You look so beautiful. I wish you could see what I see. One of the things that I learned this year from my brother Van

Jones was a culture of gratitude. I participated in an event for the Ella Baker Center and the day after, e-mail after card after note after gift came pouring in from the Ella Baker Center, thanking me for participating, and it was such a teaching for me.

I would like to thank everybody who is not in the room here. You’ve never gotten to see the people backstage who are here year after year, and the ones in the green room, and the volunteers outside, and the people who are at the tables who never get to see the plenaries. I know they’re honored by Bioneers later but I want to extend our presence and gratitude here to those who are not—the people who cleaned this hall who we’ll never see, the people who watch over it, the people who take care of the things unseen.

I especially want to thank Kenny and Nina for the years of dedication. I am a friend of theirs, as many of you are, and you know how difficult it is every year to bring this to ourselves, to raise money, to travel. Every year, as soon as this is over, they hit the road to raise money to pay for what has already happened. It happens every year. No one knows why this isn’t self sufficient, but we do know that those two people put it out again and again year after year. So I would like to say thank you.

I live a few hundred feet from Cascade Creek. It’s in the Mount Tamalpais watershed. And this year for the first time there are “no fishing” signs, instead of the “no fish” signs. That means they expect the salmon to come back. The San Francisco Bay Chinook salmon have had to overcome 160 years of poisoning by mercury from the gold mines, agriculture runoff, nitrates, sulfates, pesticides, oil spills from Chevron, sewage discharge from 60 plants that go into the bay, industrial wastes; the fact that the dams have no ladders on them. The Friant Dam stops all real spawning on the San Joaquin, and almost half of all the salmon fry that come back down are chewed up in diversion pumps so that we can keep the lawns in southern California green. And this year, the Chinook salmon are coming home.

I’ve thought a lot about Salmon Nation. It is such an iconic term that Spencer Beebe and others have coined. Obviously Salmon Nation is wherever salmon come home and what is interesting about it is that it is the first biological nation ever proposed. Imagine California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Alaska, Hokkaido Japan, Korea, parts of Russia (Kamchatka), and parts of China, joining together to form a new member of the United Nations; a new Olympic team; a new awareness of what governance can mean. Now imagine this: there would be the Minister of the Trees, the Minister of the Fisheries, and the Undersecretary of the Spawn. There would be the Secretary of Justice and Equality, the Minister of Opportunity, the Office of Culture and Understanding and the Secretary of Peace. There would be a bicameral legislature—it works pretty well. There would be the Consensus Committee, the Caribou Subcommittee, and the Committee for Eternal Responsibility to our Children.

Budgets would originate on the precinct level, and they would be approved on successive levels until they got to congress, at which time they would be ratified; they would not be bargained over, and there would be no earmarking or lobbying whatsoever. The three leading parties would be the Sustainability Party, the Peace and Justice Party and the Deep Ecology Party. And they would just duke it out every election, but the one thing they couldn’t do is put up posters on any telephone poles or lawns because they would not cut down any trees. Each candidate would receive 20,000 dollars max to run for public office. If we form this nation I would like to put my name in the hat for the Assistant Secretary for the Owls, so please remember that.

Salmon Nation is about sovereignty based on biological integrity and the right to reclaim our commons. It is the right to renew the government’s covenant with its people in order to prevent corporate depredation and to support social and cultural restoration. This is what I call liberation ecology. It is a biological economy. It heals wounds, supports the forgotten, and honors the children. It is the movement of movements. It is the gathering of the tribes. It is the undertaking of those activities that are conducive to life—Janine Benyus’s memorable phrase, “creating the conditions that are conducive to life.” Now, what I’ve done here for Spencer—I’m not good at Photoshop, so I’m not advocating this on terms of a design level—is create a flag for Salmon Nation. On it is the phrase, Creare Condiciones Sub Quibus Vita Foveatur, which is Latin for creating the conditions that are conducive to life. This is the first draft of the Betsy Ross flag for Salmon Nation.

Creating conditions that are conducive to life is the only definition of economics that will allow us to persist. It is also the only definition of politics that will bring us peace. What we see in Salmon Nation, we see all over the world, the rise in growth of non-governmental organizations, because governments no longer represent their people. But let me say this: We are not non-governmental organizations. We are actually surrogates for a government that doesn’t exist. The true non-governing institutions in this country are called the House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, and every lobbyist in Washington, D.C.

