Blessed Unrest | Paul Hawken | Talks at Google

Welcome, everyone. It's kind of unusual for me to do an introduction in the author's talk, but there's a story that goes behind it. I was on a plane, flight. I actually went from here to Zurich and then to Atlanta. I did. I open a house with Jimmy Carter there. And late that night I was on a flight and the guy sitting next to me. We didn't talk, as nobody ever does on flights, for about four hours, until both of us had actually exhausted every piece of reading material I had and he had. And then there was nothing else to do. We still had three hours. Neither of us were interested in movies and so we turned and started a chat and it was one of the most enjoyable three hours that I've had in a long time as we went from the environment to companies, to philosophy, to books, to. To technology. And very rarely have I spent any time on a plane with anybody that was more enjoyable, more knowledgeable, more understanding of a lot of different issues. And you know, for me it was very special. And then right near the end of it, we actually got to where I worked, which was Google, and he said, I'm going to be there. And I said, I'll come. And that was the last we heard of each other until we were basically were. Were introduced a little later by email. So it's my great pleasure to introduce Paul Hawkins.

Thank you. Yeah, it was so interesting because one of the magazines I was reading was Fast Company, had a picture, Jimmy Wales, about how he was going to clock Google. I'm reading this thing next to Andy. So anyway, he didn't say anything at all. He didn't say anything at all. It was really nice, but it really was a great discussion because we just. We didn't know who each other were. Which is the best way to talk to somebody actually to not know who they are and just find out where the conversation goes and leads and where your mutual interests are. Anyway, so thank you very much and thank you Alan and Larry and Anne and everybody here for inviting me. This is the first or second stop on my book tour, really. It started Monday night in Santa Fe and then I spent the whole yesterday on Southwest Airlines and ended up in Salt Lake City and came back very late last night. So anyway, here I am. Blessed Unrest. The subtitle how the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and why no One Saw It Coming really goes back 13, 14 years in my work, and that is that I've been involved with the environmental movement for a long time and just like today, have given a lot of talks and a lot of speeches about it. And in the process, I meet people, and in the process of meeting people, people give you their cards. And for years and years, I brought their cards home with me. I put the cards in my pocket and different things. And then when I get home, I would just empty the cards and look at them and then put them in a drawer. And then I lived in a houseboat, and when I bought the houseboat, I actually bought the housekeeper with the houseboat. She came with it. She was 75, and she couldn't clean. She was too old. But everybody who used her wouldn't let her go because she needed the income from house cleaning. And I had a house cleaner on the side. But I could tell when she was there because she would always rearrange everything. And one day she took this drawer with all these cards from nonprofits, and she put them into a bag. And it was a Bergdorf Goodman bag with gold lame and rope and very fancy bag, and put it in my closet and stuck the cards in there because she knew I didn't want to throw them away. But I wasn't really keeping them from anything either. I wasn't writing back to people. I was just curious, and I couldn't throw them away. And when the bag became full in my closet, where I got dressed every morning, I began to ask a simple question, which is, how many environmental organizations are there in the world? And I had thousands of cards in this bag of different names, and I began to ask that question. And as I did so, in my own work and my own thinking, I began to realize that the social justice and human rights movement and environmental movement were really one movement, and they were just different expressions of that movement. And as my thinking changed, as my talks changed, my audience changed, my cards changed and also grew. And I began to then seek out the question on a larger frame, which is, how many social justice, human rights, and environmental organizations are there in the world today? And no one knew, which is unusual because, you know, we live in America, and there's always somebody thinks they know the answer to everything. But I actually asked a lot of people. I grew up in Berkeley. I was a Berkeley brat. My father taught the library. When I went from school, I went to the library and sat in the stacks and pulled spines out and read books. So research was sort of in our genes. And so I thought, well, I can find this out. And I really couldn't. As much as I tried to, I could not find out. I went to 990s tax forms this and that. But nothing really was an enlisting of the number of organizations that were working on the environment and social justice. So I began to do what I call drilling down. I began to look at tax records and then pick out the organizations which I thought conform to this sort of definition. And then multiplied it back out and began to get numbers of 30,000 organizations in the world, and then 70,000 organizations in the world, & then 100,000 and about 100,000. I began to think, wait a minute, how big is this relative to other social movements in the world? And I couldn't find a movement that was bigger historically or currently. And I began to say that in talks. And people were singularly unimpressed, even particularly people in the movement. It's like, this is the biggest move in the world. And go. And so one of the things I did, and I'll show this to you right away, is I made a clip because it is bigger than 100,000 groups. I found out a lot more. And if I can get this going right now, I'll do it and see. Are we up? Yeah, we're up. And this is something I did after I watched Winged Migration. And when I watched that movie, there was these beautiful, beautiful credits of these organizations all over the world. You know, the Siberian Crane association of Kirkusk and things that I'd never heard of. And what you're seeing here is just names of organizations, cities and countries. Most of these organizations you will not have seen or recognized before. And that's easy to do because we have one of the largest databases now of these organizations. Mostly when you hear the