Moderator: It's a great pleasure to introduce Paul Hawken because he is he is really an unusual person. And I am going to read I don't usually okay, I don't usually do this for introductions. But I I really want to get this one right. He is an environmental entrepreneur demonstrating how businesses can make a better world. He co-founded Smith & Hawken, has founded or co-founded several other green enterprises and is the head of PaxIT, PaxTurbine, and PaxFan, three companies associated with Pax Scientific, a California based Research and Development Company promoting cutting edge technologies to promote sustainable development. Paul Hawken is also a prolific writer. He has authored or co-authored seven books including The Ecology of Commerce and Natural Capitalism. His books have been widely read by lay people and are used in classrooms. I am confident that Blessed Unrest will be at least as influential as these. Paul is a terrific spokesman for a better world on numerous TV and radio shows, opinion editorials and through profiles of him in newspapers and magazines. Paul is an extremely hopeful environmentalist. Not a delusionary optimist like George W Bush but someone who knows someone who knows there is more power in hope than in despair. Paul was a pragmatist with no trouble taking the best of progressive, populist and libertarian arguments or secular, spiritual and religious arguments and melding them so that they work together. He is an unusually generous person who bestows praise and muffles scorn. Paul Hawken combines his hope, pragmatism and generosity with good environmental science and the deep understanding of both personal and experiential and book learnt of people in organizations. We are especially honored to have Paul with us this evening to introduce us to his new book. And this has really a long title. It has a short beginning, Blessed Unrest and then it goes on and on. How the largest movement in the world came into being and why no one saw it coming. Paul.
Paul Hawken: Turn them off please. I didn't the other night and it was my phone that was ringing in the podium. So - thank you very, very much and thank you for coming out tonight. How many people here are raised at Berkeley? Okay I am a homeboy so this I have been making jokes about Berkeley for last three weeks on the road and now I I better cool it. Okay I will okay you do. Well not jokes they are stories they are true stories. I had a really interesting experience a few months ago where a friend of mine, Kenny Ausubel, some of you may know him. He founded Bioneers, the conference. And Kenny and his whole family you know, they are Russian Jews and just for a lock he had his DNA done and and by DNA tribe and you know, you swab your cheek and send it away. It came back and he is 40 percent Italian and and so he asked his mother you know, he said, hey what's with what's with the alleles here. And she said, well we don't talk about that. You know, so I know how Ken is Cornish, I am an Irish we are Scottish going back to Ethan Allen, my great great grandfather is French, came here 1849, opened a bookstore at Market Street and the other part is Swedish Royalty. We know this cold we have the records and so I did my DNA. Swiss, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Flemish and Mark wants me to lower it or raise it, thank you okay all right thanks. And what was so interesting about it, when I got white guy anymore anyway. My hips moved you know, it was like cells improved over night and and I was talking to Kenny and I started he started saying Paul you know, stop I said it's Paulo it's not Paul. It's Paulo. And he thought my god - he thought I have created a Frankenstein, I said, Kenny it's Franco it's Franco. And I realized so clearly how these concepts we have about ourselves, limit us and separate us unnecessarily from from each other and from the world and it seems to me that we are going into an era very, very I think troubling and very troubling era in many ways. But I think it's an era where we will find that the things that have separated us are so unimportant compared to the things that draw us together and unite us and which is really how Blessed Unrest came about and it started literally just as this evening has, which is giving talks, starting in the nineties and after those talks some people would come up and just as Adam did before they talk and either exchange cards or ask for card and I would be out for a week or ten days and then I would come back with my pockets bulging with cards. And back pack and everything was a mess and I would pull everything out, separate out the cards and sort of a homage to the people who had given them to me, I would read them on my dining room table in my houseboat and then set them aside and put them in a drawer and as I did so I was marveling at the names of the organizations and the places and what they represented as people organizing to really effect change in this world. And what also impressed me was that almost, without exception, I had never heard of these organizations. And I think all of us have a blind spot which is we think our network is the world, not really but there is that tendency you know, we can't see beyond our own network as like you