Paul Hawken Reflects on Working Toward Peace
We
are beginning a mythic period of existence, rather like
the age portrayed in the Bhagavad Gita or in other ancient
tales of darkness and light. We live at a time where every
living system on earth is in decline, and the rate of decline
is accelerating as our economy grows. The very practices
that bring us the goods and services we desire are destroying
the earth. Given current corporate practices, not one wildlife
reserve, wilderness, or indigenous culture will survive
the global market economy. We are losing our forests, fisheries,
coral reefs, topsoil, water, biodiversity, and climatic
stability. The land, sea, and air have been functionally
transformed from life-supporting systems into repositories
for waste.
To feel the momentum of loss is to want to close one's
eyes. Yet, to close one's eyes is to do the very thing that
will bring forth the fruits of ignorance. I believe in rain,
in odd miracles, in the intelligence that allows terns and
swallows to find their way across the earth. And I believe
we are capable of creating a remarkable future for humankind.
As much as people are causing damage, each person contains
within them the basis for hope. None of us individually
wants what we are doing collectively.
Worldwide, more than one hundred thousand nongovernmental
organizations, foundations, and citizens' groups are addressing
the issue of social and ecological sustainability in the
most complete sense of the word. Together they address a
broad array of issues, including environmental justice,
ecological literacy, public policy, conservation, women's
rights and health, population, renewable energy, corporate
reform, labor rights, climate change, trade rules, ethical
investing, ecological tax reform, water, and much more.
These groups follow Gandhi's imperatives: Some resist, while
others create new structures, patterns, and means. The groups
tend to be local, marginal, poorly funded, and overworked.
It is hard for most groups not to feel palpable anxiety-that
they could perish in a twinkling. At the same time, a deeper
pattern is emerging that is extraordinary.
If you ask each of these groups for their principles,
frameworks, conventions, models, or declarations, you will
find they do not conflict. This has never happened before
in history. In the past, movements that became powerful
started with a unified or centralized set of ideas (Marxism,
Christianity, Freud) and disseminated them, creating power
struggles over time as the core mental model or dogma was
changed, diluted, or revised. The sustainability movement
did not start this way. It does not agree on everything,
nor should it ever, but remarkably it shares a basic set
of fundamental understandings about the earth, how it functions,
and the necessity of fairness and equity for all people
in partaking of the earth's life-giving systems.
These groups believe that self-sufficiency is a human
right; they imagine a world where the means to kill people
is not a business but a crime, where families do not starve,
where fathers can work, where children are never sold, where
women cannot be impoverished because they choose to be mothers.
They believe that water and air belong to us all, not to
the rich. They believe seeds and life itself cannot be owned
or patented by corporations. They believe that nature is
the basis of true prosperity and must be honored. This shared
understanding is arising spontaneously, from different economic
sectors, cultures, regions, and cohorts. And it is absolutely
growing and spreading, with no exception, worldwide. No
one started this worldview, no one is in charge of it, no
orthodoxy is restraining it. As external conditions continue
to change and worsen socially, environmentally, and politically,
organizations working toward sustainability increase, deepen,
and multiply.
There is a difference between blind and heady optimism,
and the deep conviction that no force can counter the truths
we share and hold so deeply. This is the work of peace,
and it is rapidly becoming the work of the world.
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