The movement with no name: That’s the subject of the new book Blessed Unrest, by environmentalist, entrepreneur and author Paul Hawken. If we could trace the history, understand the connections and visualize the breadth of global efforts on behalf of social and environmental justice, he says, we would recognize the largest movement the world has ever seen.
More than just a book, Mr. Hawken’s Natural Capital Institute has also built a wiki-enabled database to catalog and network this movement. Now in password-protected beta, Wiser Earth, lists a hundred thousand organizations working in 416 areas of focus. On April 5th, Mr. Hawken and his NCI team visited the Ecotrust building in Portland, Oregon for an event called Build a WISER Commons. Here are some of his words from that day:
The reason I came to call it a movement is based on a very different set of criteria than we normally use for a movement. Usually, when we think of a movement, we think of an ideology, a belief system. We think of that belief system of having originated from a person or persons – usually one person…
A movement starts by people surrounding this set of ideas… They protect those ideas and make sure they don’t get polluted and distorted. And now, you really do have an ideology. And it becomes an –ism. And every –ism becomes a schism, without exception…
What’s interesting about this movement is that it’s completely atomized. It didn’t start in the center; it started from the outside; it started from, literally, the ground up. And this movement is about ideas, it’s not about ideology. Ideas open up possibility; ideas liberate. And ideas are always subject to change. They’re ongoing; they’re evolving. They’re up there for people to look at, and examine, and criticize.
So what you’re seeing is a movement that is very different from anything that we’ve seen before, because it’s got no centrality. There’s no leader. There may be charismatic people, but it’s not bound by charisma. It’s not about ideology; it’s not about beliefs. And no one asks anyone else for permission to be a part of the movement…
The reason it’s a movement is because if you take the values in this room and of all the groups in the database so far, and you put them up on the wall and you read them one by one, the fact is they’re all different, but they don’t contradict themselves. And that has never happened before. There is no movement on earth in our history that has arisen this way.
In recent times, the effort to weave together social and environmental movements has sometimes been called “sustainability” or “sustainable development,” but those bloodless words hardly embody the strength, courage and vision of the organizations and people they purport to serve. In Blessed Unrest, we finally hold the tale, brilliantly and lovingly told, of the most important social history of our age.
On top of this story, NCI has built WISER (World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility), which includes Wiser Earth (the structured wiki directory and networking forum), Wiser Business (a structured wiki on business practices, assessments and resources; in development), and Wiser Government. The registry and repository that sits between these projects and the open source platform on which they are built is called the Wiser Commons.
In the 2003 essay “The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head,” systems analyst James Moore highlighted the central role that internet connectivity could play in the rise of a global social movement, an “emergent democracy.” Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig was less sanguine about the internet’s prospects in his 2003 book, The Future of Ideas: “So blind are we to the possible value of a commons that we don’t even notice the commons that the internet is.” But the world is changing fast, and a few short years later, many of us blind folk are learning to see. Websites like Boing Boing are alerting internet users to the value of its open architecture, and web-savvy organizations like the Natural Capital Institute are using new technologies to build spaces in which users can connect in meaningful ways.
Connections enable communication, and the literature on the commons – from fields as diverse as sociology, natural resource management, cognitive science and more – emphasizes the critical role that communication plays in social systems. As part of Indiana University political science professor Elinor Ostrom’s presentation at the AAAS conference this February, she once again lambasted Garret Hardin’s 1968 essay “Tragedy of the Commons” for its assumption of no communication among the herdsmen who overgraze the hypothetical “pasture open to all.”
The academic literature on the commons is now being supplemented by web-based writings and online experiments in community and collaboration. For the internet offers more than just connectivity. Coding languages, technological platforms or tools, and websites can all be considered or designed as test cases for better understanding our ongoing experiment in building more collaborative, and thus more resilient, socio-economic systems. The internet is also enabling the development of powerful tools to assist specific communities of practice and place.
And, lest we forget, back in the physical world is where the real work of these movements – the blessed unrest that surrounds issues of poverty, health care, debt relief, forest and fishery management, water rights, conservation, climate change, food systems, industrial ecology, renewable energy and more – is taking place.