Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Going to the Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies

Leigh's and my invitations to the Nobel Peace Prize events next week arrived today. I did service in Norway at (and before) election time and on the evening before the inauguration in January -- I suppose as the closest thing to an Obama cousin as could be found. There was, particularly in those months, much interest here in Obama and inevitable comparisons to FDR, who is remembered and honored here with enormously high regard and gratitude. 

I'm still full of hope for this president, as well as pride in his election; I don't agree with those here and elsewhere who fault Obama's choice by the Nobel committee. The challenges he faces, the trade-offs that must be made in our deeply flawed system of oligarchical democracy, are daunting. I look forward to meeting him and to hearing his address. I feel honored to be invited.

50th Reunion Book, Amherst College, 2010

In 500+ words, a summary of one's life, view of the world and the impact of Amherst:

The poet David Wagoner was 28 when, at his friend Theodore Roethke’s suggestion, he moved from his Indiana homeland to the Pacific Northwest. He was awestruck by the green luxuriance of life. “When I came over the Cascades and down into the coastal rainforest for the first time in the fall of 1954, it was a big event for me, it was a real crossing of a threshold, a real change of consciousness. Nothing was ever the same again.”

I didn’t travel as far – just a few miles down the Notch road, in fact. But I felt a similar new life in the offing at about the same age, when I resigned my faculty position at Amherst to join the intrepid little band just down the road in the apple orchards of South Amherst, preparing to give birth to Hampshire College.

Mapping those liminal or threshold times is one way I’ve imagined the character and consistency of my life. It serves in this instance to say something that must be true in a sense for all of us.  The four years from the fall of 1956 to the spring of 1960 were an extended coming-of-age experience, with attendant pains, pleasures, accomplishments and missings of the mark.

The first months at Amherst were mostly excruciating. I did my shame-ridden best to hide the fright, but my skills of hiding seemed – to me, at least – to have deserted me with all the rest. Everything felt stripped away but the soft underbelly. At Thanksgiving I told my mother I was going to join the Army; it had to be more forgiving of my deficiencies.

My mother thought not, and I returned to Amherst. A kind of competence began to take hold, and an interest in the wider world reawakened – especially at that time the world of politics, my Roosevelt family’s delight and pride, bread and butter of the dinner table. Alongside a few Amherst friends and memorable teachers – foremost, Henry Steele Commager and Leo Marx – my real mentor was my grandmother, whose home became mine in those years. Her compassion and canny wisdom, her belief in the United Nations, social justice and human rights, fed me and shaped my values and choices. I didn’t begin my undergraduate years with social conscience or consciousness, at least none focused or articulate. Thanks largely to her I graduated with some measure of both.

For me, Amherst seemed – and seems still – effectively to have done what it promised, or at least that which the College most prized. I learned how to think more carefully and usefully, to apply discipline, practice, and the rules of evidence to the intellectual challenges I encountered, to find satisfaction in words that fit what I needed to describe and understand.  

God knows – and my mother, sister and girlfriends knew – I didn’t grow up. Emotionally I was as callow a youth at 21 as at I’d been at 17. For me at least, and I think for the Amherst culture I knew, maturity in that deeper sense was not among the liberal arts. I later sought, with middling success, to make it so in my designs for Hampshire College.                 

Speaking of God, while I learned something about the application and misapplication of imagination and metaphor in those years, I learned next to nothing about their essential applicability to spiritual life. Intuitively I knew otherwise, but I didn’t find my way until later to those who would reawaken that hunger, help me understand that religion was more than the blessing of a no longer required attendance at Chapel. Soul and psyche – the central re-pairing of my adult years of teaching and learning at Hampshire and after – hadn’t yet come into conscious focus.

We’re born yearning for companionship and community, and I’m still growing in their realization. My wife and I now live and work as members of a gifted community of healing in southern Norway - psychiatric hospital, research institute, community outreach program for couples and families, pastoral and professional retreat centers for clergy, physicians, psychologists and nurses.