Power is being created from the bottom up—bottom up because it is completely corrupt from the top down, and the bottom up solutions to our top down problems are seated gratefully, and fortunately, on both sides of you. These solutions are called neighbors and friends. It’s called local economies and slow food; it’s called local, renewable sources of energy; it’s called urban ecology, green jobs, green buildings; it’s called regional materials, and slow cites. There are so many words for it, but it is about creating an independence movement, and true freedom requires this complex interdependence and collaboration just as we see in nature. We can no longer import our lives in the form of food, fuel, and fundamentalism. Life is homegrown, always has been, so is culture, and so too are the solutions to global problems.

In my talk here two years ago, I suggested that the social justice, environmental movement and indigenous movements are intertwining and morphing, and are becoming the largest social movement in the history of the world, that they are in essence, humanity’s immune response to political corruption, economic disease, and ecological degradation. I’ve spent, since that speech two years ago, more time researching and writing, trying to trace the origins of the movement—where did we come from, not just as people, but where did this movement come from? Though it is growing very fast now it deep and ancient roots.

What we know is that over the years the ingenuity, genius, and imagination of organizations, social entrepreneurs, engineers, designers, and individuals have created a powerful arsenal of tools to redress what ails the world. The financial and technical means are in place to restore the needs of the biosphere and society. Poverty, hunger, and preventable childhood diseases can be eliminated within a generation. Energy use can be reduced by 90 percent in developed countries, and the remaining 10 percent can be replaced with renewable energy. The gaps in education and opportunity that exist, particularly in this country, can be closed within ten years. Dignified living wage jobs can be provided for every single man and woman in the world who wants one. The toxins and poisons that permeate our daily lives can be eliminated through green chemistry. Biological agriculture can increase yields, reduce and eliminate pesticides and poisons and other inputs, and save family farms. Green, safe, livable cities are at the fingertips of people, designers, architects and planners. Inexpensive water technologies can decrease usage and improve the purity of water so that every single person on Earth has clean drinking water. So, what’s going on now? We should be able do all if this movement is so big, right? But we aren’t. There is something missing.

It has been said by many that we cannot save the planet unless there’s a widespread spiritual or religious awakening. When I’ve heard that in the past I have sort of buckled and stiffened—not because I didn’t think it’d be a good idea, but because I thought, well, yeah, but we have work to do. Things are going so fast that we can’t depend on such a thing arising. But in my research for the book, I have come to think about this in a different way. My question for you is this: Would we recognize a spiritual awakening in this world if we saw one? Let me put the question to another way: What if an awakening was already deeply in place and we don’t see it? In other words, it’s here.

In her work, which I recommend, The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong, she details the origins of our religious traditions in what’s called the Axial Age, the period between 200 and 900 BCE. This is a time when much of the world turned away from violence and cruelty and barbarity. There was an upwelling of philosophy, insight, and intellect in that period that is carried forth in the work of Socrates and Sophocles, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Mencius, the Buddha, Rabbi Hillel, and others.

Rather than creating religious institutions, these leaders brought forth social movements that addressed human suffering. Later, they were called Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, monotheistic Judaism, democracy, and Philosophical Rationalism. In their origin these were not theocratic systems; they did not require belief, they required practice, action. They were not trying to create doctrinaire institutions but a compassionate society. They asked their students to question and challenge everything, to never take anything on faith. They urged people to change how they acted in the world, and all that relied on one common principle, the Golden Rule: Never do anything to anything or anyone that you would not have done to yourself. Rabbi Hillel said, “Don’t do anything to your neighbor you wouldn’t do to yourself. That is the Torah. Read it. All the rest is commentary.”

These were not theocratic systems. They didn’t require belief; they required a change in behavior. Armstrong again, this is a quote,

“The axial sages were not interested in providing their disciples with a little edifying uplift after which they could return with renewed vigor to their self-centered lives. Their objective was to create an entirely different kind of human being. Sages insisted that people abandon their egotism and greed, their violence and unkindness. Not only was it wrong to kill another human being, you must not even speak a hostile word about or towards that person, not even make an irritable gesture. Further, you cannot confine your benevolence to your own people. Your concern must somehow extend to the entire world. If people behave with kindness and generosity to others they could save the world.”

This is what they were teaching but no one at that time said, hey, we’re in the midst of a spiritual awakening. It was a very difficult time, far from perfect. It was riddled with betrayals, jealousies, and misunderstandings. Axial sages lived in a time of war. Their goal was to understand the source of violence, not to combat it. Their practices guided the mind with very simple precepts that slowly and gradually changed the heart. Enlightenment was not the goal. Kindness, action, and compassion were.
These teachings are the source of charity in the world. They are the source of NGOs, of philanthropy, of institutes, of collectives, of alliances, of faith-based organizations. These teachings are the source of what we are creating on this day.

