Ocean Book of the Month

Each month in 2008, The Ocean Project will highlight a book focused on our blue planet or environmental sustainability. Books for all age groups will be covered, non-fiction and fiction, prose and poetry. If you have a suggestion, please let us know.

Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming

By Paul Hawken

"This is the first full account of the real news of our time, and it's exactly the opposite of the official account. The movers and shakers on our planet aren't the billionaires and the generals--they are the incredible numbers of people around the world filled with love for neighbor and for the earth who are resisting, remaking, restoring, renewing, revitalizing. This powerful and lovely book is their story - our story - and it's high time someone's told it. Nothing you read for years to come will fill you with more hope and more determination."

-- Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy and The End of Nature

The dawn of the 21^st century has witnessed two remarkable developments: the appearance of systemic problems that are genuinely global in scope, and the growth of a worldwide movement that is determined to heal the wounds of the earth with passion, dedication, and collective wisdom. Across the planet, groups ranging from ad hoc neighborhood associations to well-funded international organizations are confronting issues like the destruction of the environment, the abuses of free-market fundamentalism, social injustice, and the loss of indigenous cultures.

Paul Hawken, bestselling author and one of the world's leading activists, has spent over a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person .org causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. 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.

Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of the movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and hidden history dating back many centuries, and features a taxonomic guide to the full breadth of project areas that are being pursued by the environmental and social justice movements - an invaluable resource and inspiration.

Fundamentally, it is a description of humanity's collective genius, and the unstoppable movement to re-imagine our relationship to the environment and one another. It is the story of what is going right in this world. From students in Australia to farmers in France, from shoemakers to zoologists to poets, the participants in this great enterprise are united by a conviction that the world must be reconstituted to ensure its - and our own - survival.

A culmination of Hawken's many years of leadership in the environmental and social justice fields, it will inspire and delight any and all who despair of the world's fate, and its conclusions will surprise even those within the movement itself.

Blessed Unrest is accompanied by one of the larger websites in the world, WiserEarth.org, a collaboratively written, free content, open source networking platform that links NGOs, funders, business, government, social entrepreneurs, students, organizers, academics, activists, scientists, and citizens. Here you can see what Paul Hawken describes in his book in its scope, detail, and diversity.

• Visit Blessed Unrest's website.

• Find out how you can help do your part at the Seas the Day action pages.

• If you are interested in reading this book but also want to be a conscious consumer, please visit your local library and check it out.

• If you're interested in purchasing this book, and then perhaps passing it along to a friend to spread the word, we encourage you to buy locally and from an independent bookseller. Please click on one of the two logos below to purchase a good read and help The Ocean Project.

  [For any purchase you make online by linking directly from this website to either the legendary independent bookseller, Powell's, or an independent bookstore in your community participating with Book Sense (if the latter, they will prompt you for your zip code to find the closest participating bookstore), a small commission will be sent to The Ocean Project to help us continue our nonprofit educational mission, thanks to you!]

Click here to order from your local independent bookseller

Click here to order from Powell's Books

• If you have any suggestions for a future "Ocean Book of the Month", please let us know. Send us your favorite recent or not-so-recent read so we can share it with all!