This past March all of my immediate family – Leigh and I, four children and their spouses, and seven grandchildren – gathered on a Pacific Northwest shore, my birthplace, to celebrate Grandpa’s 70 years. My first great-grandchild - a girl, we already know - is expected at Christmas time. I worry a lot about the state of the earth; I’m very happy to anticipate sharing it with her.

Obama's opposition

Frank Rich does all of us a service in the following NY Times op-ed article today, as he seeks to identify the sources and character of a minority but significant populist libertarian opposition to - approaching hatred of - Barack Obama, an opposition that is palpably racist but isn't only fueled by racism.

Obama inherited the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, one that continues to frighten and anger ordinary Americans, who continue to lose jobs, health care and homes, and he hasn't demonstrably succeeded in his goal of making American lives more secure. I'm convinced that is his goal, but it's hard to see it in the context of gutted health care reform, absence of Wall Street regulation, and terrible ongoing - now seemingly endless - war.

It's easier to see that the United States continues to have a government that is functionally more oligarchic than democratic, severely constrained if not thoroughly dominated by wealthy corporate elites with powerful vested interests in a deeply inequitable status quo. 

______________________

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September 20, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

Even Glenn Beck Is Right Twice a Day

By FRANK RICH

IF only it were just about the color of his skin.

With all due respect to Jimmy Carter, the racist component of Obama-hatred has been undeniable since the summer of 2008, when Sarah Palin rallied all-white mobs to the defense of the “real America.” Joe Wilson may or may not be in that camp, but, either way, that’s not the news. As we watched and rewatched the South Carolina congressman’s star turn, what grabbed us was the act itself.

What made the lone, piercing cry of “You lie!” shocking was that it breached a previously secure barrier. It was the first time that the violent rage surging in town-hall meetings all summer blasted into the same room as the president. Wilson’s televised shout was tantamount to yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater. When he later explained that his behavior was “spontaneous” rather than premeditated, that was even more disturbing. It’s not good for the country that a lawmaker can’t control his anger at Barack Obama. It gives permission to crazy people.

The White House was right not to second Carter’s motion and cue another “national conversation about race.” No matter how many teachable moments we have, some people won’t be taught. (Though how satisfying it would have been for Obama to dismiss Wilson, like the boorish Kanye West, as a “jackass.”) But there is a national conversation we must have right now — the one about what, in addition to race, is driving this anger and what can be done about it. We are kidding ourselves if we think it’s only about bigotry, or health care, or even Obama. The growing minority that feels disenfranchised by Washington can’t be so easily ghettoized and dismissed.

Many of those Americans may hate Obama, but they don’t love the Republican establishment either. Michael Steele, who was declared persona non grata at one of the mad “tea parties” in April, was not invited to that right-wing 9/12 March on Washington last weekend. There were no public encomiums for McCain or Bush. No Senate leader spoke to the gathering, and perhaps only Palin and Ron Paul would have been welcome from the ranks of what passes for G.O.P. presidential timber. If there was a real hero to this crowd, it was the protest’s most prominent promoter, the radio and TV talker Glenn Beck.

Time put Beck on its cover this week. Man of the Year may not be far behind. Beck is not, as many liberals assume, merely the latest incarnation of Rush Limbaugh. He is something different. That’s why he is gaining on his antecedents — and gaining traction in the country’s angrier precincts.

Though Beck’s daily Fox News show is in the sleepy slot of 5 p.m., his ratings are increasingly neck and neck with the prime-time tag team of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, and he has beaten them in the prized 25-to-54 demographic. It’s not just because he is younger (45). This self-described “rodeo clown,” who wells up with tears for dramatic effect, doesn’t come across as cranky or pompous, like Limbaugh and O’Reilly. A fervent Mormon convert and proselytizer, he is untainted by association with the old Dobson-Robertson-Reed religious right. Unlike Limbaugh, he bonds with his fallible listeners by openly and repeatedly owning up to his own mistakes, including his history of drug and alcohol abuse. Unlike Hannity, he is not a Republican apparatchik.

