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