Book Review: Blessed Unrest
February 15, 2008
Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken
Every now and then I come across a book that is better than the stereotype of what it should be. With most of the books I’ve read on environmental issues, the authors tend to talk in circles or rehash someone else’s thoughts and theories. The end result is that they all sort of blend together and come off as cliché.
Not with Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest. Hawken writes a book heavy on stories and comprehensive in histories. His basic premise is that the environmental movement is not something that is new to the 21st century, despite what Oprah and her cloth shopping bags may make you believe. But rather that the environmental movement has been operating just under the surface for a while and it is only just now beginning to bubble to the surface at the level of popular culture.
Blessed Unrest is the story of the environmental movement’s multiple streams that have moved throughout history that are now beginning to merge into one river of environmental consciousness.
This is a book about the growing number of organizations and people who are restless with the current options in regards to the environment, human rights, justice, sustainability, etc.
Blessed Unrest tells of how these organizations and groups have been moving under the radar for the last couple of decades, moving independently of each other, with no “mission statement” or organizing agenda, culminating in the growing changing tide for change in how view and operate in the world. Hawken argues that no one owns this movement and no on can control it. Rather, that it is the world’s for the world.
Hawken then spends time discussing the “blessed” roots of much of the groups and organizations and how their unrest is deeply rooted in their spirituality, faith, and vision for the world. Far from saying their spirituality is an effort to colonize the world for “environmental justice”, the point is that many of these individuals and groups are beginning from a starting point that wants to integrate their faith with their “blessed” responsibility to be good caretakers of the world. To prove this point, the author leans heavily on the thoughts of Emerson, Thoreau, Gandhi, and King and provides insights into how their faith and values shaped their perspective to become agents of change. He then brings it back full circle and reminds us that our responsibility as agents of change, is to live fully and integrated with ourselves (faith), others, and our environment. This is no small task, but one that is built of the “still small voice of God” that stirs in each of our spirits, that remind us that things are not as they could or should be.
What makes this book so rich is that Hawken doesn’t deal with pie-in-the-sky ideals or theories. Rather he shares the raw, honest, successful, and even failed attempts at sustainability. Instead of providing black and white concrete models for us to follow, he instead simply shares the stores of hope and optimism and lets them do what they have the power to do, inspires us to follow in their foot steps one small step at a time to affect change in a world desperate for it.
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