Beck has notoriously defamed Obama as a “racist,” but the race card is just one in his deck. His ideology, if it can be called that, mixes idolatrous Ayn Rand libertarianism with bumper-sticker slogans about “freedom,” self-help homilies and lunatic conspiracy theories. (He fanned Internet rumors that FEMA was establishing concentration camps before tardily beating a retreat.) It’s the same crazy-quilt cosmology that could be found in last weekend’s Washington protest, where the marchers variously called Obama a fascist, a communist and a socialist, likening him to Hitler, Stalin, Castro and Pol Pot. They may not know that some of these libels are mutually exclusive. But what they do know is that they need a scapegoat for what ails them, and there is no one handier than a liberal, all-powerful president (who just happens to be black).

Beck captures this crowd’s common emotional denominator — with appropriately overheated capital letters — in his best-selling book portraying himself as a latter-day Tom Paine, “Glenn Beck’s Common Sense.” Americans “know that SOMETHING JUST DOESN’T FEEL RIGHT,” he writes, “but they don’t know how to describe it or, more importantly, how to stop it.” This is right-wing populism in the classic American style, as inchoate and paranoid as that hawked by Father Coughlin during the Great Depression and George Wallace in the late 1960s. Wallace is most remembered for his racism, but he, like Beck, also played on the class and cultural resentment of those sharing his view that there wasn’t “a dime’s worth of difference” between the two parties.

Now, as then, a Dixie-oriented movement like this won’t remotely capture the White House. Now, unlike then, it is a catastrophe for the Republicans. The old G.O.P. Southern strategy is gone with the wind. The more the party is identified with nasty name-calling, freak-show protestors, immigrant-bashing (the proximate cause of Wilson’s outburst at Obama) and, yes, racism, the faster it will commit demographic suicide as America becomes ever younger and more diverse. But Democrats shouldn’t be cocky. Over the short term, the real economic grievances lurking beneath the extremism of the Beck brigades can do damage to both parties. A stopped clock is right twice a day. The recession-spawned anger that Beck has tapped into on the right could yet find a more mainstream outlet in a populist revolt from the left and center.

“Wall Street owns our government,” Beck declared in one rant this July. “Our government and these gigantic corporations have merged.” He drew a chart to dramatize the revolving door between Washington and Goldman Sachs in both the Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner Treasury departments. A couple of weeks later, Beck mockingly replaced the stars on the American flag with the logos of corporate giants like G.E., General Motors, Wal-Mart and Citigroup (as well as the right’s usual nemesis, the Service Employees International Union). Little of it would be out of place in a Matt Taibbi article in Rolling Stone. Or, we can assume, in Michael Moore’s coming film, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” which reportedly takes on Goldman and the Obama economic team along with conservative targets.

Unlike liberal critics of capitalist inequities, of course, Beck and his claque are driven by an over-the-top detestation of government. Washington is always the enemy, stealing their hard-earned money to redistribute it to the undeserving and shiftless poor (some of whom just happen to be immigrants or black). Though there is nothing Obama can do to stop racists from being racist, he could help stanch the economic piece of this by demonstrating how a reformed government can at times actually make Americans’ lives better. That’s what F.D.R. did, and that’s the promise Obama made, swaying some Republicans and even some racists, during the campaign.

Too many Americans are impatiently waiting for results. It’s hard to argue that the stimulus package reviled by big government-loathers is a success when unemployment continues to rise and most Americans feel none of the incipient “recovery” spotted by Ben Bernanke. The potential dividends to be gained at the end of the protracted health care debate also remain, for now, an abstraction to many who have lost and are continuing to lose their jobs, their savings and their homes.

Nor has Obama succeeded in persuading critics on the left or right that he will do as much for those Americans who are suffering as he has for the corporations his administration and his predecessor’s rushed to rescue. To mark the anniversary of Lehman’s fall, the president gave a speech on Wall Street last Monday again vowing reform. But everyone’s back to business as usual: The Wall Street Journal reported that not a single C.E.O. from a top bank attended. The speech sank with scant notice because there has been so little action to back it up and because its conciliatory stance was tone-deaf to the anger beyond the financial district.

