Across the globe, an uncommon movement to seek a common good

PAUL HAWKEN, author, environmentalist and entrepreneur, is surprisingly optimistic for someone who thinks the world is falling apart.

For 40 years he has worked to change the relationship between business and the environment, becoming a leading expert on sustainability long before the word was fashionable. Among the businesses he has founded are Smith & Hawken, the gardening catalog and retail company , and, more recently, the California-based Highwater Research, which works to establish standards for and support socially responsible investing.

Our free-market economic system, he has argued, goes against science and common sense when it fails to value living systems and rewards those who destroy them with profits. Hawken, who is 63, has advised governments and corporations on environmental policy, and knows the huge transformation it will take to get the world back on track to mitigate climate change — a whole lot of algae to replace petroleum and a widespread effort to retrofit buildings, for starters.

So what renewed his sense of optimism?

In his latest book, "Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming," he examines the global movement for social and environmental change.

Hawken spent a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice, from "billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot. causes." Those millions of people comprise the largest movement on earth, and they give him confidence in the future.

At the University of Portland in May, Hawken was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters, and he delivered the speech reprinted (in shorter form) here today. By way of introduction, we asked him some questions about the themes he raised in that speech.

Q: Your speech is a kind of call to arms in the service of saving the planet. Do you think we can reach full employment of our population by focusing on healing the earth, or at least on balance more healing than stealing? What are some specific projects or steps that will get us there?

A: The only way to attain full employment is to value everything, all that is alive in nature including every human being. As soon as you discount, ignore or diminish life, you sow the seeds of economic dysfunction where income is polarized, assets are concentrated and winners are far outnumbered by losers.

If we look at our cities, the degraded environment, our shabby schools, the underpaid teachers, our impoverished soils, the wretched state of our health-care system and other indicators of genuine well-being and progress, they are all severely lacking. So the question may not be can everyone be employed? The question is: How did we create an economic system that tells us it is cheaper to destroy the earth and waste certain people? Because those are the economic signals we act on every day, unconsciously or not. How, when there is so much work to be done, so much restoration and healing, is it that 17 percent of Americans are un- or underemployed? And how is it that we are not up in arms about this? Can we design an economic system that offers abundant employment of family-wage jobs? Easily. But that would require a country that wanted justice, fairness and, yes, would sacrifice one's own wants for the good of the whole.

Q: If you were graduating from college today, what would you do with your life?

A: I would try to continue to learn every day and never stop my education. I would try not to get lured in by the trivial, the mundane, the commercial and the profane. I would spend as much time as possible outdoors. I would be sure that I would be able to sing, dance and draw. I would seek the most joyous way I could find to work on behalf of others. I would find mates who would want to join the effort, or whose efforts I could join. I would focus on an array of skills, and know how to work with my body just as much as my head. I wouldn't try to save the world; I would try to serve the world. I would read like crazy. I would avoid too much time on the Internet, but definitely be digitally literate.

Q: You mention weeping Muslims, the kindness of strangers and Mercy Corps as behind-the-scenes forces. In your view, what role does religion play, if any, in the struggle for human survival?

A: Religion plays two roles. It is the catchment of faith and compassion. It is the place where a transcendent nature that is innate in the human spirit can find a home and a voice. The second role religion plays is pernicious, demeaning and destructive. Men, for the past 2,500 years, have twisted human longing for the divine into institutions that have killed, maimed, tortured and raped people and cultures. Both of these aspects of religion are true. I have no faith in religious institutions but infinite respect for any means, temples, chants, rituals or vows with which people find a path to the divine.

Kristi Heim is a Seattle Times business reporter. Tom Reese is a former Times photographer now working as a freelancer.

COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS TO THE CLASS OF 2009

UNIVERSITY OF PORTLAND, MAY 3, 2009

by Paul Hawken

WHEN I WAS invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple, short talk that was "direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling and graceful." Boy, no pressure there.

But let's begin with the startling part. Hey, Class of 2009: You are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Basically, the earth needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of operating instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don't poison the water, soil or air, and don't let the earth get overcrowded, and don't touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seat belts, lots of room in coach, and really good food — but all that is changing.

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn't bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: You are brilliant, and the earth is hiring. The earth couldn't afford to send any recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night-blooming jasmine and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here's the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don't be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, "So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world." There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world.

This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific 18th-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown — Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood — and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: At that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages.

And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of nonprofits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship and nongovernmental organizations, of companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals.

In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets.

THINK ABOUT this: We are the only species on this planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time than to renew, restore and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can't print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable.

We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. In each of you are 1 quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: 1 septillion actions at any one moment, a one with 24 zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone 10 times more processes than there are stars in the universe — exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a "little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven."

So I have two questions for you all:

First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end.

Second question: Who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. What I want you to imagine is that, collectively, humanity is evincing a deep, innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.

This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in 10,000 years.

You are graduating to the most amazing, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn't stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn't ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hopefulness only makes sense when it doesn't make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.