The Sustainability Movement Is Making a Huge Impact On Our Lives
It’s the birthday of theologian Martin Luther who, when he became disillusioned with the bureaucracy and corruption of the Catholic Church, wrote up his attack and published the famous 95 Theses. Luther’s ideas led to the Protestant Reformation, arguably the biggest single transformation that humankind had ever experienced.
It’s easy to see that the sustainability movement has the potential to rival the Reformation in terms of the sheer magnitude of its impact, though perhaps it’s a stretch to compare religious and secular undertakings. Nonetheless, I believe we are undergoing an enormous paradigm shift in what we perceive to be our responsibilities to one another and the way we conduct our lives accordingly.
Yet the sustainability movement possesses one remarkable difference: it has no leader. While there are a few famous authors and speakers, their presence is dwarfed by the tens of millions of individual contributors; in fact, there are over 200,000 groups on Earth today whose mission is sustainability and social justice.
The question is should there be a leader in this quest? I do not think there should be. If you want a Steve Jobs as a leader that might be fine except he didn’t live long enough to take that mantle.
Oh, I’m not implying that there should be a leader. Not to sound like a latter-day hippie, but I think there is something “spontaneous” and “organic” to the sustainability movement; i.e., there is a good reason why there is no leader. If you haven’t already done so, check out Paul Hawken’s video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1fiubmOqH4 in which he talks about how diverse and free-flowing it is. “It has no armies, no tanks, and no cluster bombs. It flies under the radar of the mainstream media. A male vertebrate is not in charge,” he says to the amusement of the audience.
Hawken also says something else I like. Referring to participating in the sustainability movement, he told an audience, “It’s not a way to get rich. It’s a way to BE rich.”