That same day a United States District Court judge in New York, Jed S. Rakoff, scathingly condemned the Obama Securities and Exchange Commission for letting Bank of America skate away with what Rakoff called an immoral and unjust wrist tap to settle charges that it covered up $3.6 billion paid out in bonuses when it purchased Merrill Lynch. How is this S.E.C. a change from the Clinton-Bush S.E.C. that ignored all the red flags on Bernie Madoff?

Beck frequently strikes the pose of an apocalyptic prophet, even insisting that he predicted 9/11. This summer he also started warning of domestic terrorism in the form of a new Timothy McVeigh. On this, one fears he knows whereof he speaks. For all our nation’s unfinished business on race, racism is not Obama’s biggest challenge during our unfinished Great Recession. He — and our political system — are being seriously tested by a rage that is no less real for being shouted by a demagogue from Fox and a backbencher from South Carolina.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

E.J. Dionne and David Brooks on Reinhold Niebuhr as "Obama's theologian"

A fascinating and lively program.

David Brooks, E.J. Dionne on the Legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr and the Future of Christian Realism from Speaking of Faith on Vimeo.

"What happened to our money?"

A lot of people personally, and a lot of charitable and philanthropic organizations, are asking "What happened to our money?" I think Paul Krugman has nailed a pretty good answer. The task - challenge to the Obama administration - is how to remedy the corruption Krugman identifies, which starts in the financial industry but is far more pervasive. For a more detailed account in the NYTimes, see here.

New York Times

The Madoff Economy

By PAUL KRUGMAN

December 19, 2008

The revelation that Bernard Madoff — brilliant investor (or so almost everyone thought), philanthropist, pillar of the community — was a phony has shocked the world, and understandably so. The scale of his alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme is hard to comprehend.

Paul Krugman

Yet surely I’m not the only person to ask the obvious question: How different, really, is Mr. Madoff’s tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?

The financial services industry has claimed an ever-growing share of the nation’s income over the past generation, making the people who run the industry incredibly rich. Yet, at this point, it looks as if much of the industry has been destroying value, not creating it. And it’s not just a matter of money: the vast riches achieved by those who managed other people’s money have had a corrupting effect on our society as a whole.

Let’s start with those paychecks. Last year, the average salary of employees in “securities, commodity contracts, and investments” was more than four times the average salary in the rest of the economy. Earning a million dollars was nothing special, and even incomes of $20 million or more were fairly common. The incomes of the richest Americans have exploded over the past generation, even as wages of ordinary workers have stagnated; high pay on Wall Street was a major cause of that divergence.

But surely those financial superstars must have been earning their millions, right? No, not necessarily. The pay system on Wall Street lavishly rewards the appearance of profit, even if that appearance later turns out to have been an illusion.

Consider the hypothetical example of a money manager who leverages up his clients’ money with lots of debt, then invests the bulked-up total in high-yielding but risky assets, such as dubious mortgage-backed securities. For a while — say, as long as a housing bubble continues to inflate — he (it’s almost always a he) will make big profits and receive big bonuses. Then, when the bubble bursts and his investments turn into toxic waste, his investors will lose big — but he’ll keep those bonuses.

O.K., maybe my example wasn’t hypothetical after all.

So, how different is what Wall Street in general did from the Madoff affair? Well, Mr. Madoff allegedly skipped a few steps, simply stealing his clients’ money rather than collecting big fees while exposing investors to risks they didn’t understand. And while Mr. Madoff was apparently a self-conscious fraud, many people on Wall Street believed their own hype. Still, the end result was the same (except for the house arrest): the money managers got rich; the investors saw their money disappear.

We’re talking about a lot of money here. In recent years the finance sector accounted for 8 percent of America’s G.D.P., up from less than 5 percent a generation earlier. If that extra 3 percent was money for nothing — and it probably was — we’re talking about $400 billion a year in waste, fraud and abuse.

But the costs of America’s Ponzi era surely went beyond the direct waste of dollars and cents.

