Something Earth-Changing is Afoot Among Civil Society - U.S. Politics Online: A Political Discussion Forum

Tethys · #1 (**permalink**) 05-08-2007

In my youth, I joined a political party, adhered to an ideological idea, believed in working towards a grand societal model for the world.

For some years now, I have observed that there was a shift in the way people thought and organised.

At times, I have felt disillusioned by a belief that the social movements of the past were defunct, and that people were preoccupied with their self-interest. But really, there are innumerable examples out there of people working to better the world in their own way, through individual and collective grassroots initiatives, with each little action somehow playing its part in creating the bigger picture without a master plan.

Today, though I still hold to my ideals, I believe it is more effective to bring about change by working with others in different ways and for different objectives. Political differences matter, but there is scope to join with people of different convictions around issues of common concern. This is especially true of the general environmental and social health of our planet.

An article by Paul Hawken I read today on the Common Dreams website articulates this phenomenon so much better than me. I am posting it for discussion in this forum because it relates to more than the environment.

Quote:

To Remake The World
Something Earth-Changing is Afoot Among Civil Society

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. They looked after rivers and bays, educated consumers about sustainable agriculture, retrofitted houses with solar panels, lobbied state legislatures about pollution, fought against corporate-weighted trade policies, worked to green inner cities, or taught children about the environment. Quite simply, they were trying to safeguard nature and ensure justice.

After being on the road for a week or two, I would return with a couple hundred cards stuffed into various pockets. I would lay them out on the table in my kitchen, read the names, look at the logos, envisage the missions, and marvel at what groups do on behalf of others. Later, I would put them into drawers or paper bags, keepsakes of the journey. I couldn’t throw them away.

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 out 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.

Describing the breadth of the movement is like trying to hold the ocean in your hand. It is that large. When a part rises above the waterline, the iceberg beneath usually remains unseen. When Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize, the wire service stories didn’t mention the network of six thousand different women’s groups in Africa planting trees. When we hear about a chemical spill in a river, it is never mentioned that more than four thousand organizations in North America have adopted a river, creek, or stream. We read that organic agriculture is the fastest-growing sector of farming in America, Japan, Mexico, and Europe, but no connection is made to the more than three thousand organizations that educate farmers, customers, and legislators about sustainable agriculture.

This is the first time in history that a large social movement is not bound together by an “ism.” What binds it together is ideas, not ideologies. This unnamed movement’s big contribution is the absence of one big idea; in its stead it offers thousands of practical and useful ideas. In place of isms are processes, concerns, and compassion. The movement demonstrates a pliable, resonant, and generous side of humanity.

And it is impossible to pin down. Generalities are largely inaccurate. It is nonviolent, and grassroots; it has no bombs, armies, or helicopters. A charismatic male vertebrate is not in charge. 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.

THERE IS FIERCENESS HERE. There is no other explanation for the raw courage and heart seen over and again in the people who march, speak, create, resist, and build. It is the fierceness of what it means to know we are human and want to survive.

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.

Inspiration is not garnered from litanies of what is flawed; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. Healing the wounds of the Earth and its people does not require saintliness or a political party. It is not a liberal or conservative activity. It is a sacred act.

Paul Hawken is an entrepreneur and social activist living in California. His article in this issue is adapted from
Blessed Unrest, to be published by Viking Press and used by permission.

© 2007 Orion Magazine
To Remake The WorldSomething Earth-Changing is Afoot Among Civil Society - CommonDreams.org - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community

Tethys

Niccolo · #2 (**permalink**) 05-08-2007

Quote:

This movement is relentless and unafraid. It cannot be mollified, pacified, or suppressed.

Anthropomorphing of memes for emotional resonance makes nice rhetoric. All-encompassing pronouncements that cannot be verified or proven are unpersuasive.

That smells like an activist propaganda campaign speech to me rather than a news report of something happening.

At any given momemt, there are probably a million 'campaigns' going on. Most of them have goals that conflict with each other.