can't see over the horizon. And what these cards did for me is keep in a sense showing how big this network was. Well the when I bought this houseboat from actually Peter Calthorpe, an architect in Louisiana, Berkeley. I bought the house keeper with it. And she was 75 at the time and when I bought it and older at that time and she was actually couldn't clean she she couldn't bent over she was a lovely human being she was an artist. And I could tell that she had been there because my whole houseboat was rearranged when she was there during the day. And one day she took the drawer full of cards which was full and she dumped them into a gold Bergdorf Goodman bag with white rope tassle handles and she put it in my closet. And so there were the cards now, visible to me every morning when I got dressed and and the bag got full. It was full with 1000s of cards and that's when Blessed Unrest started really. And I was raised in Berkeley and my father worked and taught at the Library. I would go from LeConte and really to the library and spent time in the library. That was that was my home. And and so I had this attitude that you could find anything you wanted in the library- you know. And I was sure that somebody knew how many at that time I was counting environmental organizations, but soon thereafter social justice and environmental organizations, I was sure that some body knew. I just had to ask the right person to look at the right directory or database or something. And I think the University subscribes 2000 different databases at least that it pays for. And nothing like that was on record; I couldn't find any thing at all. And I began to ask friends like Lester Brown and others who surely they would know. And then I found these little databases and ultimately 450 small databases of several society organizations in the world and then of course there is GuideStar and the 990s and things like that. But nothing really actually was a catalogue of the environmental and social justice organizations. And so I began to count. And really was out of curiosity, there was no purpose to it. That is to say I wasn't going to do any thing with the count, I was curious though. And I was curious because of those cards and that the fact that it didn't know who they were. And if I was getting that many cards then it was easy to imagine that there was a whole lot more out there, that I hadn't just gotten everyone and and sure enough and my count started at 30,000 organizations and I thought at first that was incredible, I used to say that almost tenuously say to people like - 30,000. And because I had counted the number of Catholic Churches and that was close to it. So I thought this is a lot. And then it went to 70,000 and then it went to 100,000 and then when it went over 100,000 I went back to the library and back to the literature on social movements which is really this is compared with any other social movement in the world. And I want to stop right there because the book says how the largest movement in the world came into being. Well what is this movement and and if it doesn't have a name and no one knows where it is, then how could it be a movement. I am asking that question and that's a good question. But that's what really happen as I started to research it was this I began to see that it is a movement unlike anything we have ever seen before. And that when I read the literature on social movements it sort of pointed towards this direction and you would look that way and for the framing but it didn't look this way. And this is what I mean. Most movements start for example, as a way to address imbalances of power. The Women Suffrage movement, Abolition of course as a movement and so the dynamics of the movement itself, to supervise it is in effect to change the dynamics of power within a geopolitical system. And and that's how you can tell a movement has been successful. Well the first thing I noticed about this movement is it is not trying to aggregate power to itself. What it is trying to do is to disperse the pathological concentrations of power. And that has never happened before. So there is the first sort of stake in the ground which is so then, it can be seen as power less. Right because it is not trying to aggregate power to itself. Second is that not all but many movements are ideological. That is somebody, usually male charismatic vertebrates you know, said something spend too much time in the British library perhaps you know, and wrote something and then that was brilliant and well thought of and then surrounded by factotums and people who want to preserve and then in a sense distribute this new found knowledge you know, some an "ism" starts you know, I mean and and then this ism then grows and what you see is that the 19th century really was the birth of the ideology the birth of the isms and the 20th century was where they duked it out and 120 million people died in senseless wars. And and what you are seeing now is in a sense I believe the sunset effect of ideologies which is these sort of neo populist movements like, well neo conservatism and economic fundamentalism and all stripes of right wing religious expressions. But if you look at all these they have a very, very small