Our Current Reading

Blessed Unrest:
How the Largest Movement in the World
Came in to Being and Why No One Saw it Coming

In his new book, Paul Hawken looks at the history
of the environmental movement and predicts its future.

Interview with the Author

By Elizabeth A. Evitts
April 18, 2007

Paul Hawken has always been ahead of his time. In 1966, he co-founded Erewhon Trading Company, the country’s first natural foods business. Later he launched several successful sustainability-focused companies, including the garden-tool boutique Smith & Hawken, often cited for its environmental awareness. Hawken continued breaking new ground with several books on socially responsible business. His 1993 release The Ecology of Commerce went on to become a cornerstone of business-school curricula.

In his new book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came in to Being and Why No One Saw it Coming (Viking), Hawken deciphers the history of the environmental movement and predicts its future. Contemporary environmentalism, he argues, is nothing less than the fruition of a long global uprising to reclaim basic human rights. The book’s May release will coincide with the launch of a website, Wiser Earth, an open source social network with a database of more than 100,000 organizations. Recently Elizabeth A. Evitts talked to Hawken about the book, contemporary environmentalism, and how designers are playing a pivotal role in its evolution.

In Blessed Unrest you go back to the start of the environmental movement. You analyze Emerson and Thoreau, bring us through slavery and abolition to Civil Rights and the impact of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. What inspired this approach?


My work involves giving a lot of speeches and after every one people would come up, ask more questions, and give me their card. Over the years they just piled up until I had literally a huge shopping bag of business cards from nonprofit organizations. I began to wonder how many groups there were. It’s amazing; you just assume somebody knows. But nobody does. So I began to ploddingly try to figure it out. As I did so, I discovered that there were more than 100,000 (there’s in fact over a million, but at the time I only thought more than 100,000). I started to wonder how this compared to other humanitarian or social movements, both past and present. And I couldn’t find anything comparable to it. Then the question was: where did it come from? The easy answer is, well, it’s recent or it’s Earth Day. But it didn’t work that way. It was like pulling a string on a flour bag that went on and on. It was fascinating to see that there is this history that we don’t access. Or if we do, it doesn’t include the idea that there is a cumulative movement of humanity that wants to address the suffering of other forms of life, and specifically now, ecological degradation, economic disease, political corruption, and all of the cascading effects of that. I was surprised at how broad, deep and ancient it really is. What’s happening now is it’s spreading like crazy.

Thus the subtitle of your book: How the Largest Movement in the World Came in to Being and Why No One Saw it Coming.


Exactly. Climate change is certainly a big driver in the last few years, but there’ve been others—poverty, water issues, environmental refugees, war. The other driver is modern communication technologies, which allow groups to organize more easily. Smaller groups can have a much bigger effect than they could have prior to the onset of the internet. They’re connecting better, collaborating better, working as swarms, as some people say.

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.


Why did it take so long for American business to catch on?


They saw it as a threat: "We have a business to run and this is the government’s responsibility." This is the same businessperson that would vote against the government doing anything. They would offload the responsibility, they had a very narrow sense of responsibility. It was to the bottom line, to shareholders. "If we obey the law than that’s all we have to do." That has pretty much been abolished.


In the book you write that green, safe, livable cities are at the fingertips of architects and designers. What do you mean by that?


In the last fifteen years, architects and designers and planners have come up with an array of design technologies. They have started to put them together in ways that drastically reduce the footprint of the city, making it safer and much more livable. The reason you’re not seeing it sooner is simply the way that cities evolve. They’re not clean slates. You don’t just erase a city and put a new one where it was. The rate of change is not as fast as the rate of technical and design innovation. Design is a technology, but you can’t just fix things with technology. You need people who see the world in a different way and then put it together in new ways.

The book talks about the U.S. Green Building Council. You reference architect Edward Mazria for his Architecture 2030 project, which aims to make all buildings carbon neutral by that year. Sometimes it feels as if the industrial design community is the last design discipline to catch on to the idea of sustainability. Why?


The last to catch on are clients, the manufacturers. Look at Ford. They went and designed a green factory, that’s great. They didn’t change the cars that were coming out of the factory and they got walloped by sales, the stock market, energy prices. They had it upside down and backwards. They should have gone to designers for green cars first.

How would you counsel an industrial designer on navigating that conversation with clients? How do they make the case for sustainable design?

