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Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming

av Paul Hawken

MedlemmarRecensionerPopularitetGenomsnittligt betygOmnämnanden
8341225,943 (3.73)15
Blessed unrest tells the story of a worldwide movement that is largely unseen by politicians or the media. Hawken, an environmentalist and author, has spent more than a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person causes, these organizations collectively comprise the largest movement on earth. This is a movement that has no name, leader, or location but is in every city, town, and culture. It is organizing from the bottom up and is emerging as an extraordinary and creative expression of people's needs worldwide.… (mer)
  1. 00
    Thriving Beyond Sustainability: Pathways to a Resilient Society av Andres R. Edwards (JanesList)
    JanesList: Edward's book is in the same vein as Hawken's, but is a bit easier to read, and contains more information about things you can do to be involved.
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I do want to read more recent books by Hawken.
Not sure whether I was put off by the latent eco-colonialism (that was common at the time this book was written and for near a decade after) or because it was challenging me and my views so much I just couldn't emotionally deal at the time. ( )
  zizabeph | May 7, 2023 |
This book is about... well, I am not completely sure what. Nominally, it is about "the movement" which is the joint effect of the various diverse and dispersed environmental and social justice groups throughout the world. However, the book tends to ramble all over, so it is hard to get a point from the book beyond these groups exist, they encompass lots of people, and they are a source of hope, even as things seem grim.

So the book gets only an "okay" from me for being rambly, but it does have lots of inspiring quotes. "The movement", as Hawken calls it, is very diverse, and throughout the book Hawken discusses why this is a healthy tendency. Many of the inspiring quotes have to do with the nature and importance of diverse, dispersed decision making. I have included my favorites below.

Bottom of page 16:
Ecologists and biologists know that systems achieve stability and healthy through diversity, non uniformity. Ideologues take the opposite view.
I like this quote because it brings to the fore that not only does everyone have a right to their own opinion; everyone having diverse opinions may very well make for a healthier system. By drawing the parallel to ecological systems, it makes one think about how uniform belief systems are more susceptible to sudden massive failures.

Page 21-22:
he was one of the first to recognize the dispersed nature of knowledge and the effectiveness of localization and of combining individual understanding. Since one person's knowledge can only represent a fragment of the totality of what is known, wisdom can be achieved when people combine what they have learned. ... viable social institutions had to evolve ... to confront the problems at hand rather than reflect theories at mind. ... a remedy for the basic expression of the totalitarian impulse: ensuring that information and the right to make decisions are co-located. To achieve this, one can either move the information to the decision makers, or move decision making rights to the information.
This quote emphasizes how top down decision making has a fatal flaw: there is no way that the centralized decision maker can have all of the relevant information. Furthermore, the centralized decision maker, because they are often far from the scene the decision applies to, may be applying rigid, incorrect theories in their decision making. Better decisions can be made if the power to make decisions is given to those who have the information to make decisions. Having many informed groups make smaller, more localized decisions is likely to produce more relevant results.

Page 131:
You can try to determine the future, or you can try to create conditions for a healthy future. To do the former, you must presume to know what the future should be. To do the latter, you learn to have faith in social outcomes in which citizens feel secure, valued, and honored.
Openness, freedom, and democracy require great trust and great humility. They require the ability the admit that a dispersed and uncontrolled set of people may be right and the decision you would make may be wrong. You also have to learn to trust that this decentralized process will come to decisions that are appropriate.

Page 132:
Just as democracies require an informed and active citizenry to prevent abuse, markets require constant tending to prevent them from being diverted or exploited. A free market, so lovely in theory, is no more feasible in practice than a society without laws. Democracies can sustain freedom because their citizens and representatives continually adjust, maintain, and as necessary enforce standards, rules, and laws. Markets are unequaled in providing feedback, fostering innovation, and allocating resources. Market competition is ultimately a matter of financial capital: those activities that most efficiently accrete and concentrate money gain market advantage; those that don't are marginalized. But there is no comparable competition to improve social or natural capital, because markets for such commodities simply don't exist. The only way those issues are dealt with is through legislation, regulation, citizen activity, and consumer pressure. Removing the laws and regulations that create market constraints leaves the body politic with very few means to promote economic democracy.
This quote is a good summary of why I do not believe the market alone is enough to make a good world. The market is good at what it does. It efficiently moves around money. Certainly, it might be even more efficient at doing so if it were unregulated. However, the market does not efficiently deal with everything. In particular, what Hawkens calls social and natural capital. This is not to say the market ignores such things, but sometimes it needs a push to be reminded that money is not the most important thing there is. What I like about this quote is that Hawkens acknowledges that the checks on the market can and should come from a variety of forces.

