Editor's note: Green Options is pleased to welcome Robin Schidlowski to the writing team. Robin is a feature writer and co-editor for the Urban Alliance for Sustainability's newsletter, and lives in the Bay Area. She'll be covering happenings in that part of the world, as well as writing about urban and general sustainability, and "zero waste."

Paul Hawken spoke in San Francisco last Friday on the final stop of his book tour, as a part of the Long Now Foundation seminar series. In his new book, Blessed Unrest, Hawken describes the global movement, which he declines to give a name, toward environmental and social justice. In a 60 minute speech and Q&A session, Hawken proffered an explanation for what is transpiring.

Hawken told a story of how Ralph Waldo Emerson was inspired by Antoine and Bernard Jussieu in Paris and subsequently wrote Nature. He then told how a college-aged Henry David Thoreau was inspired by Emerson and wrote Civil Disobedience, and how Rosa Parks then read Thoreau's essay the summer before she refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus in 1955. He was describing the networking and the roots of the collective conscious that he calls the “curriculum of the 21st Century”.

Hawken observed that the common thread between the literally millions of organizations in the movement is that, although they all have different ways of expressing their goals, none have contradictory values. They are all, in unique ways, exhibiting moral opposition to an unjust state. He quoted Thoreau: "If the government is unjust, the just man is in jail." Hawken described an atomized, bottom-up collection of organizations working to put down the injustice that permeates every institution, everywhere. He told of how the movement, like the immune system, categorically identifies and destroys disease (or the disease destroys it).

Next came the exciting part as Hawken explained that in the last five to ten years, as a result of the Internet and new ways of communication, the connections among groups and people in the movement have accelerated with unprecedented speed, causing a shift in the balance of power. He used the example of how text messaging technology is disrupting the censure control of the Chinese government, leading to growing unrest and protests the government can't control. A once subdued and contained environmental and social justice movement is now gaining rapid ground the world round.

Over years of collecting data and conducting research on social movements Hawken has come to the conclusion that this is a movement of its own kind, and more powerful and larger than any other. It's not an ideology or an “ism”, but, rather, ideas and solutions to the problems of injustice. It is a movement for “what is right”, and one that can't be broken apart, because it was atomized from the beginning. It's a movement that is dispersing conglomerations of power. Finally, it's a movement that no one saw coming, and that is manifesting in new resources, swift action, and real change.

Hearing Paul Hawken's words solidified the feeling that there is value in our time. It made up for feeling isolated and overwhelmed in the face of mounting consumerism and environmental pressures. He refused to predict what would happen, but instead relayed an image of the scale of the movement and the power that it holds. Hawken offered a beacon of entry to the long, extended green consciousness that will span well into the future, with or without us.

The first chapter of Blessed Unrest is available in an adapted version at Orion Magazine. A videocast of the lecture is available online for Long Now members.