state of the world and its problematic relationship to our ecology. He definitely pulls no punches. I distinctly remember a conversation with him where he convinced me that the vinyl industry was evil. It's hard not to admire him for his convictions and incredible boundary-spanning knowledge of ecology, indigenous peoples, history, and social justice.
While I've heard him quite a bit before, for this talk, the tone is quite different. As Paul states in the beginning, this is new content and territory for him -- and thus a work in progress. The idea for the talk started with Stewart Brand observing that the environmental movement has taught us a great deal about long term thinking. This is because the environment functions on long lead and long lag times, where cause and effect are hard to see because they emerge across different spatial and temporal scales, and are thus decoupled from our social and political systems, which is why we miss key ecological signals of change (we few exceptions.) Within this context, he wanted Paul to reflect on the past, present and future of the environmental movement.
I know most people don't have time to sit and listen to the whole lecture (or read this long review for that matter). But I felt that talk was important enough to summarize, together with my additions and thoughts, so pardon me if I blur the line of strict reportage. Jamais Cascio also reported on this talk shortly after it was delivered and is much more succinct, so you can check out his highlights as well.
(more...)Above all else I found these ideas very helpful in articulating more clearly this "bottom up" movement of civic action and social entrepreneurship, this Second Superpower thesis and scenario I've -- and many others in the Worldchanging community -- have been perceiving (and not so dimly.) Indeed, this is exactly why we're here: as we've said in our tagline, another world is already. Paul Hawken is just adding another powerful voice and his resources to making sure that we see it.
End of the World Scenarios
We're awash in n-time scenarios these days, starts Paul. Both Abrahamic religions -- Christianity and Islam -- have in their scriptures strong visions of Armageddon and the end of the world. And while Hindus see time as being cyclical, they also have what they call the Kaligua phase (sp?) where the world heads into a downward spiral of destruction. Interestingly enough, the Kaligua gets the "prophetic nod" in its quirky list of indicators predicting the on-set of this phase, including things like: food becoming tasteless (check), young girls becoming mothers (check), old men becoming youthful (viagra, check), and this list goes on! Perversely amusing.
We're awash in these apocalyptic visions because fundamentalist factions of these religions believe (and/or employ for their power plays ) a belief that the time for reckoning is nigh. Like perfect mirrors of each other -- or using Paul's metaphor, like isomorphs -- both believe the other is the culprit. The Christian Right in the US, and a view strongly represented within the Administration, has it that with Al Qaeda as his army Osama bin Laden is as close as we're going to get as the Antichrist. Whereas the fundamentalist Islamic sects believe that Osama is the Mahdi, their new prophet, who is going to chase out the infidels from the Middle East and recapture the lost territory of Andalusia.
The green movement, by contrast, are very much of this world. They are the stay behinds and by choice. They are the people who don't want the world to end. They don't want to leave. But they are also not happy with the landlords of the planet and their upkeep of the place. These are people who have a deep sense of continuity with this place we call Earth. These people believe that the best way to ensure a better future for their offspring -- and the offspring they'll never see in generations to come -- is by taking care of one's habitat. Empirical evidence throughout human history and evolution seems to support this case in spades. Just read Jared Diamond's latest book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,
A Brief Intellectual History of the Environmental Movement
Paul then gives a quick tour de force of the history of the environmental movement, albeit through a US-centric and Western-bent lens. (As he points out, Japan, China and India have had their movements too.) He focuses on the early years. Those seminal pioneers in the mid and late 1800s and early 1900s. He mentions the Luddite movement in Industrializing Britain, the ideas of Ruskin, Thoreau, John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt, the founding of the Sierra Club, and the tremendous public backlash to the cutting of the "Mother of the Forest" tree in Yosemite before it was a national park.
In tracing the genealogy of these ideas, he highlights a number of tensions that persist to this day within the "mega fauna of environmental organizations". For instance, the philosophical divide between Emerson's vision in "On Nature" which makes the connection between self and nature, and Marsh's view in "Man and Nature" which describes the interdependence between man and society but clearly keeps man on top of the pecking order. Emersonian organizations tend to be smaller, poorly funded, but are faster acting and more activist oriented and progressive. Friends and the Earth is an example. Marshian organizations are larger, well funded, more conservative and mainly rich white people, often with a hunting background. The Natural Conservancy and Environmental Defense Fund are examples of this group.
The legacy of this is that the Marshians are dominating the interest group power structures still. And while this may be changing, however slowly, policy makers and economists still insist on putting the environment as a subset of the economy, instead of placing the economy firmly within the broader circle of the environment. They do so even when faced with inescapable fact that without a healthy environment no economy can function, something that the Chinese leaders for instance know only too well. Who would have thunk that the Communists would become ecologists before the Capitalists?
Unlike other movements, the environmental movement is partly based on science. This doesn't mean emotions and other ways of knowing don't play a role, like indigenous practices, although there are certainly tensions there. The strategy of focusing on charismatic animals like dolphins and panda bears played a big role in making the movement more mainstream, but at the cost of less telegenic keystone species.
Like any other movement, however, it has specialized over time. Eventually this becomes counter productive, getting in the way of interconnection. Hence we see the environmental movement cutting off and ignoring other time-based disciplines such as anthropology, archeology, and historical preservationists.