base. And what you easily see is that every ism ends up a schism. So first there was the Nastiks and then Nastik Christians and there was Pauline Christians and then was the Orthodox Church and then two Orthodox Churches because they didn't recognize Papal supremacy. And then Martin Luther went to Rome and was shocked by the indulgences and went back and nailed his protestations right on the cathedral with as well the door at Wittenberg where he went to school. And then you had the Protestants church and you had 30 Protestant religions right away. And then you had 30 years war in Germany, a 100 years after that and one third of every person in of the population in Germany was killed, right. So every ism ends up as a schism, right. And so what was so interesting to me about this movement is it's not about ideologies, it's about ideas. And ideas are so different because ideas are something you try out they work you use it, they don't you toss it. And they are not sacred unto themselves. And the reason you know this, so many of you, if not all of you are involved in some kind of non profit, some kind of NGO, some kind of organization and excuse me, but let me ask you, did you ever check with any body when you did your mission statement. Did you have to get it approved? Were you worried that it didn't meet doctrine or you know, in other words that's what's the second thing that was so different about this movement is its this truly a bottom up movement, that is self organizing and it's based on values that are commonly held and really universally shared on this planet. So the next thing is of course is the well, I was talking about scale and size which is it it can't be split up. It's completely atomized. There there is nothing you could imagine, there is more scatter than this movement and so it can never be divided. But what it can do and what it is doing and why it is becoming the fastest growing movement in the world is that it can connect. It can hook up. It can call us. It can collaborate using cell phones, texting, the internet, what it can do now is start to connect at the margins and towards there is no center, so connect at the margins and inform and reform and change and collaborate. Now Silicon Corporations use the internet and texting and cell phones of course and so can other institutions, but when you are under funded and under resourced, no body makes better use of the internet and technology than this movement, right. Brilliant, innovative, unbelievable, the way it masters the technology and then we uses it and we purposes it. So that's why I call it a movement. And finally there is one more reason which is if you go to these organizations if you go to wiserearth.org which the website that in a sense parallels and compliments the book, there is about 105 organizations there now in 193 countries and sovereignties and islands, every city culture in the world is represented in the database in wiserearth.org. But if you go to organization after organization and then you get there about mission, purpose, value, statement, find that thing this is this is what informs us. This is why we do what we do. This is what we stand for in on this planet. This is what we represent and if you put those statements up, if you had a hall way or hall or room big enough to put them all down then you would see something really remarkable and actually urge it to do as an exercise with even a dozen or thirty which is they are all different. They are all different. But they don't contradict. And again when did that ever happen in human history. When? It has never happened. So this is, as they say, a horse of a whole different color. And so we are not prepared by education, by the media certainly. We look everyday at on the news, at the death of strangers really really brought about by these neo populist movements and and the reason they are neo populist, the reason they are ideological is because they are smaller group of people things they know what is better for a larger group of people. And this movement is completely the opposite. It doesn't have a big idea. It has millions of small ideas about problems and situations that are in place. That is it's trying to address suffering where it finds it and to yes, resist it and prevent it from happening, but also to create the methodologies, the solutions that really reconcile this this class that we are having between peoples on earth and between people and place, the environment. So it is, in that sense, is rich, rich vein of human creativity. And that is also what the media overlooks. You would think that this movement consists primarily of people who march resist and occasionally have an altercation with the police. And other than that some birders you know, people who are worried about the climate. You would know that really 98 percent of this movement is about solutions, it's about ideas. And again I urge you to go to wiserearth just to look at these one by one by one. And see them and look at them and study them up and go to the websites or what ever and you will see that this is really what is happening. Now to give you a sense of the scale of this I would like to have Jenny put on just a clip and there is more than a 100,000 organizations