Love fight

As all sentient Americans know by now, global warming and a complementary tidal wave of related catastrophes threaten to wreak havoc on the planet over the next 50 to 100 years. Crashing ice sheets! Rising sea levels! Mass extinctions! Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of doomsday!

But wait a minute, not so fast. There are still those who believe there’s time to avert an awful fate for the Earth. Indeed, of the hundreds of books published this past year in the endangered-planet realm, a few actually offer optimism and other antidotes to a doom-and-gloom mentality. First is Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, which looks to science, spirit and an unnamed social movement to solve our problems. Another noteworthy argument for optimism is Eban Goodstein’s Fighting for Love in the Century of Extinction: How Passion and Politics Can Change the Future.

First to Hawken, whose Blessed Unrest made waves last spring for exposing a secret he found hiding in plain view. The surprise? We are alive, believes Hawken, at the birth of a world-changing, spontaneous, organic “movement that has no name.” The mobilization Hawken has identified is the opposite of a centralized campaign for environmental or social change. It has no predetermined goals, no orthodoxy, no advance strategies—plus it’s invisible to politicians and most media. Basically, he says, it consists of tens of thousand of gloriously hodge-podge, proliferating, nonprofits and community activist organizations and Internet sites that are all fighting harder than ever today for the cause, one way or another, of sustainable living on Earth.

Hawken employs the powerful metaphor of a living organism defending itself as a means to explain how the movement can be seen as a near-biological defense response from the inhabitants of an endangered planet.

Fighting for Love in the Century of Extinction: How Passion and Politics Can Change the Future
Eban Goodstein

Next we come to Goodstein, an economics professor at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore. His Fighting for Love is a passionate assertion of the power of the interconnection of the natural world. Blending science, economics and personal reflections—he urges us to consider our very love of the natural world as a key weapon in our fight to save it.

But the book is more than lofty notions about love and the linking of things. Goodstein’s practical side shines throughout, too, especially in his exhortation that we must stabilize emissions and invest tens of billions in clean-energy technologies sooner than later. It’s too late to avoid “lower end” warming, he writes, so the cause now is to avoid catastrophic warming. Indeed, he believes avoiding this is the key challenge for those living at this point in history.

Goodstein’s optimism is not as divorced from reality as Hawken’s sometimes seems; he understands that victory will require political leadership, global catch-up, governmental structures and nonstop citizen involvement in the political process.

What’s most refreshing about Fighting for Love is the fact that the author has responded to his own call for action and is now serving as project director for Focus the Nation, an educational initiative with the goal of holding a “nationwide discussion” on January 31, 2008 about global warming solutions. Goodstein has been traveling the country, coordinating colleges and high schools, generally getting people geared up for a fight to save the future.

In a funny way, Goodstein and Focus the Nation’s planned January 31 happenings may provide one of many signs that Hawken is right. Wouldn’t it be cool if an unexpected movement has actually been birthed, if Earth’s human inhabitants were really readying to save their threatened planet?