Mark_Twain · #3 (**permalink**) 05-08-2007

Too. . .many. . .words

Tethys · #4 (**permalink**) 05-09-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mark_Twain

Too. . .many. . .words

Now, now, would Mark Twain say that?!

Tethys

Tethys · #5 (**permalink**) 05-09-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by Niccolo

Anthropomorphing of memes for emotional resonance makes nice rhetoric. All-encompassing pronouncements that cannot be verified or proven are unpersuasive.

Classical rhetoric is the art of persuasion by the spoken or written word, Niccolo (Machiavelli?).

But where do you read an anthropomorphic argument?

Are you talking about the parallels genrally made between genetics and memetics?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Niccolo

That smells like an activist propaganda campaign speech to me rather than a news report of something happening.

Yes, it’s an opinion piece, not a news item. That’s why I posted it in the Humanities forum and not in Braking News.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Niccolo

At any given momemt, there are probably a million 'campaigns' going on. Most of them have goals that conflict with each other.

Well, yes, it’s true that there is still a battle of ideas taking place out there. So, what is your point?

Tethys

SMadsen · #6 (**permalink**) 05-09-2007

Such movements only exist when, as Niccolo says, there are ideological conflicts. So, when or if the movements become non-existent does that mean that their goals have been reached or that they've been defeated?

CDavidNeely · #7 (**permalink**) 05-09-2007

Namaste,

Quote:

Originally Posted by SMadsen

Such movements only exist when, as Niccolo says, there are ideological conflicts. So, when or if the movements become non-existent does that mean that their goals have been reached or that they've been defeated?

This would be dependent. In addition, there is the possibility that sometimes the movement is enveloped by another movement with a wider reaching focus.

In Peace,
Eglaelin

Tethys · #8 (**permalink**) 05-09-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by Eglaelin

Namaste,

This would be dependent. In addition, there is the possibility that sometimes the movement is enveloped by another movement with a wider reaching focus.

In Peace,
Eglaelin

I agree, Eglaelin.

Tethys

Tethys · #9 (**permalink**) 05-09-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by SMadsen

Such movements only exist when, as Niccolo says, there are ideological conflicts.

I’m not sure if this was what Niccolo meant when he wrote:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Niccolo

At any given momemt, there are probably a million 'campaigns' going on. Most of them have goals that conflict with each other.

But, okay, SMadsen, could you please expand on your point with some examples?

Quote:

Originally Posted by SMadsen

So, when or if the movements become non-existent does that mean that their goals have been reached or that they've been defeated?

Good question.

I agree with Eglaelin, it depends. I think there would be many factors that could play a part in the dissolution of a movement. In some cases, yes, the goal could have been reached. But often, the movement evolves or shifts its scope. For example, the suffragette movement gradually disappeared after women obtained the vote, but it progressed to take on other women’s issues, and the women that were part of it also went on to join other campaigns, such as becoming involved in the peace movement, trade unions, etc.

So I am not sure that any movement that reached its goal truly ceased to exist.

And I am trying to think of a social movement that no longer exists as a result of being defeated and with no potential for revival.

Tethys

SMadsen · #10 (**permalink**) 05-09-2007

Yes, I agree. It depends.

Isn't a movement whose goal has been reached an establishment? A movement is usually only a movement as long as it can maintain an opposition to an establishment.

There are lots of social movements that no longer exist on a scale large enough to be called a movement but the chance of revival is quite an important consideration. If we consider that there will always be oppositions to the establishment then what happens when the ecological sustainability that the movement Hawkens has spotted becomes the establishment? Will movements arise that push for even more (social) sustainability and will this continue until we're back brooming each other in the trees again? Or will movements arise that push for personal liberties until we're back driving more and even larger SUV's?

And just what am I saying with this? I have no idea.

Niccolo · #11 (**permalink**) 05-09-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tethys

But where do you read an anthropomorphic argument?

Quote:

This movement is relentless and unafraid. It cannot be mollified, pacified, or suppressed.

From the OP.

This is extreme anthropomorphing. Only people can be relentless and unafraid. When such terms are applied to non-human things, it just makes the author look foolish, simplistic and unsophisticated.