that's for sure. And the if you just say numbers it's hard to convey something. Numbers are so abstract and we hear them all the time. And you can go ahead I will just talk over this. But what you are seeing is really screen credits here. Like a movie credit. And this is a credit; this is a credit for the movement. And for most of you I think you will see organizations here whose names you have never seen before which is the same experience that I had and with the city and the country. But to give you a sense of the scale of this movement, the vastness of this movement, imagine doing what you are doing now which is watching this tonight - starting tonight. But then I want you to imagine how long you would have to stay here before you saw all the names of the organizations in the world that are working towards social justice, human rights, poverty, the environment and ecological restoration. You would have to start tonight and stay all night tonight for sure and you would be here all day tomorrow and all night tomorrow and then you would be here all day Thursday and that night as well. You would not have left on Friday. And you would be here Friday night. You would spent the whole weekend here at the Church and be here for service and it would still be running. And the Sunday night and then Monday you would have been here a week and then I would come and tell you that you have to stay another week after that another week after that and another week after that. In other words you would have to stay here 24 hours a day for a month, right, in order to see all the names of the organizations in the world. I am not talking about non profits, I am talking about social justice and environmental organizations in the world, right. That's how big it is. And so when I say how the largest movement in the world came into being and why no one saw it coming, you now see both. The largest movement in the world and did anybody see it coming, did any body talk about it, do you read about it in the media? No, right, but in order to save you the time yes, we are going to speed it up and you will see a million organizations right now. But you will not be able to read them as well. And the guy who made this Mark loved Star Wars, so he wanted to change that it into a light savior but as I said no, don't do that. All right yeah, anyway it's big right. And carry on, thanks. I want to talk about a couple of other things here and you just raise your hand when your mom is shut up and signing books, okay. But oh I am very sensitive. But two things came up. One is really for me well, how does it work? If this if the literature about social movements in the past you know, isn't very telling then how does this movement work? How did it what's the dynamics? How did it come about? And that goes in two directions. One is history, where did it come from? And then it is how does it work itself? And in terms of how it works, I use biological metaphors, in terms of where it came from, I just started pulling the string on the flower and of course it goes to the 60s and 70s and Rachel Carson and histories which I think all of you are very familiar with. So obviously I want to keep going. And luckily it went to the Transcendalist and why I say luckily is that when I went to Berkeley High School, the Transcendalist were taught by Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Smith was an undercover Berkeley Police woman. And every body in school knew that except Mrs. Smith didn't knew that we all knew. And and I made it my task to make it known to Mrs. Smith that she had no right to teach the Transcendalist being that she was a cop and and she made it known to me that she was actually in charge. And so I kept getting suspended and finally one day the Dean came in and he was very, very old and bad and he was going to take over the class and and he said you know, she looks like she is almost dead. And I said how could you tell and you know, and his frustration came out at me and he dragged me physically from the class, took me to his office, made me sit there, came back and said that he was suspending me again. You needed this class to graduate. This was an important class. And said that I couldn't come back unless I wrote an essay rebellious youth, good thinking, and which I of course refused to do. And I was expelled. And I remember because there I was you know at the Oakland Draft Board and this is probably a little gross for all of you but at those times when you go to the Draft Board you had to bent over and spread your cheeks, you know. I mean they did their examination and I was thinking when I was bent over god, I probably should have written that essay. So when I revisited the Transcendalist this time I realized that in fact you can't really understand them when you are 17. I don't care Emerson, I don't know what he was smoking, but what happens is a Calvinist America in a sense you know takes this Unitarian dreamer and says, oh my god you know, what are we going to show the kids? Well the Goodwin essay on prudence, right? But my gosh, Emerson was just just ecstatic thinker. And the thing that struck me so profoundly about Richardson, his best biographer is here at the University, Mind on Fire, brilliant