Page 154-155:
"If you have children, I don't see how you can fail to do everything in your power to ensure that you win your bet, and that they, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren's grandchildren, will inherit a world whose perfection can never be accomplished by creatures whose imagination for perfecting it is limitless and free"
Hawkens quotes this from an article by Michael Chabon called "The Omega Glory". I like this quote because the attitude is not that we ought to save the planet for future generations, but that our connection to future generations makes leaving a livable planet for them a desirable end.

Page 162 near the top:
Ideologies exclude openness, diversity, resiliency, and multiplicity, the very qualities that nourish life in any system, be it ecosystem, immune system, or social system. ... Ideas are living things; they can be changed and adapted, and can grow. Ideas do not belong to anyone, and require no approval.
More about the importance of letting ideas reflect reality rather than only accepting reality in so far as it conforms to your ideas.

Page 171-172:
By definition, evolution produces creatures and systems that have the greatest ability to persist over time, and resilience allows an organism to withstand the greatest range of disturbances. This is as true for social systems as it is for environmental ones, for governments and corporations as it is for fisheries and reefs. The more resilient a system, the more shocks and impacts it can withstand and still recover. Conversely, as systems lose diversity and thus functional redundancy, they become vulnerable to disruption or collapse.
This quote promotes diversity in organizations as well as in ideas. Having a variety of organizations makes the overall system stronger in the face of crises (the recycling business is great when the environment gets weak). Hawken sees diversity as one of the strengths of "the movement". People in the various organizations that make up this movement disagree on means so they are always trying different things, making someone more likely to find something that works.

Page 179:
The opposite of learning is a runaway system where mistakes are relegated to file cabinets and ignored. When a government, corporation, financial institution, or religious organization insulates itself, its initiatives, however well intended, create uncontrolled outcomes and second-order effects that generate newer problems.

If mistakes are hidden, they cannot be learned from. Ideas that seem good may have unexpected negative side effects. That is okay. No one could have anticipated them, and they should be treated as a learning experience. Note that laws that are useless and just make things worse just so as not to be seen as soft on crime is not the way to learn from mistakes. ( )
  eri_kars | Jul 10, 2022 |
The idea of this book was interesting - comparing the network/existence of many small activist groups to the immune system of the biosphere - the execution was difficult to read, with enough fact checking problems and unsupported statements to make me uncomfortable about his depiction of the history and global span of interconnected movements (social justice, environmental, cultural preservation, etc...) The second part of the book analyzes the database that the author is involved with: wiserearth.org and that is pretty interesting and worth taking a look at. ( )
  cindywho | May 27, 2019 |
Couldn't get into it, sorry.
  Cheryl_in_CC_NV | Jun 5, 2016 |
Very inspiring and reassuring book. The world's really messed up, but their are millions of people working on solutions. Even better their shared environment is enough to produce a shared set of values, even though there's little communication between everyone. The beauty of self-correcting social systems. ( )
  willszal | Jan 3, 2016 |
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A Native American taught me that the division between ecology and human rights was an artificial one, that the environment and social justice movements addressed two sides of a single larger dilemma. The way we harm the earth affects all people, and how we treat one another is reflected in how we treat the earth. p 2
When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science that describes what is happening on earth today and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t have the correct data. If you meet the people in this unnamed movement and aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a heart. What I see are ordinary and some not-so-ordinary individuals willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in an attempt to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. p 4
Wrong is an addictive, repetitive story; Right is where the movement is. There is a rabbinical teaching that holds that if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, you first plant a tree and then see if the story is true. Islam has a similar teaching that tells adherents that if they have a palm cutting in their hand on Judgment Day, plant the cutting. p 4
Movements are the expression of changed attitudes, and how each person comes to realize his responsibility to a greater whole is a unique experience. pp 23-24
Luddites were artisans, highly skilled workers steeped in craft traditions who took great pride in the textiles they produced. The fundamental question posed by these weavers and croppers was, ‘What is progress without full employment?’ which has yet to be answered satisfactorily. p 60
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Blessed unrest tells the story of a worldwide movement that is largely unseen by politicians or the media. Hawken, an environmentalist and author, has spent more than a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person causes, these organizations collectively comprise the largest movement on earth. This is a movement that has no name, leader, or location but is in every city, town, and culture. It is organizing from the bottom up and is emerging as an extraordinary and creative expression of people's needs worldwide.

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