It was very hard to see today that Europe is capitulating to Bush on global warming. To say this is not at all the blame the messanger; Jerome has important news. But if despair can just hit you suddenly, then I expect I wasn't alone in feeling hit by despair. Is the whole world lost to the corrupt views and disasterous policies of BWB?
Until, that is, I remembered a Democracy Now segment from Wednesday
Amy Goodman was interviewing Paul Hawken, a founder of the company Smith & Hawken, and a corporate-critic and environmentalist. His most recent book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, has the following editorian reviews on Amazon.com. to have the following editorial reviews:
David Orr, author of Design on the Edge and The Last Refuge
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!
Barry Lopez, author of Resistance and Arctic Dreams
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.
Hawken argues that the G8 is not the solution. We have a fantasy that somehow signatures from the G8 could solve the problem, but it couldn't. Now in fact I don't know how reliable Hawken is, but this thought seems to me probably true. That is not to say the international agreement would not be a help, but, according to Hawken, effective action means producing a changed social and corporate climate that leads to wide-spread change in actions. He thinks that's happening.
Here's the end of the exchange where that's said.
AMY GOODMAN: You say there will be no Berlin Wall moment.
PAUL HAWKEN: Absolutely not. We had this fantasy that somehow the powers that be can meet somewhere, agree, sign something, and that it’s all going to change. But the forces that have been unleashed, the feedback loops in the environment, require participation from everybody in the world in order to make a change that’s going to be effective. And we certainly need the participation of corporations, but that in itself is not enough. It’s going to take all of us. I mean, it’s going to be the stroke of midnight for the rest of our lives in this century, and we just have to cop to that.
And that means two things: we can either separate, become more violent, we can, you know, shrink into our bastions of ignorance, or like what we do in an emergency, in an accident, is really reach out to other and open ourselves up other and realize that the distinctions we make about what separates us are really unimportant, and what unites us are values which are universal and common and have existed here for thousands of years.
Perhaps we can add Paul Hawken's voice to Jerome's and his call for action. Firm commitment from the G8 would be a help. But it is a fantasy to think it will be easy to save the planet. Jerome is right; we need to put pressure our representatives. But, as Hawken points out, everyone needs to take action.