The (Most) Nabobist

In his latest book Blessed Unrest, environmentalist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken, attempts to give both historical and contemporary context to the environmental and social justice movements that have proliferated this century.

His new book, BLESSED UNREST, was inspired by the countless business cards that earnest environmentalists would hand him after his lectures all over the world. After a while he had 7,000, and he wondered, “How many environmental groups are there in the world?” He began actively building a now-public database, WiserEarth.org, which includes social justice and indigenous rights organizations because he found they indivisibly overlap in their values and activities.

The database now has 105,000 such organizations. The still-emerging taxonomy of their “areas of focus” has 414 categories, amounting to a “curriculum of the 21st century”— Acid Rain, Living Wages, Tropical Moist Forests, Peacemaking, Democratic Reform, Sustainable Cities, Environmental Toxicology, Watershed Management, Human Trafficking, Mountaintop Removal, Pesticides, Climate Change, Refugees, Women’s Safety, Eco-villages, Fair Trade… Extrapolating from carefully inventoried regions to those yet to be tallied, he estimates there are over 1,000,000 such organizations in the world, adding up to the largest and fastest growing Movement in history.

This author is new to me and interestingly his last book, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution covers a topic a friend and I have been discussing. What are the necessary conditions for which progressive social reforms and the interests of the corporate world begin to align? How can we align market forces with social justice? These two books seem to be good reading for beginning to answer those questions.