Mark_Twain · #12 (**permalink**) 05-09-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by Niccolo

From the OP.

This is extreme anthropomorphing. Only people can be relentless and unafraid. When such terms are applied to non-human things, it just makes the author look foolish, simplistic and unsophisticated.

Pretend I'm the editor.

"Those in the movement are relentless and unafraid, while those who fail to see this are foolish, simplistic, and unsophisticated."

Better?

MareTranquility · #13 (**permalink**) 05-09-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by SMadsen

Yes, I agree. It depends.

Isn't a movement whose goal has been reached an establishment? A movement is usually only a movement as long as it can maintain an opposition to an establishment.

There are lots of social movements that no longer exist on a scale large enough to be called a movement but the chance of revival is quite an important consideration. If we consider that there will always be oppositions to the establishment then what happens when the ecological sustainability that the movement Hawkens has spotted becomes the establishment? Will movements arise that push for even more (social) sustainability and will this continue until we're back brooming each other in the trees again? Or will movements arise that push for personal liberties until we're back driving more and even larger SUV's?
And just what am I saying with this? I have no idea.

It doesn't have to be an either/or situation, very rarely does one movement completely dominate the landscape. Competing movements will push back and forth before finding an equilibrium which will hold for a longer or shorter period of time and the push and pull will begin again. It's called progress, I'm not sure why.

CDavidNeely · #14 (**permalink**) 05-10-2007

Namaste,

Quote:

Originally Posted by Niccolo

From the OP.

This is extreme anthropomorphing. Only people can be relentless and unafraid. When such terms are applied to non-human things, it just makes the author look foolish, simplistic and unsophisticated.

I think the problem lies in your understanding of the term.

Quote:

Anthropomorphism is the attribution of uniquely human characteristics and qualities to nonhuman beings, inanimate objects, or natural or supernatural phenomena. Animals, forces of nature, and unseen or unknown sources of chance are frequent subjects of anthropomorphosis.

According to textbook definitions what you are describing is inaccurate. We are talking about a collection of people and there is no cognitive dissonance in attributing human values to it. I would put forth the hypothesis that this would be the only way to describe such activities.

In Peace,
Eglaelin

Tethys · #15 (**permalink**) 05-10-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by SMadsen

Yes, I agree. It depends.

Isn't a movement whose goal has been reached an establishment? A movement is usually only a movement as long as it can maintain an opposition to an establishment.

I think I see what you mean but I am not sure this is always so. I think the reached goal could become part of societal norms, without the movement becoming the establishment. For instance, take the civil rights movement in the United States. One could say that it achieved many of its key goals. True enough, these once goals are now the laws and policies of the land. But the civil rights movement can’t be said to have become the establishment.

But I think there are quantative leaps and qualitative leaps in social change. The French Revolution, for example, represented a qualitative leap, whereby a movement became the establishment,I would say.

Quote:

Originally Posted by SMadsen

There are lots of social movements that no longer exist on a scale large enough to be called a movement but the chance of revival is quite an important consideration.

Exactly. I initially considered that the Nazi movement could be an example of a movement which was defeated but, though it might not today be called “a movement”, there is no basis for saying that it could not be revived.

Quote:

Originally Posted by SMadsen

If we consider that there will always be oppositions to the establishment then what happens when the ecological sustainability that the movement Hawkens has spotted becomes the establishment? Will movements arise that push for even more (social) sustainability and will this continue until we're back brooming each other in the trees again? Or will movements arise that push for personal liberties until we're back driving more and even larger SUV's?

And just what am I saying with this? I have no idea.

Well, that’s okay, I don’t have any firm ideas on this question either, but we can still have a discussion.

I don’t see social regression taking place as a result of people pushing for more social sustainability. Quite the opposite, it is more likely, in my view, that it would be a mass self-interest push which could lead to social and environmental degeneration. But I agree with MareTranquility’s point here: the back and forth push as a rule leads to equilibrium.

Tethys