Ian McColgin
05-25-2007, 10:33 AM
by the everenterprenurial Paul Hawken (Viking/Penguin 2007) is a wonderful book about the many many ecosystem rights/ecology rights/ democratic people's movements that are arising around our earth, from rubber tappers in the Amazon to tree planters in Africa to aboriginal rights in the antipodes and tribal fights against industrial pollution in the upper Rockies and on and on.
Of course this sort of thing has it's historical antecedants, even before Emerson the so-called Luddites - highly skilled weavers and industrially sophisticated - opposed mill mass production that produced inferior cloth, put them out of work, and enslaved children. Not to mention the french who threw their wooden clogs (sabots) into the gears. But as recently as the 1970's, when I was hired to bring a civil rights and poor people's social justice issue to the then ever so bourgoise world of Ralph Nader, earth conservation was a largely elite occupation.
Not so any longer, as Hawken tellingly demonstrates.
He also makes the significant point that this movement is not an ideology at all. It's really an ecological movement, recognizing as any ecologist recognizes, that society, like the transhuman ecosystem, benefits from bottom up diversity. Idelogues, whether neomarxist or neoconservative or neofundamentalist, seek to fit us all to the one mold of "the good."
Half the book is a brisk narrative that won't tell anyone already there very much more except, and this is huge, there are many many more of us than ever we thought.
The second half is a sort of internet search system that creates a movement version of the old Whole Earth Catalogue. Like Dave's insight about how the internet can save traditional skills, like the guy in England who makes caulking mallets, by making a global market were local markets no longer exist, so Hawkins has an insight about how democratic people's movements in Mongolia, say, learn from and draw strength from Cree efforts to detoxify their lakes and avoid the evils of World Bank development that have devastated the ecology and culture around Lake Victoria.
Hawkins estimates that there are well over 100,000 SGO's doing the work of democratic social justice earth justice, changing all the time. He has a brilliant metaphore to this movement as rather like the Earth's whole autoimmune system trying to defeat a global infection.
I most recommend this book.
G'luck
Of course this sort of thing has it's historical antecedants, even before Emerson the so-called Luddites - highly skilled weavers and industrially sophisticated - opposed mill mass production that produced inferior cloth, put them out of work, and enslaved children. Not to mention the french who threw their wooden clogs (sabots) into the gears. But as recently as the 1970's, when I was hired to bring a civil rights and poor people's social justice issue to the then ever so bourgoise world of Ralph Nader, earth conservation was a largely elite occupation.
Not so any longer, as Hawken tellingly demonstrates.
He also makes the significant point that this movement is not an ideology at all. It's really an ecological movement, recognizing as any ecologist recognizes, that society, like the transhuman ecosystem, benefits from bottom up diversity. Idelogues, whether neomarxist or neoconservative or neofundamentalist, seek to fit us all to the one mold of "the good."
Half the book is a brisk narrative that won't tell anyone already there very much more except, and this is huge, there are many many more of us than ever we thought.
The second half is a sort of internet search system that creates a movement version of the old Whole Earth Catalogue. Like Dave's insight about how the internet can save traditional skills, like the guy in England who makes caulking mallets, by making a global market were local markets no longer exist, so Hawkins has an insight about how democratic people's movements in Mongolia, say, learn from and draw strength from Cree efforts to detoxify their lakes and avoid the evils of World Bank development that have devastated the ecology and culture around Lake Victoria.
Hawkins estimates that there are well over 100,000 SGO's doing the work of democratic social justice earth justice, changing all the time. He has a brilliant metaphore to this movement as rather like the Earth's whole autoimmune system trying to defeat a global infection.
I most recommend this book.
G'luck