biography. But his visit after his wife died in Paris in 1833 and he was really quite morose and gone to Europe to see his friends you know Coleridge and Wordsworth you know, his pals. And but he ended up at this museum, the of Natural History in Paris and he was created by the Juzos and the Juzos were really brilliant partners and taxonomists and they created a system systematic really, the Wallace and Darwin actually borrowed without attribution, the French again and and he went into the coveted Natural History and on the walls, because this is the time when explorers and you know, adventurers and others were going around the world, about bringing back all these different types of species and you know, dead and alive and inbound and otherwise and they take took them to places like this and they had arrayed them for the first time anybody in the world had arrayed them according to size and morphology, color and Emerson could see the web of life. He could see evolution. He could see how everything was connected. And that night, in his journal there was this rhapsodic and epiphanic entries where he is talking about nature. He had this intimations that everything was nature. But now he could see he could see it on the wall and he really got in his mind, our minds, our nature itself. And then conversely then, what is the nature of our mind? Doesn't tell you what the mind is. But it tells you that it is everything, right. And then then what would be the nature of governance? So what would be the nature of law, right, etc? And he went back and he wrote what? Nature, that was his first book. And really one of the very first people to read it was Harvard's first hippie, Henry David Thoreau, right? And he and he was the Senior and he it came out I think in March or April, he read it again, he bought it and read again. He invited, as his classmates did, Emerson to address the Senior class. He invited himself to Emerson's house afterwards and he went to his house in Cambridge and said you know, he had been at Harvard for four years and you know, had no job skills. May be they didn't have investment banking then and said, what shall I do? And Emerson and really just an extraordinary piece of advice said, keep a journal. And he did from that day for 7,000 pages until he died in 1862. And his journal entry 12 years later was about getting arrested by Sam Staples when he walked into town to get his shoes, he was at Walden and he didn't pay his poll tax that year not just because it prevented African American from voting which is why he had not paid it before but because United States have elected a war mongering President who knew he was going to go to war before he was elected - Karl Polk and was called the Mexican War, that sound familiar, you know. And he was outraged by the war outraged by it. And the apocryphal story of Emerson coming and saying Henry what are you doing in there and him saying, Waldo what are you doing out there is not true. But it is so true in a deeper way because Emerson was so upset with Thoreau because jail was his stigma. He didn't go to jail. And Thoreau as we all know took his teacher at his word. And Emerson said everything is connected. So Thoreau said, if I pay taxes for Texas Rangers to rape Mexican women, I am a rapist. If the government is unjust the just man is in jail, right. It was very clear to Thoreau. It was such an important point because you have this Emersonian not a school but this sort of mean, right that everything is connected on the environmental side. Then from that starts this very interesting mean on the social justice side. And Thoreau, who also was a brilliant scientist on the other side, in terms of succession and so forth and so he was a two for. He went both ways but on the social justice side was so important that he gives a talk on it 18 months later. He writes it up; it's called On Resistance to Civil Government. Now, that is a memorable title. And he dies in 62' four years later, A Yankee in Canada is published and out comes this essay called Civil Disobedience. Well, where did the term come from? Not from Thoreau. It's not in the essay. It's not in any of his journals. Not any of his margin notes. And no one knows where it came from. But there it was. And so important because just four years after it was published Mohandas Gandhi, the young solicitor in Durban has met with 1,100 Hindu and Muslims who have elected to get arrested rather than register under the Black Act in South Africa, apartheid. And he writes in his journal that night, I am not sure what we have agreed to do, right. He is apprehensive about it. And somebody from the Indian Times gives him the Thoreau's essay on Civil Disobedience. And it de-stigmatizes jail for Gandhi. And he gets arrested and walks into jail, holding it up to the press and said, I am going to study up more, right. And that is important because 48 years after that Rosa Parks is standing at a bus stop in Montgomery, Alabama. We know the story, but there is a part of the story we don't hear about much at all. And that is who is driving the bus? And that was James Blake. James Blake had physically manhandled her and thrown her off the bus 12 years before. She had never seen him. I don't know if any of you