The Basis for
Hope
by
Paul Hawken
 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 non- governmental
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.
This
article was excerpted from the book:
 Architects
of Peace: Visions of Hope in Words and Images
by Michael
Collopy.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher, New World Library,
Novato, CA 94949. ©2000. www.newworldlibrary.com
Info/Order this book
About The
Author
Paul
Hawken is an entrepreneur and sustainability advocate who founded
several companies, including Smith & Hawken, the retail &
catalog gardening company. Among his books are the best-selling Growing
a Business, which accompanied a seventeen-part PBS series: The
Ecology of Commerce, which shows the potential of business and markets
to aid the environment; and most recently Natural Capitalism, with Amory
Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins. He has served as cochair of the Natural
Step, which sets environmental standards for businesses, and currently
works as a consultant on sustainability with corporations, governments,
and institutions. Visit the author's websites at www.naturalstep.org
& www.naturalcapitalism.org.
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