environmental or social justice movement, you hear of Oxfam and Human Rights International and Sierra Club, and you hear the same names over and over and over again. They get the sound bites and the McNeil lair stuff. But what we don't understand is that underneath that is a vast, vast, vast network of organizations. And the reason I did this is to really try to impress upon you how large it is. So what you're seeing now is something that you can read just as it scrolls. You can't really take your eyes away, and you'll miss something, and you can read it. If you were to read the names of every organization in the world, you'd have to start now and read this all day today and all night tonight, and you'd still be here tomorrow and all night tomorrow night, and then you'd be here Friday and all night Friday. Good thing you have food here around the clock. You would spend the whole weekend here. And next Monday and next Monday night, 24 hours a day, Tuesday. Tuesday night you'd be here. A week from now, Wednesday, you'd still be seeing the names of these organizations. And then you'd have to wait another week after that, and then another week after that, and then another week after that before you have seen all the names of the organizations in the world that are working towards ecological restoration, social justice and human rights. It's between 1 and 2 million organizations. It's upward of between 100 and 200 million people who every day work towards preserving and returning and restoring some semblance of grace and. And justice and beauty to this world. In what they do in their daily activity, they affect the lives of billions of people. And it is something that we don't hear about much. As you know, it's composed of mothers and students and peasants. This is to save you from four weeks of sitting here, by the way, workers and tribal villagers, nuns and Christians and doctors and engineers without borders and meddlers and mediators and peacemakers and activists and immigrants and children and refugees and grieving Muslims and prayerful Buddhists and Christians. It's made up of every culture, every tribe, every language in the world today. And what should we do with this? We just go full screen and stop. And you can look at that and. And it has no leaders. And we're so accustomed to a movement having a charismatic leader, usually a white male charismatic vertebrate, and we're so lucky. Finally, there's a movement that doesn't have one. There are certainly spokespeople all over the world. There are shoemakers and poets and tree sitters and farmers and biologists and tree planters like Wangari Maathai. But there is no singular leader. And what distinguishes movement from anything else that we've ever seen, and why it is unseen at the same time, is it is not ideological. It is really a movement of ideas. It's a movement of solutions. It's a movement of both trying to stop the harm and resist what's going on at the same time, by providing new ideas and new ways of thinking, new ways of imagining this relationship between the two most complex systems there are, which is human systems, human culture and living systems. And because it is hard to recognize, because it's hard to see, because we don't refer to it as a movement, and because it has no name, it tends to be ignored and fly under the radar of the media. That is, it just isn't referred to. And if it is, it's sort of in passing. What's so interesting about this movement, however, is that if you look back at the 19th century, the birth of isms, the birth of ideologies. If you look at the 20th century, which is really the war of ideology, 120 million people died while ideology is duked it out and tried to figure out who was the best ideology. And what you're seeing now at the beginning of the 21st century is what I call the sunset effect of quasi ideologies or quasi populist movements like neoconservatism, Christian fundamentalism, and economic fundamentalism, for that matter. And so at the end of that, what you saw and what we're trained to see is ideological movements that have a spokesperson, have a leader, but all ideologies, all isms, end up as schisms. They all end up being divided. And Karl Marx, another person who spent too much time in a library, created, you know, he didn't create Marxism, but Marxism came out of it. And then Leninism and Trotskyism and Christianism, Maoism, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The thing about this movement is it can't divide because it's completely atomized. In other words, it's already divided. It started that way. It truly started up from the bottom up. And what you're seeing now is this movement starting to hook up, it's starting to connect. It's doing the opposite of what every movement has done before, which is to start from the center and then move outwards. It starts from the periphery and now is connecting not to a center, but to a very complex network of which you know much about. It really has three sources. Environmental movement, social justice movement, and indigenous movements. And the reason I put the environment and social justice together, because when you look at both of those, they're both concerned with the same thing, and that is that both deal with the fact that we live in a culture which is stealing the future. We steal the future and sell it in the present. Call it gdp. Now, whether we do it by toxicology, whether we do it by deforestation, whether we do it by the exploitation of a worker someplace or a child, the fact is the economic effect is the same, which is we're enriching ourselves in the present at the expense of others, other people, other places, and certainly the future. And so both are directed to that harm, Whether it is a forest or whether it's a favela, it's the same thing. Now, this movement has a huge history. One of the things I want to do and what the book talks about is where did it come from. Everything has a mother, and this movement certainly has one. It goes back to the Transcendentalists. It goes back to the abolitionist movement in the 1780s, to Clarkson, to Wilberforce. But if you keep tracing and pulling the strings back, it goes back 2,500 years ago, goes back to the Axial Age. It goes back to Rabbi Hillel, to Mencius, to Buddha, to Lao Tzu, to Patanjali. Because at that time, in a world that was marked by tremendous amount of barbarity and violence and war and cruelty, peoples from India, from China, from the Mid east, from Greece, all at the same time, roughly, started to turn to shamans, to teachers, to poets, to philosophers, to priests, and say, there must be a better way. And they turned