Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming by Paul Hawken

From Barnes & Noble

Paul Hawken -- author, journalist, environmental activist, and entrepreneur -- is amazingly energetic. Hawken's active life makes him an ideal witness to grassroots movements on behalf of the environment and social justice initiatives of the last generation -- projects he claims have now spread worldwide and grown immensely powerful. He makes the intriguing case that these causes, organized from the bottom up, are converging to create the globe's most powerful moral and social force. Sixties boomers who recall Charles Reich's The Greening of America may recover their youth as they weigh Hawken's optimistic arguments for an emerging consciousness.

From the Publisher

One of the world's most influential environmentalists reveals a worldwide grassroots movement of hope and humanity

Blessed Unrest tells the story of a worldwide movement that is largely unseen by politicians or the media. Hawken, an environmentalist and author, has spent more than a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person causes, these organizations collectively comprise the largest movement on earth. This is a movement that has no name, leader, or location, but is in every city, town, and culture. It is organizing from the bottom up and is emerging as an extraordinary and creative expression of people's needs worldwide.

Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of this movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and centuries-old history. The culmination of Hawken's many years of leadership in these fields, it will inspire, surprise, and delight anyone who is worried about the direction the modern world is headed. Blessed Unrest is a description of humanity's collective genius and the unstoppable movement to re-imagine our relationship to the environment and one another. Like Hawken's previous books, Blessed Unrest will become a classic in its field— a touchstone for anyone concerned about our future.

The New York Times - Robert Sullivan

Blessed Unrest is not a glass-half-full book. But Hawken does imply that the movement—which he estimates at perhaps two million organizations strong—is a sign of life stirring in the beaten-up bowels of the planet, part of the earth's own immunological response, as executed collectively (maybe even semiconsciously) by "social antibodies." Hawken, studiously avoiding the language of religion, ends up groping for a faith-free yet faith-based terminology to describe what connects people who put aside their own immediate material needs, if just for a second. "Sustainability, ensuring the future of life on earth, is an infinite game, the endless expression of generosity on behalf of all," he says. Hawken, it seems, is hoping for a miracle, which by definition is possible only because it's impossible. At the very least, knowing that other people are thinking along those lines makes such a thing seem a little more likely.

Library Journal

The author of Growing a Business, basis of the noteworthy PBS series, Hawken catalogs the various environmental organizations large and small that he says make up the largest movement on Earth. With a six-city tour. Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.

What People Are Saying

David Suzuki
Paul Hawken's writings are always at the cutting edge of environmental thought, original, surprising and shot through with optimism. Blessed Unrest is an uplifting perspective, engendering wonder and hope. For all of us that are squirreling away in our individual small ways, it is inspiring to realize that millions of us can add up to an irresistible force. Read this book and shout 'Hallelujah!' (David Suzuki, author of The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature)

Ray Anderson
Paul Hawken has written an important and significant book--intelligent, compelling, moving, and hopeful. In the broad sweep of a history of diffuse and seemingly unconnected events and people, he has found emergent pattern. That pattern, amazing simultaneously in its intricacy and simplicity, gives clarity to the direction humankind is moving in its struggle for survival. Read and regain a sense of optimism for our grandchildren's grandchildren; and be motivated to ensure that they inherit a restored earth and an equitable society. (Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface)

William Greider
Paul Hawken has created a wondrous experience -- a book that magically weaves together the world across time and place. From the wisdom of ancients to our modern predicament. From dead fish to the industrial giants that killed them. From endangered peoples defending nature against the onslaught to their new friends and allies in the capitals of capitalism. Within this vast tableau, the book tells the dramatic story of people rising to resist -- a global coming together mobilized to change the world and save it. (William Greider, author of The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy)

Barry Lopez
If you have lost a sense of direction in your life, if despair dogs your every step, pick up a pencil and pick up this book. Paul Hawken, without a trace of self-importance, impales a very dark room on the beam of a very bright light here. In his hands, the civil society movement reveals itself as the action that has replaced the talk. (Barry Lopez, author of Resistance and Arctic Dreams)

Bill McKibben
This is first full account of the real news of our time, and it's exactly the opposite of the official account. The movers and shakers on our planet aren't the billionaires and the generals--they are the incredible numbers of people around the world filled with love for neighbor and for the earth who are resisting, remaking, restoring, renewing, revitalizing. This powerful and lovely book is their story--our story--and it's high time someone's told it. Nothing you read for years to come will fill you with more hope and more determination. (Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy and The End of Nature)

David James Duncan
Many books describe the world in ways that break our hearts. Blessed Unrest invokes a heartbreak from which light pours. Paul Hawken is stupendously well informed. He is also critical without rancor, intuitive without woowoo, and poetic or hard-minded as the case requires. This is a work of enormous love and consequence. Every compassion-driven soul who reads it will be stunned by the scope and power of the movement we've inadvertently formed. When, inevitably, my daughters someday feels their hearts broken by the wounded world they have inherited, I will be handing them this and a precious few other books. (David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K and God Laughs & Plays)

Terry Tempest Williams
Blessed Unrest is a beautiful, soulful, crucial book. It is a manifesto of hope for the 21st century grounded squarely in the hearts of engaged people around the planet. Paul Hawken chronicles and testifies on behalf of this "movement with no name" with his charismatic intelligence and insight. This book makes the invisible visible. I believe Hawken when he says we are part of the Earth's immune system each time we exercise our active compassion in the name of social justice and ecological health. I love this book. It is a field guide for all that is possible. (Terry Tempest Williams, author of The Open Space of Democracy)

David Orr
On one side the four horsemen of the apocalypse; on the other a vast and nameless uprising of peoples and organizations fighting for justice, places, communities, diversity, and health--the planetary immune system. Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest is not just a good book, it is a necessary book, wise, eloquent, perceptive, sober, and timely but above all, hopeful. A landmark! (David Orr, author of Design on the Edge and The Last Refuge)

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