Speak Out For Nature and Democracy in Canada

Recommended Winter Reading: Blessed Unrest

Five years on and this is still a most timely comment on how “people power” could really change the world—and save the planet.

Published in 2007, Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest may have been pushed to the back of your brain by the sheer number of books flooding the market every year since, but as Bill McKibben rightly identified, “Nothing you read for years to come will fill you with more hope and more determination."

Mid-decade, Hawken noted a groundswell of unrest and resistance rising from the bottom up ( think Occupy!) and pointed proudly to a new fierceness (his word!) in the world, not in the sense of ferocity but in the sense of determination — determination to stand up, speak out, and demand accountability, transparency, truth and justice from the power élite —   the corporations and the governments that collude with them.

So why are millions of people taking a stand for social justice and environmental justice around the world and across social media platforms? Because it’s hardwired into our genes: We fight because we love and we hope.

I’m a little late to the party too, in the sense that I did not get around to reading this book until only recently. So if you have not yet read Blessed Unrest, now’s a good time. It inspires courage and promotes hopefulness. We have a fighting chance, Hawken says, but only if we work together, for each other and for the well-being of our planet:

“The insanity of human destructiveness may be matched by an older grace and intelligence that is fastening us together  in ways we have never before seen or imagined.”

 “To come together we must know our place in a biological and cultural sense, and reclaim our role as as engaged agents of our continued existence.”

“We became human by working together and helping one another. According to immunologist Gerald Callahan, faith and love are literally buried in our gene and lympocytes, and what it takes to arrest our descent into chaos is one person after another remembering who and where they really are.”