away from this violence, and they developed codes, ethos, ethics of behavior. They didn't develop religions, but they developed religiosity. And what you see at that time throughout the world, at least that part of the world, is two things arising, and one is simultaneously the Golden Rule, which is, never ever do anything to anyone you would not have done to yourself. And anyone meant anyone, not just somebody in your own tribe or family, people you don't even know. And that's the important thing, which is, for the first time, the idea that you had to act to somebody you did know, a stranger in a way that would support and honor and respect them, was introduced culturally that never existed before. And the second thing was that all life is sacred, whether it's a child, a culture, or a cathedral. And that meme, that idea of other, of the other being sacred then, was really embodied by the abolitionists. In 1787, 12 people who met in a print shop in London and decided to banish enslavement of people in the world. Now we look back and say, well, of course. But at that time, three quarters of the population of the world was indentured or enslaved. In other words, three out of four people in the world were a slave or belonged to somebody else. So when they came up with this idea, everybody said, you're nuts. You're crazy. This is what people do. They were deplored in Parliament as activists and troublemakers. They were meddling. They were going to ruin the British economy. Sound familiar? But that's exactly what they did. And everything that NGOs do today pretty much was invented by the abolitionists 220 years ago. I mean, so it created this sort of pattern that has grown and spread. And then came Rachel Carson, then came EPA, then came the Cuyahoga river, lighting on fire in 1970. And now what you're seeing is this explosion. And the second really wave of that explosion is really the Internet and connectivity and cell phones. Now organizations have a way to inexpensively link, to connect to each other, to trade, to collaborate, to exchange information. Because the currency of this movement is information. And in that way, it very much, you know, imitates life itself, behaves like an organism. Organism. And I dare not say this in front of physician, but I'm going to anyway. But it's very much like humanity's immune response. And what you're seeing is humanity be organismic. That's not orgasmic, it's organismic and it's behaving like an organism. And when you go into your body, if you go in there, you don't see cells. You see a community that is a community with incredible communication skills. You have a hundred trillion cells in your body, 900 trillion more other cells that are not human cells. And at any moment in your body, you know, there's 400 billion molecules in one cell. There's tens of millions of things going on in one human cell between all those cells, at any one moment, there's one septillion to one octillion things occurring in your body right this second. Right this second, 10 to 100 times more than all the stars in the known universe that's 15 million light years wide. It's happening in your body right this second question is, who's managing it? Who's organizing it? Who's in charge? So we're so used to seeing change come from somebody being in charge. And what we're seeing is a movement that's really bottom up, that's rising, where nobody's in charge. And the reason you can say it's a movement is if you take those organizations and the other hundreds of thousands of them and you ask them what their goals, their missions, what their purpose is, and you put it down on a piece of paper and you had a room big enough and you could put down all the missions of these organizations and then read them one by one by one. What you'll find is that they are all different and they don't conflict. And that has never happened before. That is the only opposite of an ideology. Right? And one of the things we did is to. We created a database called Wiser, Earth.org, which I'm sure you'll go right on right now, some of you, but you're welcome to. But it became bigger than that. WISER stands for World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility. And in the process, we created taxonomy of this movement, which is how big is it? Is one thing, what does it do? Is the second thing, what does it do? And I urge you to go look at the areas of focus on wiserearth.org, and what you find, I believe is a curriculum for the 21st century. These are the things that we are, need to and have to address if we're going to be here for the 22nd century in any way that closely resembles the civilization. We'll be here, some of us, in some way or another. But unless we address these issues, we won't be here. So what you're seeing here is just 100 of those categories and how we developed them. We just looked at people's websites and their annual reports and things like that, and we just sort of created this taxonomy iteratively, step by step by step. There are those who say, well, these are separate issues, but they're not separate issues. Corruption is intimately related to poverty. Poverty causes high birth rates because of insecurity. High birth rates cause high population. High population increases demand on resources, which causes more poverty. Poverty creates a wealth gap. That wealth gap is exploited by the wealthy because there's inexpensive labor. Inexpensive labor creates deracination of culture and place. Deracination results in globalization and exploitation. I mean, it just keeps going and going and going all underneath that you have the use of energy, climate change, etc. So in a sense, what you're seeing here is a world, again, this organismic world, this movement that has no name. What we're seeing is a world for thousands of years that has been created by privilege. And what we're moving to is a world created by community. There's a huge transition, it's very empowering to community, very threatening to privilege. And it's caused really by the problems we face, but it's also caused by the technologies that you are so masterful with. And those two together are creating this extraordinary convergence where people in a sense in a bottom up way are imitating life and sort of taking charge and taking ownership of the problems and the solutions that plague us. Now we were going to talk and I want to stop now. Larry and I are going to have a conversation. He didn't get a chance to read the book. So I wanted to do this little precis really quickly so that we had a chance to create more of a basis for our conversation. So I'm going to introduce Larry. No, I'm.

