An impossible vision?

Paul Hawken’s chronicle of the worldwide movement for social and environmental justice concludes with what seems an impossible vision:

While so much is going wrong, so much is going right. Over the years the ingenuity of organizations, engineers, designers, social entrepreneurs and individuals has created a powerful arsenal of alternatives. The financial and technical means are in place to address and restore the needs of the biosphere and society. Poverty, hunger and preventable diseases can be eliminated in a single generation. Energy use can be reduced 80 percent in developed countries within thirty years with an improvement in the quality of life, and the remaining 20 percent can be replaced by renewable sources. Living wage jobs can be created for every man and woman who wants one. The toxins and poisons that permeate our daily lives can be completely eliminated through green chemistry. Biological agriculture can increase yields and reduce petroleum-based pollution into soil and water. Green, safe, livable cities are at the fingertips of architects and designers. Inexpensive technologies can decrease usage and improve purity so that every person on earth has clean drinking water. So what is stopping us from accomplishing those tasks?

It has been said that we cannot save our planet unless humankind undergoes a widespread spiritual and religious awakening. Fixes won’t come unless we fix our souls as well. But would we recognize a worldwide spiritual awakening if we saw one? What is there is already in place a large-scale spiritual awakening and we are simply not recognizing it?

Of course, he doesn’t mean a return to a literal reading of “the book” coupled with the kind of self-congratulatory piety that passes for so much religion today. Rather, he comes much closer to a book I read a couple of years ago called The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard, a professor of philosophy at USC. Willard concluded that that we cannot lead moral lives by our own powers, only by the grace of God. That wasn’t exactly his original thought. Luther said much the same thing nearly 500 years ago.

Hawken argues that we cannot solve our environmental problems just by addressing the environment, only by bringing the whole social and economic structure into accord with the environment.

There can be no green movement unless there is also a black, brown and copper movement. What is most harmful resides within us, the accumulated wounds of the past, the sorrow, shame, deceit and ignominy shared by every culture, passed down to every person as surely as DNA, a history of violence and greed. There is no question that the environmental movement is critical to our survival. Our house is literally burning and it is only logical that environmentalists expect the social justice movement to get on the environmental bus. But is the other way around; the only way we are going to put out the fire is to get on the social justice bus and heal our wounds, because in the end there is only one bus.