At the crudest level, Wall Street’s ill-gotten gains corrupted and continue to corrupt politics, in a nicely bipartisan way. From Bush administration officials like Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who looked the other way as evidence of financial fraud mounted, to Democrats who still haven’t closed the outrageous tax loophole that benefits executives at hedge funds and private equity firms (hello, Senator Schumer), politicians have walked when money talked.

Meanwhile, how much has our nation’s future been damaged by the magnetic pull of quick personal wealth, which for years has drawn many of our best and brightest young people into investment banking, at the expense of science, public service and just about everything else?

Most of all, the vast riches being earned — or maybe that should be “earned” — in our bloated financial industry undermined our sense of reality and degraded our judgment.

Think of the way almost everyone important missed the warning signs of an impending crisis. How was that possible? How, for example, could Alan Greenspan have declared, just a few years ago, that “the financial system as a whole has become more resilient” — thanks to derivatives, no less? The answer, I believe, is that there’s an innate tendency on the part of even the elite to idolize men who are making a lot of money, and assume that they know what they’re doing.

After all, that’s why so many people trusted Mr. Madoff.

Now, as we survey the wreckage and try to understand how things can have gone so wrong, so fast, the answer is actually quite simple: What we’re looking at now are the consequences of a world gone Madoff.

A cultural cocoon

Michael Kahn reminded us recently of Arnold Toynbee’s conception of a “creative minority” culture, a cocoon that is woven beside and beyond a dominant and dying culture, nourishing the seeds of succession, life that accompanies and follows the dominant culture's failing and demise.

To speak or write of two contrasting cultures is caricature, as are the two images I sketch below. They may nonetheless be useful if they serve fairly to describe a challenge and an opportunity, as I hope they do.

Our still prevailing culture (or what I’m calling a culture) has been named the “industrial growth society” by Joanna Macy, “the military industrial complex” by Dwight Eisenhower, and just “the empire” by David Korten. Whatever its humane accomplishments, for 200 years it’s been relentlessly shutting down the essential life systems of the earth. One of those life systems is human development—the integrated growth of our bodies, hearts, minds and souls, our gifts of companionship and imagination.

Today’s dominant culture of industrial empire is pathologically adolescent rather than truly adult or mature, as if the developmental path was lost in the pre-transformative, pre-right of passage stage of adolescence. So the culture is largely egocentric, anthropocentric, hierarchical, materialistic, competitive, violent, conflict-driven, racist, sexist and ageist, riven by economic and social inequity, unsustainable and fundamentally unnatural because its relationship to the earth is instrumental or alienated, neither organic nor intimate. (I am particularly grateful here to the work of Bill Plotkin.)

The successor or alternative culture I have in mind—the cocoon or embodiment of Toynbee’s creative minority—is life-sustaining and life-nourishing. It is eco-centric (nature or earth centered) and soul-centric (let’s say imaginative, holistic, integrative, spiritual, conscious of the whole web of life). It is egalitarian and democratic, cooperative, community-based, just, compassionate and sustainable. We could call the movement, as David Korten has, a transition “from empire to earth community.”

The scope and vitality of that movement is the subject of Paul Hawken’s recent book, Blessed Unrest (2008). “Life is the most fundamental human right, and all of the movements within the movement are dedicated to creating the conditions for life, conditions that include livelihood, food, security, peace, a stable environment, and freedom from external tyranny. Whenever and wherever that right is violated, human beings rise up. Today they are rising up in record numbers, and in a collective body that is often as not more sophisticated than the corporate and governmental bodies they address" (p 67-68).

When I see compassion as describing and driving our mission and our practice, I am imagining our service to that alternative culture and that transition, and our membership in that community and movement.

A note on compassion

As many readers of Reckonings know, for many years - over 30 now - I have worked for The Christopher Reynolds Foundation. The focus of our attention has evolved during that time, but I think a spirit has remained constant. On the one hand, we of the Reynolds board have never sought to capture that spirit in words; and on the other, our conversations with each other and our dialogues with grantees during all that time are always trying to describe it in words.