Not. Come sit here. Yeah, sit in a Google.

Chair. Good. Hey, thank you so.

Much. Paul and I have known each other for so long that we were part of the last movement, the one in the 60s. And I guess that's my first question. When the well was getting started, when the hippies were doing Back to Nature, when Stuart Brand was publishing the whole Earth catalog, when we were marching on the Pentagon to stop another war, when the civil rights movement and the women's liberation movement all merged together. There was a moment in time when large numbers of us could recognize in each other's eyes that we were part of the same thing. And it was a movement. Is that part of the continuum that leads from the Axial Age here? Was that different? And then did it succeed or did it.

Fail? People in the 60s tend to be nostalgic about the.

60S. People in their 60s tend to be nostalgic about.

This. In their 60s tend to be. And the problem of the 60s is that we tend to think it happened in America. It happened in many places, number one. Number two is that the 60s, it felt to me like it discovered we have a problem, you know, and it didn't. It just thought it did. And there was massive, there was massive growth at that time. It was an extraordinary convergence of, of issues in awareness and psychotropic substances. And it produced an unusual amount of activity. But the thing that has been so interesting for me as a writer is to really pull the string on the flour bag and keep going back and back and back. And it is so fascinating. And the origins of this movement are different in Italy and they're different in Australia, and they're different in China, and they're different in Japan and different in Africa. In other words, we tend here being both xenophobic and not very globalized in a funny way, in America, even though we benefit hugely from it, not to really understand the dynamics, the worldwide dynamics that is creating this movement. And we also tend to see this movement as being sort of American centric. And I think there is a lot of NGOs here, but NGO means non governmental organization. But since we have some of the worst government in the world, it makes sense that we have more NGOs because we need more NGOs because we don't have GEOs that work. But in the rest of the world, it really goes back. In Italy, it's between the lacita campania, this dialogue. In South America, it's very much about campesinos and, and workers rights and land tenure. In India, it's a very different movement. In the uk it was about worker health and came out of the Industrial Revolution. In Germany, it started out in forestry. Really the best agroforestry, scientific forestry methods in the world came out of Germany. Inspired interestingly by George Perkins Marsh, who is an American writer. So when you start to look at the different, the roots of it, quakers from the UK then the 60s were definitely a burst of that, but it wasn't the head of the parade. It was definitely a spectacular flowering of.

Awareness. And did it.

Succeed? I think that the word success and failure is not really useful. It's a it because that has a beginning and end and I don't think this has an end. I think this is for all of this century, this movement will grow and get larger. I think it's still embryonic. I actually don't think it's even come close to its stable size. I think it's going to be 5 million organizations within 3, 4, 5, 6 years. I really do. It's just growing so rapidly right now. I think that what I don't can understand is how the connectivity is going to affect it. What's going to come out of that in terms of the tools, the technologies, the collaboration, the mutual awareness. One of the great organizations is Transparency International, which goes right after corruption. Really great organization. And the Internet is making it more and more difficult to be corrupt or to be corrupt and not have to respond to somebody saying basically you're doing this and you didn't say, you said you weren't going to do this or you're, I mean with, you know, Google Earth and other things, people using Google Earth right now to confront logging companies in British Columbia saying, and going on, you know, YouTube and running basically advertisements or things that are outing timber companies for their timber practices. Well, you know, two years, four years. I mean the rate of innovation, the rate of change with respect to transparency itself, just transparency is going to fundamentally change politics, voting, democracy and the big issues of climate change. That being really, right now the mother of all issues in terms of will really determine whether and how we function going ahead or not. So I think the 60s didn't fail or succeed. They were the.

60S. You know, I don't think if everybody knows that Paul was the Hawkins of Smith and Hawkins, which it was and still is an incredible store for those of us who love to garden and love to be outside. And from his experience running a business. First time I met you, you were on a telephone talking to a customer and I walked in with Stuart Brand and we wanted to talk about starting the well. And you said, just a moment, customer service comes first. I remember that so well. But from that experience, he moved to an understanding of how companies can be run well and how they can be run badly. He had a TV show for a while about that. And then when he wrote Natural Capitalism, he actually began to look at generally accepted accounting principles as a way in which corporations misunderstand and I think misreport the nature of the externalities of what they produce. And I remember hearing you at a Commonwealth Club meeting, it probably was another book tour, and you said something which really just struck me, and I've never forgotten it as long ago as it was, it was that corporations steal from the future, they steal from the past, they steal from the government, they steal from their clients, and they steal from their suppliers, and that's what they call profit. And it was a little harsh in some ways, but there was such a strong full of corporations element, not Google, there was such a strong element in there. When you talked about an example of refrigerators, and you talked about how unless the cost of the entire life cycle of the refrigerator was kept as part of the P and L or put on the balance sheet as a payable, that no one would be responsible in that company for the cleanup of the rest of that product life cycle. And then it would wind up on the shoulders of government and it would wind up on the shoulders of taxpayers. That was such a. For me, that was such a profound insight. And so you look at corporations now and you look at this movement, which you didn't put a lot of corporate names up.

