Blessed Unrest

How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being,

and Why no One Saw It Coming

It is my believe that we are part of a movement

that is greater and deeper and broader

than we ourselves know, or can know

It flies under the radar of the media by and large

It is nonviolent, it is grassroots

It has no cluster bombs, no armies, no helicopters

It has no central ideology

A male vertebrate is not in charge

This unnamed movement... you can clap for that... the unnamed movement....

(audience laughs and claps)

...is the most diverse movement the world has ever seen

The very word movement I think is too small to describe it

No one started this world view. No one is in charge of it

There is no orthodoxy, It is global, classless, unquenchable and tireless

This shared understanding is arising spontaneously

from different economic sectors, cultures, regions and cohorts

It is growing and spreading worldwide with no exception

It has many roots

but primarily the origins are indigenous culture, the environment and social justice movements

Those three sectors and their sub-sectors

are intertwining, morphing, enlarging

This is no longer or simply about

resources, or infractions or injustice

This is fundamentally a civil rights movement

a human rights movement

this is a democracy movement

it is the coming world

What you're seeing here

is the beginning of a list

of the 130,000 minimum... organizations in the world

who work towards social and environmental justice

and that's the minimum.

It may be 250,000 groups, it may be 500,000 groups

Read these names. They're unfamiliar to you most of them. I'm sure

We do not know how big this movement is

It's marked by kinship and community and symbiosis

It is pachamama. It's mama

It's the earth talking back, waking up

What you see is your kin on that screen

and to give you a sense of how big this movement is

if I had started this tape on Friday morning at 9am when this conference began

and if we sat here all day Friday, all night Friday, all day Saturday, all night Saturday

all day Sunday, all night tonight and all day Monday

we still would not have seen the names of all the groups in the world..... who we are

It's so new, we can't recognise it

We're familiar with armies and governments and war and churches and religions

but this is...there's no precedent for what we're doing

What you're creating is completely unknown

it is everywhere

there is no centre

there's no one spokesperson

it's in every country and city on earth

it is within every tribe, every race, every culture and every ethnic group in the world

This is the first time on earth that a powerful non-ideological movement has arisen

During the span of the 20th century

big ideologies were worshipped like religion

they dominated our beliefs

This is to speed it up so you don't have to stay here until Monday night

Big ideologies dominated... capitalism, socialism, communism

In the words of Ed Hunt, "ideologies stalked the earth clad in armour"

they fought for the control of our minds and the lands and it wasn't pretty

and we were told that salvation would be found in the domination of a single system

This is where salvation will be found

We know that as biologists, we know that as community organizers

We know that as ecologists

It's found in diversity

This movement is humanity's immune response to resist and heal...

...political disease, economic infection and ecological corruption caused by ideologies

So it is up to us to decide... how will we be?

Who will we be?...

This is what it is we're building

...the capacity to respond

It is about possibilities and solutions

Human kind knows what to do

(audience applause)

Subtitle by: Camilla Burg