The Movement with No Name: How the Largest Social and Environmental Force in All of Human History is Re-Imagining the World from the Bottom Up

By Paul Hawken

Over the past 15 years, I have given nearly 1,000 talks about the environment, and every time I have felt like a tightrope performer struggling to maintain perfect balance. To be sure, people are interested to know what is happening to their world, but no speaker wants to leave an audience depressed, no matter how frightening a future is predicted by studies that outline the rate of environmental loss. To be sanguine about the future, however, requires a plausible basis for constructive action: You cannot describe possibilities for that future unless the present problem is accurately defined.

Bridging the chasm between the two was always a challenge, but audiences kindly ignored my intellectual vertigo and in time provided me with ways to overcome this challenge. After every speech, a smaller crowd would gather to talk, ask questions and exchange business cards. These people were typically working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights. They came from the non-profit and non-governmental 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 unfair trade policies, worked to green inner cities and taught children about the environment. Quite simply, they had dedicated themselves to trying to safeguard nature and ensure justice. Although this was the 1990s and the media largely ignored them, in those small meetings I had a chance to listen to their concerns. They were students, grandmothers, teenagers, tribal members, business people, architects, teachers, retired professors and worried mothers and fathers.

I would get from five to 30 such cards per speech, and after being on the road for a week or two would return home with a few hundred of them 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 the scope and diversity of what these groups were doing on behalf of others. Later, I would store them in drawers or paper bags as keepsakes of the journey.

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