What I’m suggesting is that, unknowingly perhaps, this movement is tipping its hat and returning the favor to the Axial Age, and is collectively forming the basis of a spiritual awakening. This is a very different awakening. It is accompanied by an exquisite understanding of biology, ecology, physiology, quantum physics, cosmology, and most importantly, unlike the massive failing of the Axial Age, the feminine is now seen as sacred and holy. It recognizes that the wisdom of indigenous people from all over the world, from Africa to Nunavut, people who didn’t fall asleep and require a great awakening, who didn’t try to globalize the Earth or conquer others, are our sisters and bothers in this movement.

I have friends, who, if they hear this speech, will vigorously protest these suggestions, pointing out that NGOs are small minded. There are turf wars, there’s competition, and there is selfishness. This is not a question of whether the human condition permeates this movement; it most certainly does. Clay feet march in every single protest that I’ve been in because I’ve been in the protest. It is a question, surely, of whether the underlying values of this movement are permeating global society, and I say they are. This question is about intent. What is the intention of this movement? If you look at the values, the missions, the goals, the core principles that inform it and you parse that language—underneath it, albeit unstated, is always the Golden Rule.

Second, life is sacred—the movement is about the sacredness of all life, whether it is a child, a creature, or a culture. This is this movement. This is the awakening. The prophets we now enshrine today were ridiculed during their time. Amos was always getting into trouble. Jeremiah is the root word of jeremiad, a list of woes, but like Cassandra his real woe was that he was always right. Nobody wanted to hear what he said.

David Suzuki has been right for 40 years. David Orr points out that Donella Meadows was right about biological constraints to the limits to growth yet she was scorned and ridiculed by her fellow scientists. Bill McKibben has been unwavering and unerring in his cautions about climate change. Dr. King was killed exactly one year after he delivered his Beyond Vietnam speech opposing the war, berating the American military for sending and taking “the young black men who have been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in southeast Asia that they had not found in southwest Georgia, or East Harlem.” Jane Goodall has an exquisite home in England. She spends 300 days every year on the road teaching kids and adults—traveling constantly; she only gets home two months a year. Wangari Maathai was denounced in parliament, publicly ridiculed and mocked for divorcing her husband, beaten unconscious and thrown in jail for her work on behalf of women and African environment. It does not matter how these leaders will be seen in the future. What is true now is that they did and continue to try to relieve and eliminate the suffering of all forms of life. This is what this movement is about.

It is the first time a movement understands that honoring the web of life is integral to addressing poverty, violence, and oppression. There are still two movements though. There is an environmental movement and there is a social justice movement. They are definitely coming closer; every Bioneers conference is about furthering that, but they are not one yet. If they could truly become one movement the transformation possible would be unimaginable. When a black child in Oakland winces at the thought of an ancient tree being cut down in northern California, and when an ex-logger in northern California winces at the thought of a black teenager being cut down on the streets of Oakland, we’ll know that day has arrived.

There is so much hurt out there, and to heal the past requires reconciliation, reparation, and forgiveness. I don’t think a viable future is possible until we make communion with our errant history. I suspect that everyone owes and deserves an apology from someone, but there are races, peoples, and cultures that are particularly deserving of a tribute of regret. In 1993 Prime Minister Paul Keating had this to say about aboriginal Australians:

It might help if we non-aboriginal Australians imagined ourselves dispossessed of the land we had lived on for 50,000 years, and then imagine ourselves told that it had never been ours. Imagine if ours was the oldest culture in the world and we were told that it was worthless. Imagine if we had resisted the settlements, suffered, and died in the defense of our land and then were told in history books that we had given it up without a fight. Imagine if non-aboriginal Australians had served their country in peace and war and then were ignored in history books. Imagine if our feats on the sporting field have inspired admiration and patriotism, and yet did nothing to diminish prejudice. Imagine if our spiritual life was denied and ridiculed. Imagine if we had suffered these injustices and then were blamed for them.

Well, you can put in other peoples besides aboriginals into that paragraph. African American. Hispanic American. Native American—works just as well. Imagine. We’ve never said, sorry. We haven’t even countenanced the thought. The idea that non-indigenous cannot apologize to descendents of enslaved and first peoples for past horrors because we were not the ones who did the evil, completely misses the point. When we receive someone else’s sorrow, when we hear those admissions, when somebody allows us to offer some form of reparation, when they give us the opportunity to participate in reconciliation of those people and those tribes whose ancestors were abused, it gives new life to the world. The energy that arises from the healing is just as important and real as wind and solar energy.