There. This is all about nonprofits, I.

Understand, but the movement's bigger. There'd be some individuals in it, some religious groups. There'd be probably one or two companies, we would hope, that might at least be friendly to this movement. Give us.

That. Well, let's go back to Wise Earth and I'll go back to the refrigerator in a minute. Well, actually, at the talk itself, the talk was at Commonwealth Club, and the thing I remember is that it was just after Exxon Valdez. And, you know, Exxon really stonewalled it and just did not respond in any way at all that was intelligible. So I took it upon myself at that talk to actually write the letter that the chairman of Exxon should have drafted and should have said to the people of Alaska. And I thought it was a very gracious letter, actually. It said, you know, we apologize first of all for opposing for 20 years the use of double hull tankers because we wanted to save money. And obviously that was a mistake. And we opposed, you know, the stricter licensing requirements for captains because we thought that would impose costs upon us. And that was obviously a mistake because we had a drunk driving the boat. And it just went on down the line by saying, you know, we've really learned from this, we feel bad about it and we're going to, whatever we do, we'll make up for it in whatever way we can because we owe that to you because we've been taking your oil out for 25 years. Well, anyway, the interesting thing about that, I just thought it was what a human being would say, which is like, wow, we screwed up, I'm sorry and we're going to try to make it right and make amends. There was a table of Chevron, they all got up and walked out in solidarity. And I thought, wow, it's like I wasn't talking to you, I was talking to Exxon. And you realize in this corporate world, like they're joined at the hip, it's like a cult, like, oh, you've offended Exxon on I'm out of here. And I actually wasn't, it wasn't.

Offensive actually, what were you going to say about.

Microsoft? But. Thanks to the Internet, it's there. You can see what I've said about them. But the wisererth.org is the first of three Wisers. There's wiserbusiness.org coming and wisergov.org, so you definitely need the three legs of that stool in order to make a sustainable and enduring society and a durable economy. And Wise Earth is only, what, 18 days old? So it's just a little, you know, babe. And it is the first online relational database that is wikiable, that is you can modify all the text, but you can also modify the structure. Now, as part of what you'll see it being a database, it is structured, but you can actually modify the structure. In fact, you're encouraged to because it really is trying to model this movement in a sense from the bottom up. It's not a world changing trigger, top down thing. Well, come here to wiser. What we're trying to do there is create a kind of an information commons or an information infrastructure. Because what NGOs do very well and also do badly is keep themselves separate for funding reasons. They have to keep their identities separate and distinct. And so there's so many NGOs we're trying to do is create the names, the organizations, the areas of focus and the people and the resources and the events so forth, so that any organization can in a sense sit down on top of it and then pull up that information into their own website and there is no branding whatsoever. They can rebrand it EGA or Ashoka or Seva or anything like that. So and to do that we need people to participate to create it. In other words, it has to go both ways. So what happens if I go to the save organization or google.org or something and I go down there and there's information and that's editable. And the only difference between us and say most wiki sites is you really have to show up who you are to edit. And if you edit that, then it goes to every other site in the world that's using that. In other words, the edits go right across but you can pull it up. So that's what Wiser Earth is about. So the reason there's no businesses on that is this Wise Earth. But then there's Wiser Biz and there's Wiser Earth. There's tens and tens of thousands of companies in the world who get it and who are working towards a sustainable and just future. The change has been really astonishing. One of the things Alan and I talked about was just that on the plane, you know what Google's doing and what they can do. And I shared some technologies with him that Google can do and no doubt.

Will. I do want to go back to that question about externalities because in a way the sum total of all of pollution is the sum total of somebody else's externality. Somebody produced that and either didn't consciously account for that as being part of their responsibility or consciously tried not to account for.

It. Yeah, and I think, I mean in the College of Commerce and Natural Capitalism both, I mean it seems obvious that it. I guess it's not, but, but if we paid the true cost of everything that we want, desire, need and purchase, then we get feedback, how much does it cost? And of course we know from self organizing systems they start with simple rules, they have good communication and they have very rapid feedback loops. That's how they work. And we have an economy that doesn't do that. And the feedback loops are really distorted. In fact they're so mangled that we don't have any idea what it is that we're paying for, how much it costs. For example, when we buy a gallon of gas, we think it's high, now it's three, $4, it's 12, $14 a gallon. Except we're paying for it in the Department of Defense. We're paying for it in many other ways, but we don't get that signal at the pump. So what would we do if we were paying $10, $12 a gallon? We would live differently, we would organize differently, we would do our city planning differently. Everything would be different because we wouldn't need to be told or to be encouraged to change our habits and behavior because we would have an immediate incentive to do that. So on one hand, people who invoke the free market are very vigilant, very assiduous about the free market. The free market, the free market. But it's kind of like what Chesterton said about Christianity. He said it'd be a good idea, but no one's tried it yet. I mean, it's kind of like we haven't really tried the free market, because the free market means that you have to fully take responsibility for what it is. It costs, you know, because with freedom comes great responsibility. And the responsibility is missing, but the license is there, which is not freedom. And that's what we.