have been hurt, hit, abused by someone but your adrenal glands light up if you see that person again, fight or flight sense, right. And it did for Rosa Parks. And there was her oppressor looking at her in the eye and what did she do? The most amazing thing she did to me was to get on the bus. I mean obviously she didn't get up when asked to move for a white man but getting on that bus was extraordinary. But why did she get on the bus? That summer before she had been sent to the Highlander School, Miles Horton Clifford and Virginia Durr were there to study up on Civil Disobedience to enforce Brown v. Board of Education, right. And Miles Horton was influenced by Mohandas K Gandhi. And two months after that or just five days actually after that, Martin Luther King, the new kid in town, the brilliant, eloquent, Baptist minister is elected the Head of the Montgomery Improvement Association. And two months after that the front part of house is blown up, his wife and children out there, he comes back, he stops and quells a near riot. Two weeks later Bayard Rustin comes down to talk to this emerging, brilliant leader, sits down in the first chair he finds and sits down on a very hard object and pulls out a loaded pistol. And puts it back, goes to another chair and sits down on another pistol and stands up say, what's going on? And the house is an arsenal. And he said, I thought this is a non violent movement. And Dr. King says it is, but no body better come in here in here who wasn't invited. And Rustin says, have you heard of Gandhi. He said non violence is a principle. And he said, I have heard of him but I haven't read his work. So Glenn Smiley comes over the next week, brings him Gandhi's autobiography and Civil Disobedience. And that Sunday Dr. King is incorporating both of them into his sermons. Now the reason this story is so important to me is not to do with Emerson, Thoreau, Gandhi, King and Rosa Parks. I had loved the story because of the people we don't know. We don't know and hear about the Juzo family. We don't know who and hear about the Juzo family. We don't know who re-titled the essay. We do not know the young man at the Indian Times in Durban who gave the essay to Mahatma Gandhi. We don't hear although we know about Jo Ann Robinson who created the Montgomery Improvement Association two years before the boycott and created the situation in which it could emerge. I could go we don't know about the Durrs really. We don't know what happened to Rosa Parks at the Highlander School except she said; she loved waking up in the morning, smelling bacon and fried eggs and coffee cooked by white people. What I am saying is when you look at this history and many more what you find is that we would look at these great acts in these really great people. And they would have been great, no matter what happened, but what you find is that the most seemingly inconsequential acts changed all of history. And this movement this unnamed movement suffers particularly in this country from low self esteem. And it does so because it has this what, this Promethean anxiety of taking on the whole tomalley, like somehow we have got to fix it all soon and if we don't, we are going to hell in a hand basket. But really let's talk about that for a minute. First of all we have no control over outcome what so ever. We don't have control what's going to happen in this room two minutes from now. So how could we possibly take on the burden of two, 10, 20 years from now in this country or further earth as a whole? No control whatsoever, just give it up give it up. The only thing we have control over is our intention. That's it, right, our intention. Sorry I am not talking about that. And that we do have control over. And it is our intention that creates the world around us. And there a wonderful new book called Radical Hope by Jonathan Lear, Harvard University Press, about the Crow Indian. How they were you know, really like so many first, peoples just deracinated and defeated. Well the Crow as you know, their whole culture is really revolves around one thing and that is courage and no shame, that's it. Coups, planting coup sticks in front of your enemy and daring them to cross. And in front of the cavalry, in front of whizzing bullets, Plenty Coup, the Chief who planted Plenty Coup, and while he was Chief, planted Coup sticks in front of the army and seemingly, invincibly could ride across the cavalry firing guns at him and he was not hit and shot. Amazing, right? Well, they were defeated and that they implode as a culture completely because it wasn't like, oh we will get a different job you know. I mean there whole culture, men, women, child, grandchildren everything revolved around this identity of heart of courage. It was gone. And he studied the Crow and what they did and Plenty Coup it did something which Native Americans do and did, which is to go into the world and its defined guidance. And he did and he came back and he told, can you imagine his warriors listening to this, he told his warriors that they had to become like Chickadees, that they had to listen like a Chickadee to the world. And in that way they would transform and change and he had no idea what they would become. And Jonathan Lear calls