On the nature of the new social movements

From an interview of Paul Hawken:

(of whom we also strongly recommend this wonderful commencement address, given to Portland students)

* You write about how this evolving movement will look very different from movements of the past.

There’s no charismatic leader, no center. It’s not ideological. That’s often lost in the reporting of it, because what’s reported is the resistance point of a group saying, “Stop. Don’t.” That becomes an interesting event from a media point of view. What goes unreported is the innovation, design, engineering, and social technologies. This is a movement of ideas. And sometimes ideas don’t work and you try another one and that works, and then you try and figure out how to make it work better. It’s an iterative, evolutionary process. It’s tens of thousands of ideas with respect to water, buildings, cities, poverty, women, education, climate and carbon neutrality. You can’t sum them up because they appear all over the place. But they actually do all point north toward a very different world than the one we live in now.

* You suggest that the politics of the future are really about fostering unusual alliances that revolve around ideas. Strange bedfellows—evangelicals aligning with environmentalists, for example. Are you seeing this elsewhere?

Yes. At the same time, we find out that we’re not strange bedfellows. We’re human beings and what estranged us is far less important and almost meaningless compared to what is meaningful now. You’re seeing Wal-Mart, for example, quite authentically—and I don’t care what someone else says about them—they’re very committed to 100% renewable energy and a lot of other things that they have not talked about yet. Well, who would’ve thought it? Is that a strange bedfellow or just the American people awakening to core values that now need to be expressed?

* This goes back to what you wrote about in The Ecology of Commerce. At the time it seemed an oxymoron to combine those two ideas of nature and business. You were among the first writers who tied sustainability to commerce.

I was and I didn’t get a lot of support at the time. But this week’s cover story of Business Week is called “Beyond the Green Corporation” and the first line is, “Imagine a world in which eco-friendly and socially responsible practices actually help a company’s bottom line.” That’s the opening line of the lead story of Business Week. Fourteen years after The Ecology of Commerce was published. When it was published, not a single business publication here would review it. It was reviewed, by the way, but editors wouldn’t publish the reviews.

* You write about the loss of the public commons and the rise of the creative intellectual commons. Much of this activity is coming from young designers who are sharing software, sharing research, sharing design. Still, the marketplace seems to foster manufacturer paranoia about being knocked off. How would you change this?

I don’t know how I would change it, but it certainly is changing. There’s just a different ethos arising. We’re moving from a world created by privilege—which is a top down world—to one created by community, which is a bottom up world. And that’s going to be true for everything—money, design, planning cities, information, politics. It’s an amazing threshold that we stand upon. The rate of change right now fosters and foments the open source model, because it’s evolutionary. The proprietary model is not. We’re moving to a period, in ecological terms, called perturbation. One hundred twenty five mile per hour winds in Poland and Czechoslovakia last night. That’s so bizarre as to be unthinkable and yet at the rate we’re going that will be 160 miles per hour ten years from now. In a period of perturbation you get a rapid rate of evolution. And that’s what we’re going into. It is exciting, dynamic, hair-raising. It’s the stroke of midnight for the rest of our lives.”