“The elegant and eloquent Stephanie Mills,” as Nancy Jack Todd so rightly calls her, is writing a biography of Bob Swann (co-founder of the Schumacher Society, land-truster, community currency advocate, Ghandian, and more). Her second Schumacher Lecture, given in 2004 and carried last year in Annals of Earth, told Bob’s story.
I won’t attempt to summarize it here – it’s too rich – but I will share one thing that grabbed my attention:
This passage, in which [Albert] Camus envisions a global peace movement, brought Bob Swann much to mind: “Little is to be expected from present-day governments, since these live and act according to a murderous code. Hope remains only in the most difficult task of all: to reconsider everything from the ground up, so as to shape a living society inside a dying society.”
Camus wrote that in 1946. Coincidentally (or not), a small piece in the business pages this morning, Saving the Earth One Wiki at a Time, plugs Paul Hawken’s forthcoming book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
From the Blessed Unrest web site:
Like nature itself, it is organizing from the bottom up, in every city, town, and culture. and is emerging to be an extraordinary and creative expression of people’s needs worldwide.
Hawken and his colleagues at the Natural Capital Institute are chronicling this movement in WiserEarth, “an online database of social justice and environmental organizations”. You can find out more at a meeting this Tuesday in San Francisco.