The Movement

There comes a time for all that is harmful to leave.
There comes a time for healing.

An awakening, a rising, a revolution, a movement is growing and spreading silently across the world. It has no center, no leader and no central ideology. This is a civil rights movement, a human rights movement, an environmental movement, a democracy movement. It is the coming world. 

For every act of violence, oppression and injustice in the world, there is another of compassion, charity and restoration. This is how humankind is responding. How humanity is trying to heal the wounds of oppression, injustice and intolerance, of centuries of violence inflicted on our planet and its people.

Today there are over a million organizations across the world working to restore grace, justice and beauty to the world. Students, volunteers, NGOs, monks, nuns, poets, biologists, indigenous people, artists, businessmen, farmers, the landless and refugees - they are defining this movement.

This unnamed movement is the largest social movement the world has ever seen. And no one saw it coming: A woman in India sits for days fasting on the banks of the Narmada river protesting for the rights of millions being displaced by large dam projects; an environmentalist in Canada speaks passionately before a crowd of thousands about toxic lakes so big you can see them from outer space; a man in Liberia risking his life to expose evidence that Liberia President Charles Taylor used the profits of unchecked, rampant logging to pay the costs of a brutal 14-year civil war; a Swiss biologist in the Amazon basin stands up for the rights of indigenous people to own their own land; an African woman along with volunteers plants 40 million trees across Kenya to stop soil erosion; a CEO of a prominent automobile company challenges the legacy of a fossil fuel infrastructure; a rural community in Luxembourg  generate its own energy from bio-gas; a flotilla of skateboarders reclaim the streets of Chicago to green their campus; a young boy chases an entire corrupt government into the woods via a paper airplane campaign.

These are acts of enormous courage, faith, resistance and restoration growing out of a collective consciousness. These people may never meet but they are all part of something bigger: A movement of movements.

This movement doesn’t seek power. It seeks to decentralize power. It is conducive to life. It is humanity’s immune response to heal political disease, economic infection and ecological corruption.