After speeding through the 20th century, mentioning Carson's "Rites of Spring" and Dana Meadows, Paul Hawken wryly notes that not one Native American is mentioned in his list of notable thinkers and activists. To illustrate his point, he tells a sickening story of the now extinct Yamana or Yaghan people in Patagonia, a people who Magellan dubbed "beasts from hell" when he first spotted them on shore. Of course, years later, after we hunted and killed them to extinction, it was discovered that the Yamana people have one of the most rich and complex languages on the planet with far more verbs than English. This was a "local science" to quote Stewart Brand, with much knowledge embedded in it. For instance, the Yamana word for depression literally meant a crab whose shell is molting but is struggling to shed it. Paul's point is that for the Yamana people nature, the self, society were never separated as they have been in Western culture.
The Movement Without A Name
So, Paul concludes: environmentalism emerged from great alienation and separation. Today, the environment movement has effectively gone, he argues. It has morphed into something else, something that is a subset of a much larger movement. Social justice and environmentalism are coming together, for instance. People are not seeing the problem as just a resource flow issue, but also a quality of life and diversity problem. As we get a more sophisticated way of seeing the world, we're starting to see connections between poverty, disease, and private sector patterns towards resources. So this is a movement that spans a mind-boggling array of issues -- everything from indigenous rights, to immigration, to ecotoxcity, to emissions controls, to alternative healthcare, to restoration ecology, etc. It's becoming clear that these issues are connected in a deep structural way. And, to quote exactly, this has something to do with "humanitys collective immune response to resist and heal political disease, economic infection, and ecological corruption caused by ideologies."
Yes, wow! That's powerful language and the description resonates deeply. David T. Suzuki and Holly Dressel make a similar case in their excellent, "Good News for a Change: How Everyday People are Helping the Planet."
Paul argues that this is the largest movement in the world and growing. There are at least 130,000 groups at minimum, but they could be off by a factor or 2 or 4 in measuring this. A half million groups could easily exist today. These are self-healing, civic groups -- some large, some small -- and they are in every country around the world. There are so many groups that even leaders like Paul can't keep track of them, although he is trying to study them at his new organization, The Natural Capitalism Institute, which is a direct offshoot of his book, "Natural Capitalism" which he coauthored with Amory and Hunter Lovins and "The Ecology of Commerce". What's clear is that this is bigger than anything else around. Bigger than Al Qaeda, bigger than the Catholic Church, bigger than the Neoconservative agenda.
(Another cross-reference: David Bornstein makes a similar case in How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas
Of course, the trouble is this movement can't be named yet; it's too early, so much so, that he cautions against categorizing too much. And Paul points out, this is not too unusual in the grand scheme of things. For instance, it wasn't until 1876 when Spengler named the Industrial Age, which had been going on for 175 years before that without any difficulties.
Mainstream Myopia
A good question is why is this not more visible to the mainstream? While it's clearly visible to Worldchangers, part of the problem is that this is so new and historically unprecedented that it's beyond the mental maps of most mainstream players. As cognitive science research has proven, large groups of people routinely fail to perceive things that are unfamiliar, even if they are plainly evident.
Another reason why this movement isn't being detected is that it's very distributed, non ideological (or has many ideologies), and has no clear hierarchical leaders. This movement also doesn't seek power but rather seeks to dismantle the current power structures. (Perhaps a bit naive here but I see his point.) Some in this movement believe the type of political power today is unnecessary and should be illegal. This is what makes this movement so different and unique: no movement has emerged without a codified ideology and without a central system at its core. By contrast, the 20th century was dominated by big ideologies -- capitalism, socialism, fascism --which demanded unreflective loyalty in our beliefs and preyed on our inner sensibilities. These "isms" all told us that salvation was found in a single system, whereas everything we've learn from nature and ecology tells us that health and stability comes through diversity.
Of the parts that are seen -- say the World Social Forum-- they are labeled by the media as fringe elements, ex-hippies, liberals, anti-corporate, no logo, etc. While all of this may be true, this means this movement is consistently misunderstood. While the mainstream often points out that this movement couldn't possibly amount to much because they are a ramshackle of interests and groups, what they don't see is the shared underlying values that informs this group. They also don't understand the power of bottom-up, self-organizing dynamics. Paul argues that this group is going to win at the end of the day because it has better technologies, better ideas, and is unstoppable because of the vitality and joy driving this movement. This is the Long Green -- and it will be the dominant force of 21st century.
Rough Waters Ahead
Paul ends up very gloomy in the Q&A, which isn't unusual (and probably not unwarranted either). He has a scientific mind and a big heart for the planet and its' peoples. As he puts it, if you look at the data and you're not pessimistic, you're NOT looking at the data clearly. He argues were heading into an age of tremendous resource constraints and with corresponding depopulation. Citing the study on rapid climate change which Peter Schwartz helped lead where the best case scenario was still a nasty one for this century, Paul believes that climate change will be the ultimate driver of frugality and attention.
Most poignantly, Paul believes that in the next century we will become homeless. We'll see such changes in our climate that we wont be able to recognize the places in which we live in. Our homes will be beyond our recognition. Having said that, Paul makes a beautiful distinction. While he cant really be optimistic on the future based on current trends, he can be hopeful when he looks at the humans involved. We all have an amazing capacity to heal, he said, both within ourselves and our surroundings. With millions and millions of people trying to restore this place that we love, this may catalyze the perceptual change we need. Amen to that. Thanks Paul for these words.
