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What is technology's role in a revolutionary social and environmental movement involving millions of people around the world?

Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming, recently spoke at an event hosted by Bay Area-based philanthropy organization Full Circle Fund, where he discussed environmentalism, social justice, and his work with the Wiser Earth collaborative online directory, which allows activist groups to connect with others involved in their causes.

Jim Lynch, Program Director of Recycling and Reuse at TechSoup, attended the event and shares some highlights:

Hawken finds that the social justice and environmentalism movement taking place on earth today is so vast as to be unnamed and even unacknowledged, drawing parallels between it and the industrial revolution, which took over 100 years for people to recognize and understand.

This movement — a collective effort of millions of people working largely independently — has taken place for generations, yet it has accelerated rapidly in the last few decades to address the conditions wrought by escalating environmental crisis and human rights abuses.

Hawken has spent the last decade trying to get his head around the volume of work all around the world that individuals and organizations are doing in the areas of social justice and environmentalism, a quest that led to his Wiser Earth directory, the first effort to create a database and to understand the scope of the NGO sector worldwide.

To date, Hawken and his Natural Capital Institute have compiled an online database that features 106,938 organizations, 3,352 people, 2,054 resources, and 772 events.

The site is without question the best existent taxonomy of environmental clusters. Here’s an example of one:

Coastal and Marine Ecosystems

• Coastal and Marine Human Impacts (78 organizations)
• Coastal and Marine Invasive Species (31 organizations)
• Coastal and Marine Law and Policy (64 organizations)
• Coastal and Marine Pollution (563 organizations)
• Coastal Ecology (506 organizations)
• Coral Reef Conservation (166 organizations)
• Mangrove Conservation (82 organizations)
• Marine Ecology and Conservation (890 organizations)

This makes it possible for people interested in an specific area to quickly find who else is working in that field.

Hawkens regards the role of cell phones, computers, Web 2.0, and other Internet applications as immensely important tools in increasing the impact and connectivity of social justice and environmentalism — you may notice that www.wiserearth.org is mostly a wiki.

Yet technology is only one part of this movement; Hawken finds that social justice and environmentalism consist of around 1 percent activism (such as marching, protesting, resisting) and 99 percent practical problem solving.

Today, Hawken believes, we are on the cusp of another Axial Age like the efflorescence of consciousness around 500 BCE, the time in which Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tse, the Biblical Isaias, and Zoroaster lived.

To learn more about Hawken's book and to check for future speaking engagements, visit www.blessedunrest.com. You can also catch Hawken online in this podcast interview with WGBH Forum Network in Boston, or in this Wired Magazine Q&A.

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