this Radical Hope. And this is where we are. The idea that we know was going to happen or where we are heading or what the outcome is going to be is really folly. But the fact is every event, like this tonight, right now, where we are, millions of activities created at this moment millions. And that goes back to my metaphors which is how do you describe this movement? And the way I came to understand it was at best by sort of analogizing it with the immune system. I think this is humanities immune response to political corruption, economic disease and ecological degradation, I mean, we have the Gaia Hypothesis as the earth as a living organism. But many people, Spinoza, De Chardan, Lewis Thomas have speculated that we, us as species. We also have this sphere, this Novasphere, this way of having a collective intelligence that we cannot understand as individuals. And what so interesting about the immune system to me is it is the most complex system in the human body and the sort of the kindergarten or the sort of the the headline description of it being a department of defense that goes out and kills invaders like Donald Rumsfeld really is so such a disservice to the system because really, its more like a chamber of commerce mixer, right, where exchanging cards in meeting and high I do, ice swans for weddings, what do you do you know. And it's very confused and antibodies will go after antibodies and its not that well organized but its very well networked. And what we know about immune system is the better networked it is the more resilient it is. And the immune system will always try rapprochement or detente before it tries attack. And its purpose is to identify me, me, me. Not me, these are not me here, right, me, me, not me and then is it's just what are you going to do with the not me. Some of those not me's it takes little bits of the whole thing and attaches them to then really for the killers house and keep them alive, just like in a cage for years and years and has this library this sort of Alexandrian Library of immunological memory which means that I can touch anything and put in my mouth and I will not fall over dead and even know there is bacteria, right, its memory, all right. It's an amazing system. But this movement is the same which is it is us looking at the worlds saying humane, humane, not humane, humane, humane, not humane. Oh you are clear cutting y forest, ooh, stupid, you just killed the river, oh my God you know. I mean and so whether it's a child that has been trafficked for chocolate plantations, whether it's something in nature, its inhumane to kill life, to destroy life, all right. And the internet is the most complex system that we have as human beings and it is not as complex as the immune system. It has quintillion transistors, a million e mails per second; your immune system is doing more right now than the internet. And to take that analogy even further think about this, you have 100 trillion cells in your body. You have 900 trillion more which are not human. Say hello, and those were your friends, they are with you all the time. And each in one human cell there is 400 billion molecules and tens and millions of activity multiplied out which means right now there is one sept to one octillion activities in your body. That's one with 24 to 27 zeros, that's ten to a hundred times more than stars there are in the 15 million like your universe. And they are going on right now and now and now and now and you that's you. That's is kind of cool. And my question for you is twofold, which is can you feel it? Really, yeah you can, you have always felt it. Its called life. We feel alive. And when you die you can compare. And you will know, yeah that was live, I I get it now. I felt it all the time, right. And the second thing is like, the question, is who is in charge? Who is in charge of your body? And you think you are, you better hope not. I mean we hope it's not Republican Party in charge - all right, or the Democrats, yeah. Or any political party or any ism, right. The point is it does pretty darn well, right, without a central manager or a CEO. And and I am saying the same thing is true about this movement, right. It's not an ism, it cannot be controlled, it has no centrality. There is no spokesperson. You can stand up and say, "Oh well - well", all right, which is why we continue to think it doesn't exist, ignore it, because the media is all facing towards power or the exercise of power and the concentration of power only. I want to show you one more clip, and really when we went into these organizations and you'll see this when you see this clip. And that is, what do we do? We say, environmental, we say human rights, we say poverty, we say social justice. But what do what does this movement do? And it's brilliant. The last third of the book is the taxonomy in this movement which we got not by making it up but by looking at organizations one by one by one by one. And looking at them and saying, okay, what does it say? It does. And then looking for synonyms, tags, keywords and we created, basically with definitions, a 50,000 word taxonomy, what you cannot see is a 100 of 414 top categories here. Okay. And if they kept going, the thing is you would say, yup; check, check, check, check, check. Business creates corruption in government, corruption creates poverty. The main drive of poverty in this world is the lack of rice not the lack of money. Poverty drives demand on resources and exploitation of these resources that drives poverty further. It drives, again deracination and the uprooting and elimination of world communities. 