Have. You're certainly the first person at Google to ever mix Chesterton and Spider man in the same. But it's good, it's. I'm going to ask one more question and then we're going to open it up for questions. If anybody wants to start walking up here, we've got an open mic and I'm going to actually refer back to a chapter long section that I did read quickly in Paul's new book. And he alluded to the Axial Age. And I wonder, did you ever read Gore Vidal's.

Creation? No, I.

Didn'T. It's a wonderful book. For those of you that are interested in trying to find the period of time that Paul was talking about where Lao Tse and Confucius and Buddha and Socrates and Zoroaster had just died. We're all alive roughly the same time. And Gore Vidal creates a fictional person who goes all over the world and talks about that. One of the things that emerged in the Axial Age, according to Gore Vidal, is the notion of progress. Prior to that time, he argues, no one really believed that their children would live in a world that had more stuff, more cargo, more things. Or a world in which their life would be longer, or a world in which their kids would not die with the same frequency. This notion of progress is a relatively new notion and it also contributes to some of the issues and the problems that we're talking about. And I wondered if you'd comment on.

That. Yeah, I do know that about Vidal's book, and I'm not sure that's true or not, because when you had the Industrial Revolution, the idea that income could go up was actually unknown in the West. Few people had a lot of money, and the rest worked for very little money and none. And the idea that income should go up in your lifetime or that a country's income could go up was really a new idea. And now we're so accustomed to it that when it doesn't happen, it's considered a disaster. But at the time, it was what the Industrial age introduces, the idea of concentration of capital, that you could go out from, say, the British Isles or Spain and then bring in stuff and concentrate wealth in one place. But I do think what's so interesting about the actual age, though, is that it was really people turning away from an age of brutality and cruelty. And there was this rising. It wasn't just Buddha or Zoroaster or Patanjali or Mencius or Lao Tzu. It was people themselves were so open, so ready to listen to a different way of being. And the thing about the actual age is it wasn't about monotheistic gods or religions or temples or churches. It was always about exactly how you acted in the world. It was what you did and what you did every day. It was really about a practice, and it was really a very grounded morality. And only later did it become religion, which is really moving away from those core teachings. And I think that this movement, in a sense, is a kind of a kindness, a bow back to the actual age, because it's really the same thing. It's about how do we act in such an age? How do we act in such a time? What is an ethical life? What is an ethical company? What is an ethical act, given who we are and what we're doing at this.

Time? I think one of the saddest things, with all the velocity of communications and all the words that are exchanged, we don't have a simple venue for having that conversation as a large community either. And I think we miss it. Television has never fulfilled that promise. The Internet is struggling to find ways in which it can fulfill the promise of being the town square of great ideas. But we have not really found the way in which we can all be part of that.

Conversation. Well, I would encourage you to. I mean, if you go to Wise Earth, do two things. One is go to the areas of focus and just scan and read them. It's the back of your book, too. It's in the book, so you don't have to go there. The other thing is to go look at the organizations. And I think in any way that you want to go in and dive in, but what you'll find is really, I think, a hidden world of humanity that we're not seeing. Because if you turn on the news, you turn on the radio, if you look at the New York Times, you're seeing a very, very, very narrow view of humanity and a very narrow expression of who it is we can be and who we're becoming. And that's what's so, to me, fundamentally hopeful. When I wrote this book, I was not looking to write a hopeful book or an unhopeful book. I was simply trying to figure out how big it is, how it works, and where did it come from, its history. And in the process, I feel like hope or optimism discovered me. You cannot. If you look at the data right now and you're hopeful, you're not really looking at the data, and you need to go back to science, get more science. But if you look at the people who are addressing the data, if you will, the problems, and you're not hopeful, then you don't have a heart. So both are true at the same time. And one doesn't obviate or cancel out the other. And that's what's occurring. And it's really important that we don't lose sight of this extraordinary uprising and upwelling and coalescence of humanity that's occurring right now. As I said, nothing like this, nothing even remotely like it has ever happened in history. There's no antecedents, there's no precedence. We simply don't have a way of even seeing it. And I talk about the Mem tribe in Ethiopia, and anthropologists went there. But if you actually can't think of something, sometimes you can't see it, even though it's in front of you. If you don't have it in your mind, they know this. And we've done experiments, and in this case, they had a coloring book with the Mem tribe of animals they live with, like waterbuck and antelope and things. They know them like, they know. Like we know cars, you know, or better. And they had a coloring book, and they showed it to the men. And the men would pick up the, you know, the coloring book, and they'd smell it, first of all, you know, and then they would listen to it in the wind, you know, the sound that the paper made in the wind, you know, and then they would, this is your book. And then they taste it, you know? You know, and then. But then the person said they had these outlines of animals, you know, and they'd say, you know, what's this? What is this? You know, I have no idea. And say, I have no idea what that is. So then they took the same thing and they did it with women, and they put the outlines on cloth, and on the cloth they took their fingers and then they outlined the animal. And they'd say, well, what do you see? And she'd say, oh, I see a horn, and this is a tail, and this is a hoof. And they said, yes, what is it? And she said, I have no idea. And we're very much in that same situation, which is we're so trained to look for power, to look at power, to look for someone, a leader, to save us, to come with an idea, you know, that behind us, you know, there is salvation. And we're not looking that way. I don't mean salvation in religious sense, but in a really complete way that we've never understood salvation before. That is to say, it's us, we're already here. And it is growing in such extraordinary, magnificent ways. And really. And I go back to immunity, which is when you really understand how immune systems work. They work better the more connected and networked they are. That's what makes a strong immune system. And the closest. It's the most complex system in the body. And the closest thing we have to describe the immune system is the Internet. It's the closest things that human beings have done that describes the most complex organism or system in the human body. And this is an immune response to political corruption, economic disease and ecological degradation. And it is beautiful to watch. It doesn't mean it doesn't need money and help and guidance and so forth. But it's beautiful to watch it precisely because it is self organizing. And they did an experiment once with activists, and they took activists, and then they trained a group of activists in strategy and tactics and all these stuff you learn in business. And then another group of activists. They didn't train them all and they tracked them. The ones who were just going intuitively did much better than the ones who had.

