A Global Democratic Movement Is About to Pop (Orion Mag., via AlterNet)

[marmar]

A Global Democratic Movement Is About to Pop

By Paul Hawken, Orion Magazine. Posted May 1, 2007.



Something earth-changing is afoot among civil society -- a significant social movement is eluding the radar of mainstream culture.

I have given nearly one thousand talks about the environment in the past fifteen years, and after every speech a smaller crowd gathered to talk, ask questions, and exchange business cards. The people offering their cards were working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. They were from the nonprofit and nongovernmental world, also known as civil society. They looked after rivers and bays, educated consumers about sustainable agriculture, retrofitted houses with solar panels, lobbied state legislatures about pollution, fought against corporate-weighted trade policies, worked to green inner cities, or taught children about the environment. Quite simply, they were trying to safeguard nature and ensure justice.

After being on the road for a week or two, I would return with a couple hundred cards stuffed into various pockets. I would lay them out on the table in my kitchen, read the names, look at the logos, envisage the missions, and marvel at what groups do on behalf of others. Later, I would put them into drawers or paper bags, keepsakes of the journey. I couldn't throw them away.

Over the years the cards mounted into the thousands, and whenever I glanced at the bags in my closet, I kept coming back to one question: did anyone know how many groups there were? At first, this was a matter of curiosity, but it slowly grew into a hunch that something larger was afoot, a significant social movement that was eluding the radar of mainstream culture.

I began to count. I looked at government records for different countries and, using various methods to approximate the number of environmental and social justice groups from tax census data, I initially estimated that there were thirty thousand environmental organizations strung around the globe; when I added social justice and indigenous organizations, the number exceeded one hundred thousand. I then researched past social movements to see if there were any equal in scale and scope, but I couldn't find anything. .....(more)

The complete article is at: http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/51088/

[IndyOp]

1. Over 1 million organizations working toward ecological sustainability and social justice.

Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn!

:woohoo: :woohoo: :woohoo: :woohoo: :woohoo:

I really had no idea - this is a TREMENDOUSLY HOPEFUL message.

Mitakuye Oyasin
(For All Beings Everywhere)

On edit - an addition:

The movement can't be divided because it is atomized -- small pieces loosely joined. It forms, gathers, and dissipates quickly. Many inside and out dismiss it as powerless, but it has been known to bring down governments, companies, and leaders through witnessing, informing, and massing.

The movement has three basic roots: the environmental and social justice movements, and indigenous cultures' resistance to globalization -- all of which are intertwining. It arises spontaneously from different economic sectors, cultures, regions, and cohorts, resulting in a global, classless, diverse, and embedded movement, spreading worldwide without exception. In a world grown too complex for constrictive ideologies, the very word movement may be too small, for it is the largest coming together of citizens in history.

[Peace Patriot]

2. This movement came together at the World Social Forum in Caracas, recently.

And we saw its power in the US in Seattle in 1999: 50,000 people--trade unionists, human rights groups, environmental groups, religious groups--a broad spectrum of ordinary activist Americans--marching and meeting, and then combining forces in the largest, most awesome act of civil disobedience I have ever witnessed--10,000 people simply sitting down in the street intersections in Seattle, and blocking entrance to the undemocratic, secret society indoors, the WTO, where big countries were bludgeoning little countries into exploitative policies that make the rich richer, and where our rights in THIS country--our right to regulate corporate impacts on the environment; our right to enforce labor laws, etc.)--were being impinged.

Where is the WTO today? Broken! Brazil and twenty other third world countries rebelled later at the WTO meeting in Cancun. They walked out! The WTO and its global corporate predators are being challenged throughout the world. The WTO going down. The World Bank going down. All the tools of exploitation are being rejected, or evaded--by a healthy uprising of the poor that is happening everywhere, but perhaps most notably in South America.

Oh, they slandered Seattle, yes they did. They couldn't slander that peaceful and amazing protest quick enough. Just know this: It was a police riot (later established in city of Seattle hearings--the police chief was forced to resign--but the hearings were not covered by the corporate news monopolies, of course).

I think it might have been as a consequence of Seattle that the global corporate predators thought up electronic voting run on "trade secret," proprietary programming code, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations, for the USA. Cuz if the people of the USA rebel, it's all over for these global predators. We have the power--and the right as a sovereign people--to curtail them, to regulate them, to pull their corporate charters and dismantle them and seize their assets for the common good. They know this. They saw it coming. They acted to take away our right to vote. It's a hunch I have. I think Seattle was profoundly threatening to our Corporate Rulers. And, unfortunately, at least half of our Democratic leadership is allied with these corporate predators, and do not represent us, the American people. So it isn't just Bush and the Bush Junta that is the problem. It's the whole corporate edifice. They threw naked fascism at us. Now, if they want to make nice, we'll get their fallback position: a War/Corporate Democrat (possibly Hillary), and we had better be grateful, cuz they have Hitler II in their back pocket, if we aren't.

Seattle 1999 was a large organism comprised of many small groups. It even created a conscious image--the spokes of a wheel--as a self-description. No leaders. Everybody is a leader. And, with that freedom and empowerment, everybody cooperates on a larger project--even one that is seemingly impossible, like shutting down the WTO, or electing real populists in stable governments in Latin America.

I've followed the South American revolution closely. And I keep wondering how they've done it--what's the magic? Leftist (majorityist) governments have been elected in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua (and there are strong leftist movements in Peru, Paraguay, Guatemala and Mexico--likely to win future elections). Venezuela in particular is the leader of a new paradigm: community-based groups interacting with government and TELLING government what they need; widespread participation in politics and government, often via small groups (rejection of big, overarching political parties, which often become corrupt); national and regional independence and self-determination; natural resources used for everyone's benefit, not just rich elites; indigenous leadership (often); strong, collective rejection of outside interference by US/Bush-type violence, World Bank/IMF-type financial exploitation (and ruination), and ripoffs by global corporate predators.

Here are the lessons I've gleaned from what is happening in Latin America. We should heed them well:

1. Transparent elections (!).
2. Grass roots organization.
3. Think big.