During the past year, as our work on Cuba and Cuban-American relations has continued, we have begun anew to discuss our core values and our mission. This spring, as part of that ongoing dialogue, I began to take note of my own thoughts. The recent postings on Reckonings - ideas of Joanna Macy and Bill McKibben, and my responses to Paul Hawken's book Blessed Unrest - are part of that musing. So too are the following two postings, the first a suggestion that compassion is at the heart of our intention, the core substance of our gift and our practice; the second, indebted particularly to Paul Hawken and to Bill Plotkin's recent book, Nature and the Human Soul, is an effort briefly to describe the larger movement of which we experience ourselves as members.

I thought it might be useful to post abbreviated versions of these two reflections here on Reckonings, in the hope that they might provoke a discussion or elicit suggestions of additional resources we should explore. Thoughts can be added as comments here or addressed to john@reckonings.net.
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I have in mind a holistic conception of compassionate attention to healing suffering and nourishing the quality of lives, human and otherwise. At Spikenard Farm, for example, it’s a conception whose interactive components include education, the arts, farming and community building, with farm and apiary as organizational core. I can imagine other kinds of programs pursuing essentially the same conception of holistic growth and healing that aren’t on farms – they could be anywhere - schools, hospitals, libraries, churches, animal shelters and wildlife sanctuaries, penal colonies come to mind.

Could we describe a mission as informed and inspired most deeply by a spirit of compassion, expressive of the Buddhist commitment to metta or loving-kindness , or the Judeo-Christian tradition’s grounding in love of God and neighbor? The Christian contemplative Thomas Merton wrote, beautifully I think, “Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things." The word’s origin, I learn, is Middle English : via Old French from ecclesiastical Latin compassio(n-), from compati ‘suffer with.’ We could as well use the word love, or mercy, working to diminish the suffering of all sentient beings.

Nourishing compassion for self and for others is the core of mindfulness and the Buddhist practice of meditation. Compassion is essentially relational, synergistic, holistic. Empathy for others and for oneself are naturally and necessarily integrated, extensions of one another.   And in turn, psychologist Christopher Germer writes, “… as mindfulness begins to dissolve the artificial boundaries that define our separateness, we begin to experience our innate affinity with all beings.” (Germer, et al, Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, Guilford, 2005) 

Compassion can describe and comprise a mission and a practice: what we seek to embody and to nourish with our grant-making and what we might call our field work, our ongoing learning and companionship with grantees and their other companions and beneficiaries, who become then our fellows in compassionate practice.

We ourselves and our grantee-fellows-in-compassionate-practice may not use that language, but if it is our mission and our practice, and we take the time to learn about and truly know our grantee companions’ world and their practice, we can choose essentially to be in the business of nourishing the compassionate practice – and diminishing the suffering - of others. 

Some wise words from Joanna Macy

“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world—we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.”

Paul Hawken's book "Blessed Unrest," Part 2

Hawken’s central organizing theme in Blessed Unrest is the emergence, interaction and merging of three developments in American culture and history, an environmental movement, a movement for social justice, and specifically a movement for social and environmental justice for indigenous peoples and cultures. He is an especially skillful and informed student of that branch of 19th century American environmentalism for which the classic texts are Emerson’s Nature and Thoreau’s Walden, a perspective in which humankind and the natural world are of a piece, “with all divisions between them arbitrary and dangerous.” As his friend Bronson Alcott wrote, “Thoreau is himself a wood, and its inhabitants. There is more in him of sod and shade and sky lights, of the genuine mold and moistures of the green grey earth, than in any person I know.”

It is wisdom that has its deepest spiritual roots in the traditions of indigenous cultures, and that has survived and taken on new richness in the scientific world of modern ecology. Rachel Carson said in 1963 that the time has come for human beings to “admit their kinship with other forms of life… We must never forget the wholeness of that relationship. We cannot think of the living organism alone; nor can we think of the physical environment as a separate entity.”