Training. Are there any questions? The first person who comes up and asks a question, I have a sample of Paul's DNA here that I'll be happy to give you. Please come forward. Here we.

Are. I have a DNA.

Story. Hi, glad to see you here among.

Us. Thank.

You. Thank you for coming. So this is very interesting about the multitude of NGOs and the variety of things that they do. And I know this from my own experience. I run in a very, very small NGO with a very, very, very Focused, with a very, very focused mission. And in light of all what you have said, what I'm really curious about is how do you see this space of NGOs? I mean, are there some that are emerging that will become some sort of infrastructure that could help the sprouting ones sort of have an easier job to start themselves up? Because some of the things, very practical things that we had to go through, I guess, could be really helped by something else out there as well. I'm not sure if this was.

Understandable. I mean, well, they. The movement of the NGO world is getting, excuse me, better at being what it is. And just like business used to be buying and selling, and now business really is very sophisticated in terms of what it does and how it does. It's gotten better and better in the last 10 or 20 years in terms of organization and culture and what it does. Civil society is doing the same thing. And you have like the boot camps at the Craigslist foundation, and you have the Rockwood Institute in leadership, and you have organizations. In fact, we have a whole section in areas of focus, which is NGOs, dedicated to serving NGOs in terms of learning. So the learning is speeded up, mistakes are not, don't need to be repeated, and that people can learn from each other so that the learning is. So speed it up in itself. And so that is kind of a Lamarckian kind of leap as well, when it starts to learn from itself and speed up its rate of adaptation. Because usually it's been siloed and people have been repeating and reinventing the wheel over and over again. And that's starting to change. In fact, it's changing very.

Rapidly. It's really. I completely agree. I mean, I think it's time to start putting this sort of infrastructure.

Place. Yeah. By the way, when you mentioned DNA, I have a friend who's Russian Jew, and he had his DNA done and found out he was Italian. So he went to his mother and said. She said, oh, yeah, well, we don't talk about that. And so I had my DNA done and I. So, you know, I'm. I'm Cornish, Scottish, Irish, Swedish and French. And we know that Ethan Allen, we have the records, the photographs and so forth. So I get my DNA back. Yeah, right. Swiss, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and some Flemish. And the population that most matches me was the exposure Patriot Puerto Rican population in Springfield, Massachusetts. As soon as I got that, I felt like, oh, it's so cool. I don't have to be Nordic anymore. You know, it's like I have hot blood. You know, it's like. But it makes you realize, because then there was Moorish and it was a little African. There was Indian. I mean, there was this. You know, you realize, God, we're all connected. My God, we. So the way we've been taught to identify ourselves as so. So.

Erroneous. Tom Villasek, who was the governor of Iowa and who ran for president and was running for the nomination for the Democratic Party, he was an orphan. He was totally unaware of what his lineage was. And he would go into some of his campaign meetings and he'd go into a Catholic campaign group, he'd go into a Jewish group, he'd go into an African American group. He says, listen, I can't be derogatory towards any group because I don't know where I come from. Do you have a question? Yeah.

Please. You mentioned about Exxon and Chevron. So my question was, in your years of experience, are you beginning to see large corporations trying to kind of.

Begin to account for their negative.