1.4 million people come into the cities every week. They become a pool of very inexpensive, exploitable labor which drives globalization, which drives the making of inexpensive charge costs for big box retailers, which drives consumerism, which drives the use of more fossil fuels you know, I don't have them. It just keeps going. And people see this movement as addressing these different things, like mountain top removal, in that sense saying, what does Burma mountain top removal and turtles have to do with each other? It has everything to do with each other because the fact is; it's the same economic political system. And whether it's a social issue or an environmental issue, it is stealing the future and selling it in the present and calling it GDP or profit. And so whether it is as a I said, a child being trafficked for a chocolate plantation, whether it's a worker in China being exposed to toxins to make toys, whether it is clerca some place, the fact is that some things, some institution almost always a business with the cooperation of government has basically stolen our future and is reselling it you know. The reason there is so many non governmental organizations is because there is a huge non governmental organization in Washington DC. In other words what's happening and is not just our capital, it's in Tokyo, it's in Germany, it's in London. It's all over the world. It's in India. You know, it's in Canada. The fact is our governments do not represent us. They do not represent the people, they represent money. And so is it any surprise that in a sense that we you know, arise that we be have become surrogates for what we should have what we should be electing, what we you know, think we deserve in a democracy. And I just want to end with one more historical note which is really goes back to values. And that is if you go to the Transcendentalist, then you go to the abolition's movement and then the abolition's movement really everything that NGOs do today were started then. But where did abolitionist come from? Where did Clarkes and Wilberforce, where did they get this idea? At a time when three out of four people three out of four people in the world, in 1787 were enslaved or indentured. So when they started that up, people said what you are talking about? Its what humans do, they make slaves you know. And if you do this you guys are meddling with something you don't know. You are going to ruin the British economy. You are leftists; you are do gooders and you know, basically get out of the way. Well they didn't get out of the way, right. But where did that come from. The English sense of charity, not that we the way we use the word. It was the first time that a secular group of people got together to work on behalf of people they wouldn't didn't know, would never know and from which they would never receive indirect or indirect or direct benefit. We do that all the time now. That was the first group to do it. But where did it come from? And you got to trace that right back really to the axial age, 200 to 900 BC, time of great violence, barbarity in the world. People has had enough already. Sages, teachers, philosophers rose. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Socrates, Buddha, Mencius, Lao Tzu, right, eventually towards the end, Rabbi, right. And if you look at their teachings at that time sort of not simultaneously because they weren't completely contemporaneous but without recourse or discourse with the other they came up with two underlying principles, one is never ever do anything do anything to anyone that you would not have done to yourself, the golden rule. And the second, that all life is sacred, whether it's a child or a preacher or culture. And those two values really started that and what we have to remember is that Buddha, Lao Tzu, Mencius, Isaiah, Jeremiah, they were starting social movements. They were not starting religions. They were not starting isms. They were social movements to address suffering and how we caused suffering and they were about re-imagining what it meant to be an ethical and moral human being. Nobody then said cool you know, we are in the beginning of a great transformation, right. We don't know what we are in. We will probably never know what it will be called. It would be long may be after we have passed. But we do know I think we can say that what this movement is is sort of more than echo more than slew but it is the beginning of a great transformation. Will we prevail? May be not, immune systems fail you know. If we knew we will prevail it would be really uninteresting. Probably go do something else, right. It will the stroke of midnight for the rest of our lives. You can count on it, right. And the question is who will we be? Who will we be? Will we separate or will we come together? I mean that's really the question. Thank you very, very much.