Hawken is at his best in writing of the interconnectedness, the integrity of the strands of environmental and social activism, whether in his discussion of the Mi’kmaq people’s knowledge of the world through sound and the cycles of the moon, the environmental and human disaster in Bhopal, or a network of NGOs taking on the world’s biggest beverage company, Coca-Cola, over concerns about water pollution, toxicity, product safety and worker rights.

Paul Hawken’s concluding paragraph – introducing a preliminary collection of organizations and programs working on behalf of social, economic and environmental justice and human rights, the first embodiment of a larger database gathering on Wiser Earth (www.WiserEarth.org) is worth quoting in full.

“It is axiomatic that we are at a threshold in human existence, a fundamental change in understanding about our relationship to nature and each other. We are moving from a world created by privilege to a world created by community. The current thrust of history is too supple to be labeled, but global themes are emerging in response to cascading ecological crises and human suffering. These ideas include the need for radical social change, the reinvention of market-based economies, the empowerment of women, activism on all levels, and the need for localized economic control. There are insistent calls for autonomy, appeals for a new resource ethic based on the tradition of the commons, demands for the reinstatement of cultural primacy over corporate hegemony, and a rising demand for radical transparency in politics and corporate decision making… Everyone on earth will be an environmentalist in the not too distant future, driven there by necessity and experience… The world is a system, and it will soon be a very different world, driven by millions of communities who believe that democracy and restoration are grassroots movements that connect us to values that we hold in common.”

We are indeed “at a threshold in human existence” of the kind Hawken describes. We – and the entire natural world of which we are inextricably members – are experiencing that cascade of ecological crisis and destruction, that suffering and extinction to which he refers. I wish, at the end of such an admirable book, he was not offering such an anthropocentric vision, but he is surely right that humankind is the source of such suffering and extinction and will, as it is ameliorated and reversed, bear virtually the entire responsibility for succeeding in that creative and restorative process.

I suspect the momentum of that process will undergo a qualitative acceleration only when our largely western world of wealth and privilege is palpably, obviously in decline, only when the human suffering reaches those who still possess the wealth, the comfort and the power to compound the world’s illness or redeem it. The record thus far, for all the creativity and inspired resistance Hawken describes, is still predominately one of growing inequity and destruction. Bill McKibben, Paul Hawken and yes, millions of others are working to tip that balance, to create and restore the kind of world they so well describe. Morally and practically, I believe there is no viable alternative. In that sense we can embrace, as Hawken clearly does, those words of Joanna Macy:

“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world—we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.”

__________________________

Hawken’s central organizing theme in Blessed Unrest is the emergence, interaction and merging of three developments in American culture and history, an environmental movement, a movement for social justice, and specifically a movement for social and environmental justice for indigenous peoples and cultures. He is an especially skillful and informed student of that branch of 19th century American environmentalism for which the classic texts are Emerson’s Nature and Thoreau’s Walden, a perspective in which humankind and the natural world are of a piece, “with all divisions between them arbitrary and dangerous.” As his friend Bronson Alcott wrote, “Thoreau is himself a wood, and its inhabitants. There is more in him of sod and shade and sky lights, of the genuine mold and moistures of the green grey earth, than in any person I know.”

It is wisdom that has its deepest spiritual roots in the traditions of indigenous cultures, and that has survived and taken on new richness in the scientific world of modern ecology. Rachel Carson said in 1963 that the time has come for human beings to “admit their kinship with other forms of life… We must never forget the wholeness of that relationship. We cannot think of the living organism alone; nor can we think of the physical environment as a separate entity.”

Hawken is at his best in writing of the interconnectedness, the integrity of the strands of environmental and social activism, whether in his discussion of the Mi’kmaq people’s knowledge of the world through sound and the cycles of the moon, the environmental and human disaster in Bhopal, or a network of NGOs taking on the world’s biggest beverage company, Coca-Cola, over concerns about water pollution, toxicity, product safety and worker rights.

Paul Hawken’s concluding paragraph – introducing a preliminary collection of organizations and programs working on behalf of social, economic and environmental justice and human rights, the first embodiment of a larger database gathering on Wiser Earth (www.WiserEarth.org) is worth quoting in full.