When you’re a designer you can be no better than your client. But you’re always in the job of educating them, and part of that education is about perception, costs, positioning. It’s about the future. Are you designing for yesterday, today or tomorrow? The idea of tomorrow has always been the slate, brushed aluminum projectile—if you could take something that was blocky and clunky and make it look like it could be a suppository, than somehow that was supposed to be great design. That paradigm really has to shift. That’s a difficult thing because we’re all kind of primitive. We’re all entranced by baubles. I’m talking about consumers now. Some of the new PDA’s and phones are brilliant—except from a materials and waste point of view they’re not. From that perspective they’re poorly designed. Here you have a system in which the designer is supposed to reposition or redo something so that a product stands out in the marketplace, like the Motorola Razr, and he or she may succeed in that, but they’re not given the full agenda, the full charge, which is: Can you design a product that will be valuable when it comes back to us as well? I remember years ago when HP was forced by pending legislation in Germany to design their printers for disassembly for reuse and recycling. They discovered that assembly time was reduced by, I forget exactly, but about 70 to 80%. A huge savings. Engineers asked, "Why didn’t you do this before?" And the designers said, "Well, you never asked." The talent is there, but the question isn’t there. They have to be asked to design things that fully embody what is possible in terms of material cycles, which is to say that it can be reused continuously and the value goes up. It’s not just about recycling, but it’s about upcycling, which is you design something, you use a material, and then when it’s reused it’s even more valuable than it was before.


You write that it’s time for us to have our Rosa Parks moment, to have someone refuse their seat on the bus so to speak, and upset business as usual. You actually mention Ray Anderson of Interface.


Yeah, I said, maybe he’s the one in hindsight. We don’t know. Rosa Parks wasn’t seen at the time as precipitating a whole movement. But there were women before her as I mention in my book who did the same thing and nothing happened. Then something did happen; there was a convergence because of Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy. A whole bunch of things converged at that point. Whether Ray is that person is for history to decide looking back. But certainly in terms of understanding, comprehending, and then meticulously implementing it piece by piece throughout his company, Ray is definitely a leader.


You designed many of the tools and products sold during your twelve years at the helm of Smith & Hawken. Your Monet bench is still the most popular outdoor bench in America. How has your approach to design changed over the years?


From a systems perspective, if you optimize a component, you pessimize the system. It’s hard for people to get their arms around because we think that if you make all of the pieces better, the whole gets better. That’s not necessarily true. You could say, well, every single thing in the U.S. that we use today, except for some SUVs, uses less energy. Except when you add it all up together, we’re less efficient today than we were 50 or 100 years ago. To me when you design something that is good design, it’s not about how it looks, it’s about what it does. It will appear beautiful if you understand its total impact on the system. That’s one way it’s changed for me. I think of designing systems now.


How important is materials research to breakthrough products?


Absolutely critical. And there are two sides to materials research. First, there are new materials. The second is taking the materials that are everyday, plebian, and redesigning those as well. I saw a hardwood flooring design by a company in Oklahoma and it is made of the pallets that are piling up by the tens of thousands at Ford Motor Company. Owner Joy Nunn is an expert on fiber and so much of our material is fiber if it’s not metallic. With this flooring, you would never know it came from ash or oak pallets. It’s bulletproof, it’s so hard, so tough, and you can do anything with it in terms of textures and appearance. It’s like a new material. This is an example of upcycling where you’re taking fairly hard but not great grades of wood, and then you’re using it until it’s no good anymore and then you’re making beautiful hardwood flooring at a lower cost than regular flooring. It’s kind of elegant.


What would you tell industrial designers about how to be more effective, more creative, while negotiating the realities of the marketplace? What resources would you suggest they tap?


I would say to go to the other design school that they didn’t go to yet—nature. Go to biology and immerse themselves in biomimicry, in biomass. It’s a huge field that’s growing. I have a company, the Pax Group, and our work is based on how fluids flow in nature, not how they flow in a pipe, or how they’re forced to flow by pumps, fans, turbines, or compressors. We’ve taken those flow forms and made fan designs based on them. These designs are more efficient, they save energy, they’re quieter, and there is less or no cavitation in the case of marine propellers. All we’ve done is bow to Mother Nature, which always moves in the path of least resistance. We were talking earlier about design removing stress from the system. Well, there’s a system that has the least amount of stress: it’s called nature. The reason nature does it that way is because it has no choice, it has no V8 engines, no coal-fired plants. We have a motto that nature sucks, and what we mean by that is that nature always draws water or flows to it; it never pushes, never forces. And good design is never forced.