Externalities? And if they are, you know, what is causing them to do this, and if they are not, what is hindering them? That's a great question. Yes. First of all, in the last two years, and it's really right after the election, before Katrina, something seemed to shift and it didn't happen in the headlines, but I could tell by who was calling me and what they were asking, what they were saying. And there seemed to be, and that's going full force right now, and start at the highest levels, the CEO level, chairman level. And I don't know what the precipitating factor was, but no longer was it about how can we get rid of this issue or get something off our back or this is really plaguing our reputation. Forget that we need to change. There was a real clear sense that they need to change their practices. What you find is, and they find certainly is that the externalities, which they're so addicted to and all their competitors are addicted to as well and almost have to be that in a way, they can't go right at the externalities. And so what they've done is gone the other way with technologies in order to reduce their footprint and save money. In other words, they've had to go the way to save cost. And that actually has been very effective, like Walmart. Whatever you think about Walmart, plus or minus, the fact is that on the environment side, they really do get it. And if you talk to the executives there, there's a literacy about energy, about water, about oceans, about Mangroves and coral reefs and diamond mining and right on down the line. That would have been extraordinary, I think, in an ngo five years ago. I mean, so the rate of uptake, the rate of learning, and for all the poor mouthing that some people do to corporations, corporations are really smart and they really learn fast when they need to and want to. And they are right now. And they're outstripping, in some cases, their teachers, if you will, the NGOs. What's interesting, though, about Walmart, and they wouldn't let me publish it in this book, which is the cooperating NGOs, so the very NGOs who were kind of MAU Mauing them and say, come on, you know, you guys are destroying the place, were the first actually to help and work with them to change their practices. And it's an extraordinary list of organizations that are working with them. Some want to be known, some don't want to be known. But you see it all over the world now. And I don't think there's very many organizations left of Fortune 500 scale that are taken seriously if they don't address these issues. Some are doing it in a recidivist way, I think, still like Exxon, but using sort of mirrors, you know, and it's really about promotion. But even hypocrisy is okay, because you start to believe your own lies, and then pretty soon, you know, you start to actually do it. And so anywhere you start is fine, as long as you're moving in that direction. But, yeah, thank you. When you measure externalities, is it also possible, or is it difficult to measure the displaced externalities? For example, the food not wasted because of the refrigerator, the paper saved by using a computer. Yes, it is. And a lot of that measurement now is starting to take place because people are monetizing it. Carbon offsets. So before, it would take an academic or a graduate student or class at Cal Poly or wherever to essentially do that because no one else had the time or money. But now, because of carbon offsets, the fact that they're fungible means that people are actually drilling down and finding out what are the displaced effects, in the positive sense of the word, of activities. That was the second and third order effects of an activity as opposed to first order, because then they can, in a sense, document that LCA it and then with that, resell it in Chicago or London and make money from it. So the market has come to externalities, or in this case, the reduction of externalities. So, yes.

Maybe. Last question, Perfect person for our last.

Question. Thank you, sir. So you mentioned addiction to externalities and in the context of large corporations, but also I think individuals are addicted to externalities as well. And you also mentioned availability of information as one way of redressing those addictions. So if you figured out how much it actually cost to eat a certain kind of food in terms of how much fuel it took, then maybe you wouldn't choose to eat strawberries flown from Chile, that kind of thing. But do you think that access to accurate information like that will be enough to change consumption patterns or will something else need to be.

Done? I think it will change consumption patterns for people who can afford to. Because what you have is most people do not have a lot of disposal income. In fact, they don't have disposal income at all. And they really go from paycheck to paycheck. So those people cannot make real different decisions, purchasing decisions. Mostly it's middle, upper middle class people that can have that discretion for those people. The technologies are coming very fast now. I mean, you'll be able to take your cell phone away from a barcode and look at it and go, eh, you know, and I'm not buying that. And you just see right away why you're not buying it. Or you can decide to buy it, but you'll see why. Things you might want to consider if you do buy it. But at the same time, yes, consumers are addicted to it and producers are addicted to it. And really this is one of those things you really need. It's got to be a policy change because it has to change. At the same time, the fact is the organic tomatoes is cheaper than that pink baseball you buy in the wintertime. And that doesn't have any taste. But you would never know it about price. But it's true, it costs because the pink baseball is putting people in emergency rooms and pesticide poisoning, they were not paying their health care, poor wages. I mean it goes right on down the line. And whereas the organic tomato farmer, if they're using traditional biological agricultural practices, are not only not doing that, creating externalities, but they're actually sequestering carbon in the soil. They're building carbon back up in the soil. So it's even a plus. And one of the things that happened is that in the carpet industry you had interface. And then one by one the industry started to change because architects have made put so much pressure on indoor air quality and other things. And now they're talking together about asking the government to ban carpets from landfills. Three to four billion pounds a year, last 10 20,000 years, you know, the stuff in landfills, because they really are developing the technologies to completely reuse and remanufacture from old carpet. And in that way, they think that they will, in a sense. So the outliers and the free riders who are, aren't environmental, they will then actually force them to compete with them. So you're starting to see that kind of shift, you know, in the corporate world can't happen fast enough. Thanks for the.

Question. So let me, let us all, I think, thank authors at Google and thank sue and thank Paul Hawking for coming to.

Google. We really appreciate.

It. Thank you.