“It is axiomatic that we are at a threshold in human existence, a fundamental change in understanding about our relationship to nature and each other. We are moving from a world created by privilege to a world created by community. The current thrust of history is too supple to be labeled, but global themes are emerging in response to cascading ecological crises and human suffering. These ideas include the need for radical social change, the reinvention of market-based economies, the empowerment of women, activism on all levels, and the need for localized economic control. There are insistent calls for autonomy, appeals for a new resource ethic based on the tradition of the commons, demands for the reinstatement of cultural primacy over corporate hegemony, and a rising demand for radical transparency in politics and corporate decision making… Everyone on earth will be an environmentalist in the not too distant future, driven there by necessity and experience… The world is a system, and it will soon be a very different world, driven by millions of communities who believe that democracy and restoration are grassroots movements that connect us to values that we hold in common.”

We are indeed “at a threshold in human existence” of the kind Hawken describes. We – and the entire natural world of which we are inextricably members – are experiencing that cascade of ecological crisis and destruction, that suffering and extinction to which he refers. I wish, at the end of such an admirable book, he was not offering such an anthropocentric vision, but he is surely right that humankind is the source of such suffering and extinction and will, as it is ameliorated and reversed, bear virtually the entire responsibility for succeeding in that creative and restorative process.

I suspect the momentum of that process will undergo a qualitative acceleration only when our largely western world of wealth and privilege is palpably, obviously in decline, only when the human suffering reaches those who still possess the wealth, the comfort and the power to compound the world’s illness or redeem it. The record thus far, for all the creativity and inspired resistance Hawken describes, is still predominately one of growing inequity and destruction. Bill McKibben, Paul Hawken and yes, millions of others are working to tip that balance, to create and restore the kind of world they so well describe. Morally and practically, I believe there is no viable alternative. In that sense we can embrace, as Hawken clearly does, those words of Joanna Macy:

“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world—we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.”

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A short bulletin from Bill McKibben on the old culture and the new

I've put together below some brief excerpts from Bill McKibben's current work, the first from his book Deep Economy (2008), a critique of the concept of economic growth and persuasive case for a new economic model based upon sustainable local economies. The second - in a sense the expression of need to which Paul Hawken in Blessed Unrest offers at least an interim response - is drawn from an essay McKibben contributed to the current issue of Yes Magazine. Bill McKibben teaches at Middlebury College and is a much admired journalist whose writing focuses primarily upon environmental issues. One of his current movement-building projects, attentive particularly to global warming, is described at 1sky.org. He has also suggested need for a vision of generosity bearing similarity to the Marshall Plan concept of Michael Lerner and the Network of Spiritual Progressives, and intriguingly, to the Christopher Reynolds Foundation's early focus on the US and China.

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"The old realism—an endless More—is morphing into a dangerous fantasy…In the face of energy shortage, of global warming, and of the vague but growing sense that we are not as alive and connected as we want to be, I think we’ve started to grope for what might come next. And just in time… [T]he new, deeper economy will be built, in pieces and from below. It’s a quiet revolution begun by ordinary people with the stuff of our daily lives.”

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"We need a movement. We need a political swell larger than the civil rights movement—as passionate and as willing to sacrifice. Without it, we’re not going to best the fossil fuel companies and the automakers and the rest of the vested interests that are keeping us from change."

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"The kind of extreme independence that derived from cheap fossil fuel—the fact that we need our neighbors for nothing at all—can’t last. Either we build real community, of the kind that lets us embrace mass transit and local food and co-housing and you name it, or we will go down clinging to the wreckage of our privatized society.

"Which leaves us with the one piece of undeniably good news: we were built for community. Everything we know about human beings, from the state of our immune systems to the state of our psyches, testifies to our desire for real connection of just the kind that an advanced consumer society makes so difficult. We need that kind of community to slow down the environmental changes coming at us, and we need that kind of community to survive the changes we can’t prevent. And we need that kind of community because it’s what makes us fully human.

"This is our final exam, and so far we’re failing. But we don’t have to put our pencils down quite yet. We’ll see."