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.


You said that you went into this project not knowing how you would feel, but that you came out feeling hopeful.


Very much so. If you look at the data about Poland and Czechoslovakia and you’re hopeful, then you’re not understanding the data. But if you meet and hang out and see the groups and people and organizations, and watch their brilliance, innovation, and creativity and you’re not hopeful, then you don’t have a heart. Both are true and I put my faith on people.

* * *

Original Story Can Be Found At:
http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=2596

Our Current Reading:

The War of the World:
Descent of the West

by Niall Ferguson

Paperback: 816 pages
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
(March 29, 2007)

We know Ferguson is a British conservative and supporter of 'staying the course' in Iraq. But he's also an important historian and influential public intellectual. This book will give us the occasion for examining the last century in a fresh way. Here's a brief Amazon review. A long one is posted as the first comment.

Reviewer John Matcock: A most interesting view of the 20th century. Certainly the two World Wars were the climatic moments, but he also points out that more people have been killed in the smaller wars that we don't normally think about.

Perhaps 55 million were killed in World War II. Perhaps a hundred million more in the Russian collectivizing of farms, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and one genocide after another in places of which we had never heard. In this book Dr. Ferguson takes a different view of history than normal. Here is not the sweep of Rommel towards Dunkirk, but here is the relentless killing. Killing of all kinds of 'undesirable' people. It's a view of history well worth keeping in mind as we approach the next century with no hint of violence slowing down, and the incidence of Shiite/Sunni strife that we see developing in Iraq.

In the sub-title of the book, 'the Descent of the West,' he is less clear. He laments the passing of the big European empires that controlled much of the world. I'm not so sure that the people of India would lament their getting out of the British Empire. Perhaps they helped to hold the peace, but they also started World War I, and the Romans also held the peace at places like Masada.

Our Current Reading:

The Shia Revival:
How Conflicts within Islam
Will Shape the Future

By Vali Nasr


W. W. Norton
August 5, 2006

$17.13 on Amazon

(Purchasing through Cawi's Amazon Store, last page,
at http://noiraqwar-chicago.org helps us a bit)

Vali Nasr is Professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. He joined NPS in 1993 after teaching at the University of San Diego, University of California, San Diego, and Tufts University. He is the author of Democracy in Iran (Oxford University Press, 2006); The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam will Shape the Future (W.W. Norton, 2006); The Islamic Leviathan: Islam and the Making of State Power (Oxford University Press, 2001); Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism (Oxford University Press, 1996); The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama`at-i Islami of Pakistan (University of California Press, 1994); editor, Muslim World, Special Issue on South Asian Islam, 87:3 (July-October 1997); an editor of Oxford Dictionary of Islam (Oxford University Press, 2003); and co-editor with S.H. Nasr and Hamid Dabashi of Expectation of the Millennium: Shi`ism in History (SUNY Press, 1989).

The Iron Cage:

The Story of the Palestinian

Struggle for Statehood

Beacon Press
October 2006
352 pages

By Rashid Khalidi

About the Author:

Dr. Rashid Khalidi, author of Resurrecting Empire, holds the Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies at Columbia University, where he heads the Middle East Institute. He has written more than eighty articles on Middle Eastern history and politics, as well as op-ed pieces in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and The Nation. He lives in New York.

From Publishers Weekly:

Historian Khalidi (Resurrecting Empire), a leading expert on the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, brings vital perspective to Palestinian attempts to achieve independence and statehood. Admirably synthesizing the latest scholarship and concentrating on the period of the British Mandate (1920–1948) established by the League of Nations after WWI, Khalidi describes the process by which a newly arrived European Jewish minority overcame, with help from its imperial ally, the claims and rights of the native Arab majority in what became Israel and the occupied territories. Khalidi shows Palestinians under the mandate facing comparatively severe systemic, institutional and constitutional obstacles to the development of any para-state structure—contrary to British promises of Arab independence and Article 4 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Meanwhile, the Jewish minority could count on a system biased in its favor to develop the structures that became those of the Israeli government in 1948 amid violent expulsion of over half the indigenous population. In bringing this narrative up to the present, Khalidi rigorously details the missteps of the Palestinians and their leadership. Khalidi curiously refrains from drawing any detailed proposal of his own to resolve the ongoing conflict, but his first-rate and up-to-date historical and political analysis of the Palestinian predicament remains illuminating.

