Has anyone read "Blessed Unrest" by Paul Hawken yet?

I just found out about the idea but it's already busily terraforming my view of the coming collapse. I will cheerfully admit that I haven't even read the book yet (it's on order), but the idea is so powerful that even its baldest statement carries the weight of its importance.

The idea is that right now there is a spontaneously emerging, locally centered, leaderless movement of environmental and social justice organizations in every country and city on the face of the earth. The movement consists of two million or more of such organizations, each working on some different local issue. They are not being created or supported by any government actions, but belong entirely to civil society. It appears that they are being called forth by our increasing awareness of the planet's troubles. Hawken calls them "the largest social movement ever seen", and seems to think that they may comprise humanity's last best hope for preventing the collapse.

I think it goes deeper than that. If you accept James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis at any level, they look and behave like antibodies in Gaia's bloodstream. Called out by the electronic equivalent of chemical distress messages on the internet and other media, they perform two functions. First, as Hawken observes, they are trying to fix "The Problem", one local symptom at a time. They are independent, locally acting, leaderless and resilient, just like antibodies. However, I suspect they will perform another, potentially much more important function.

If our high-energy industrial civilization does collapse as a result of resource depletion and waste accumulation (as I strongly believe it will), humans will not go the way of the Dodo Bird. We may behave like yeast as we consume all the available resources and poison ourselves with our wastes, but we are also like cockroaches: you can't kill us all. This means that, just as Resilience Theory predicts, another cycle of civilization will arise even if we reduce this one to ashes. Unfortunately, the next time around it will be in a polluted, resource-depleted, energy-poor world. What values does a civilization need to embrace in order to prosper in such a world?

I maintain that they will need the very values promoted by the activist groups Hawken has identified: cooperation, consensus, an understanding of the unity and interdependence of the biosphere, as well as inter-gender and inter-species egalitarianism. Nurturing as opposed to exploitation, consensus as opposed to competition, cooperation as opposed to domination. These values are required in both the environmental sphere which governs human interactions with other life as well as the social sphere that governs our interactions with each other. These values are critical, whether the intention is to slow down and avert the coming collapse or to provide the seed-stock for the regrowth of a truly sustainable human presence on this planet.

A very cool thing is that the movement is already happening, and it has has been growing even while those of us who despair of the future have been weaving our apocalyptic tapestry. Even better, it's all been happening without any conscious direction or "Manhattan Project" from the powers that be. That means it may be both truly authentic and truly effective. Another wonderful characteristic is the resilience of the movement. Because there are no leaders or organization the movement as a whole can't be shut down, co-opted or discredited. Because it is local and distributed, even if governments stop one group from functioning they cannot kill the whole movement.

But the best part of all is that it empowers individual action by placing it in the context of hundreds of millions of other individual actions. One person changing their light bulbs from incandescent to compact fluorescents or deciding to compost their kitchen waste is insignificant in the face of the scale of the problem. However, when seen as part of a global movement of people all trying to make the world a better place however they can, it takes on a whole new dimension. A single drop of water does very little; a billion drops of water can carve the Grand Canyon. Mirabile dictu, we seem already to be well on our way to a billion drops of water.

Regardless of whether you think we will be able to save this cycle of civilization or not, this event is something to be treasured, celebrated and joined. Become one of Gaia's Antibodies.

For more information see:
http://www.amazon.com/Blessed-Unrest-Largest-Movement-Coming/dp/0670038520
http://lloydkahn-ongoing.blogspot.com/2007/06/paul-hawkens-new-book-blessed-unrest.html
http://greenmyplanet.blogspot.com/2007/06/paul-hawken-gathers-largest-social.html

they might embody new experiments for what comes after us. I'm of the opinion that our current civilization can only be saved by large-scale organized activity. If I'm right about that, it represents a classic weakness of highly optimized systems.

Then again, I could read his book and see if he changes my mind.

If these groups were just acting as the seed stock for what comes next, I'd agree with your characterization. However, I think they arose to try to deal with the problems existing right now, and were called up by Gaia's dis-ease. That makes them more like antibodies than like spores. I agree they'll function as spores starting within 25 years.

To forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil
is to forget ourselves.
-Mahatma Gandhi