Religion and the
Human Prospect

By Alexander Saxton
Monthly Review Press

Amazon Notes: Since September 11, 2001, religion has been at the center of debates about the global future. 'Religion and the Human Prospect' relates these issues systematically to a path-breaking interpretation of the history of religion, its part in human development, and its potential role in preventing or enabling global catastrophe.

Religion has made possible critical transitions in the emergence and development of human society. At the moment when our humanoid ancestors became aware of the inevitability of death, religion interposed the belief in spiritual beings who gave it new significance. When individual self-interest and collective survival conflicted, religion defended collective survival by codifying its requirements as morality. When inequalities of wealth and power developed, religion extended moral codes to include obligations of dominance and submission. Religion enabled a species facing constant hunger and scarcity to adapt and spread.

Today, however, facing ecological disaster, exhaustion of essential natural resources, and the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, religion no longer provides a collective defense mechanism for the human species. Instead, the solutions it has provided have become central to the problem of human survival. This magisterial and compelling work weaves together evolutionary theory, anthropology, reflection on theological treatments of the problem of evil, and ideas from literature and philosophy into an account of the human prospect that is truly epic in its ambition and explanatory power.

[ALEXANDER SAXTON is emeritus professor of history at UCLA. He is the author of three novels and several historical works, including The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. ]

The End of Faith:
Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

By Sam Harris


Amazon.com Note:

Few can ignore that for almost three millennia the Abrahamic religions have provided recurring excuses for tribal violence, and still do. And I appreciate Harris for bringing this point to his book and media appearances.

The only thing that turns me off is this. I don't buy into his rigid position that you can't cherry pick the "good stuff" from the Bible without endorsing its prescriptions for tribal violence. Sure, there are tons of destructive and misogynistic passages mixed in with the Bible's inspiring wisdom bits. Kind of like most any human I know - an admixture of love and hostility.

Harris' all or nothing position seems just as fundamentalist as anything he opposes. What's wrong with extracting best practices from the Bible in the process of learning what works ethically? It's about as harmful a procedure as finding grown-up jokes in Sesame Street. Finding a basic humane principle (meme) in the Bible isn't automatically put up a poster for internecine warfare.

It's likely Harris is adamantly all or nothing because his debate opponents - the true believers and jihadists - are just as polarized. He's debating people who believe their scriptures are divinely revealed. But that doesn't change things. His rigid stand rejects and invalidates everything good one of the world's oldest books might pass to us from generations past.

In the comment below, Alex Saxton offers a longer, more critical review.

After Capitalism

By David Schweickart.

Comment: James G. Devine

If a well-read non-socialist leftist were to ask me for the best current book on socialism, I'd recommend After Capitalism. In addition to being well-written, it is presented in a very logical way, using little of the standard jargon that discourages outsiders. It also lacks the paralyzing tone of de­pression infecting some leftist authors these days...

In the 1970s, the phrase "economic democracy" was associated with the idea of extending democracy from the political to the economic realm. To his credit, Schweickart rejects this formula. Rather than being democratic, the political system of the United States is a "polyarchy," following Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom (105). This system involves changing govern­ments in a way that fits best with capitalist rule in the richer countries - and something that should be replaced by true democracy. Schweickart's Economic Democracy is in the broad tradition of Alec Nove's "feasible socialism." It involves three main elements: worker-controlled cooperatives coordinated using government-regulated markets and centrally planned investment....

--Science & Society Book Review: May 2005

[The first comment below is a longer review by Carl Davidson.]

Race Matters

By Cornell West
Princeton University

From Kirkus Reviews

In essays that challenge the nature of racial discourse in America, the director of Princeton's Afro-American Studies program, professor of religion, and self-described "intellectual freedom-fighter" calls for moral regeneration and profound social change. Scheduled to appear on the anniversary of the L.A. riots (when the nation presumably will take stock of America one year after), this collection (much of which appeared previously in The New York Times Magazine, Dissent, Z, etc.) is consistently effective at pointing out how the intellectual frameworks used by both whites and blacks as well as by liberals and neoconservatives impede true progress and understanding--whether the issue is affirmative action, black nihilism, or the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. West identifies the valuable insights of black conservatives while taking their conclusions to pieces and sees black anti-Semitism as threatening the ethical nature of the black struggle (if it "becomes simply a power-driven war...that pits xenophobia from below against racism from above, then David Duke's project is the wave of the future"). While unsparing in his critique of black leadership and American racism, West situates the crisis in black America inside our market-driven culture, a world of "random nows" and the "empty quest for pleasure, property and power"--a pervasive spiritual impoverishment that transcends race but is most devastating among the poorest, most powerless, and most despised. Aiming at accessibility, West perhaps too much curtails his customary intellectual range; but with clear thinking and sensible analysis being in short supply these days, his words are welcome nonetheless.

The first comment below is an interview with West on the book in The Christian Century

The Invention of
the White Race:

The Origin of Racial Oppression
and Social Control in Anglo-America

By Theodore W. Allen
Verso, in two volumes

[A note from Carl Davidson: Ted Allen was a teacher and friend of mine. I've often said three books are critical to understanding our country: Black Reconstruction by WEB Du Bois, Blues People by Amiri Baraka, and the Invention of the White Race by Ted Allen. Ted would have agreed about the first two, but may have been unduly modest about his own. In any case, our study group went through both volumes, and learned a great deal, especially what original historical materialism in the Marxist tradition looks like when done extremely well on a burning question. Here is a brief description of the books. The first two comments are a long review putting the work in a wider context, and an appreciation of Allen following his death.]

The Meaning of White

By Dara Bryne
Black Issue Book Review

One of the best ways to understand the workings of "whiteness studies" is to read some of its landmark books. These are essential readings that must not be overlooked by anyone who is interested in race, identity, gender, economics, politics, culture and American history. The most compelling and widely cited among them are Theodore W. Allen's The Invention of the White Race: Racial Oppression and Social Control (Verso Books, 1994), Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White (Routledge, 1995), and David R. Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Verso Books Irevised], 1999) and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (Verso Books, 1994).

Each author traces the development of "whiteness" to the 19th-century white working class in America. The Irish play a central role in each of these writings. One can look to the history of the Irish in America as a clear example of what "whiteness" means ideologically, materially and culturally. After reading these works, one understands why whiteness is not simply about having white skin. Rather economic and political processes serve as the dominant structural force in this society.

Full House
The Spread of Excellence
from Plato to Darwin

By Stephen J. Gould


From Kirkus Reviews: Now hear this: Evolution is not progressive. We (humans) are not the be-all and end-all of nature's plan. You've heard these lines before: They are quintessentially Gould. In this short volume Gould (Dinosaur in a Haystack, 1995, etc.) elaborates on this theme. Among the examples he advances is one that should prove dear to the hearts of baseball fans: Why, Gould asks, are there no .400 hitters anymore? The answer requires looking not at batting but at how the game of baseball has varied over time. There has been a general improvement in play so that the normal curve of batting averages no longer has a tail trailing off to the right where the few .400 stars were to be found. Instead, in Gould's phrase, we have hit a right wall--a boundary reflecting the limits of human performance. A second, longer, and more complex example deals with evolutionary data. If we eliminated human hubris, we would see that it is bacteria that were in the beginning, are now, and ever will be the most populous and successful kingdom--virtually at the left wall boundary in terms of minimally complex organisms capable of life. Over time, there was nothing else for life to do but to expand to the right. However, using fossil records, Gould demonstrates that there was no directionality: Descendants didn't always get more complex--they could just as easily revert to less complex forms. What befuddles the issue is the matter of cultural ``evolution''--a word Gould would strike in favor of the word ``change.'' Cultural inventions (including reading and writing) have enabled great leaps of technical ``progress'' in nanoseconds of time, reckoned by evolutionary standards. As a species, however, we remain an anomalous tail in the full house of life on earth. So we should accept our place with becoming humility. Gould fans will be charmed at the cogency and cleverness of his arguments--but expect a wall of opposition from pious and diehard progressivists.

[We read several books by Stephen Jay Gould, beginning with 'Wonderful Life.' We learned a lot from all of them. Gould was both a Marxist and scientist committed to pushing the envelope on the cutting edge of science, letting dogmas fall where they may. We visited with him in Chicago, when he gave a talk on this book. He died not long afterwards, and an appreciation of him by Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, from Monthly Review, in the first comment below. --Carl Davidson.]