I’ve been coming here for many years. I probably should stop and make room for the young brilliant dancer/poet who just preceded me. I would much rather listen than talk, for when I come here I just drink it up. I don’t realize how thirsty I had become until I drink at the well of the people who speak here. Even here there are two movements.

The environmental movement seems to have the upper leg because the house is burning down. Literally. So it is very easy for the environmental movement to turn to the social justice and say, yes I know how important your issues are, but the house is burning down. You should come and join us on the environmental bus. I think that it is upside down and backwards. Global warming is injustice. It is a type of colonialism. I think that if the talent, the imagination, the ideas, the brilliance that is in this room, that is represented elsewhere in so many ways is going to be effective over the short time we have, we have to slow down, stop, and change the bus. I think the environmental movement has to get on the social justice bus.

Each one of you is so amazing. Right now you have in you one quadrillion cells. That’s one hundred trillion times one thousand. About nine hundred trillion of those cells are not human. They’re virus, bacteria, and microorganisms. What makes us human, ironically, is not human. If they were not there you would rot like a piece of fruit in a few days. So be grateful for those free riders. But I want you to experience something, because every second in your body, one septillion things are happening. That’s a one with 24 zeros. Another way to imagine one septillion is it’s ten times more than all the stars and planets in the known universe. Now, let me ask you a question: Can you feel it? Seriously. One septillion interactions. It’s called life. You can feel it. Except we talk and we get busy and we ignore that feeling.

Let me ask you another question: Who is in charge? If you tried to manage those one quadrillion cells, what would happen? You would die.

What you are feeling is life. It is the infinite game. There are two kinds of games, finite and infinite. Life invented infinite games. Human beings invented finite games. Finite games have strict rules and they have winners and losers. They’re called CEO, they’re called bank, they’re called Wall Street, they’re called MBA, they’re called politics, and the president of the United States. There’s always a loser.

Sustainability and restoration is about playing an infinite game, and in an infinite game you change the rules anytime something threatens to stop the game. You change the rules so the game can continue going because the point is play. Nobody would want to end the game because you’d stop playing. Infinite games pay it forward; they fill future coffers. They’re called family, they’re called going down the Columbia River with your kids on a raft, playing Huckleberry Finn. They’re called samba. They’re called song telling, like hip-hop. They’re called storytelling. They’re called tree sitting. These are the endless ways in which generous people support our future and our children and our planet.

The first cells that assembled and metabolized under the most difficult circumstances 40 million centuries ago are in your bodies right now, and they, as we, in Mary Oliver’s words, are trying to save the only life we can. Life can only occur in a cell. You take it apart you get molecules, nothing else. This quivering, gelatinous, sentient mote is the core of everything we cherish and it places us within direct relationship to every other form of life. This primordial connection to life—so incomprehensible when you think about it—manifests, is sacred and incontestable, and links us inseparably to our common fate.

When Martin Luther King was drafted into being leader of the Montgomery 51 years ago, it was five days after Rosa Parks got on the bus; when the door opened that night on December 1st, the bus driver was James Blake. James Blake had physically manhandled Rosa Parks, and threw her down to the ground 12 years before. She had never seen that bus driver again. When the door opened that night her heart dropped, she was panic-stricken. But she got on the bus—an amazing act of courage on her part. Five days later when she was arraigned, they elected Martin Luther King to be head of the Montgomery improvement association and he had 15-20 minutes to give his speech. The first thing he said—it’s one of his finest speeches to this day—was a simple phrase. He said, “There comes a time.” If he were alive today he would say it again: There comes a time. There comes a time for all that is harmful to leave.

There are one million organizations in this world. One million escorts, and they are here to transform the nightmares of empire and the disgrace of war upon the people and places on this Earth. We are the transgressors and we are the forgivers. We means all of us, everyone. There can be no green movement unless there’s a black, brown, and copper colored movement.

We absolutely have to speak the truth, but we cannot disparage, ridicule, or shame other people. No one. Not Bush. Not Cheney. Not Foley. Not Delay. We do not exalt ourselves when we belittle others. To be the change, as is so often quoted, means compassion, it doesn’t mean prosecution. As Kenny said, and made clear in his opening talk on Friday, there is no enemy. Dr. King in that first speech quoted Booker T. Washington: “Let no man pull you down so low as to make you hate him.” We become what we say, and what we say creates the world, and what we are doing is not about winning, it is about what Rosa Parks did; it is about acting courageously.

Two years ago, I showed a clip—a list of some of the organizations that comprise what I call the largest movement in the world, a movement that has no name. The reason I created it was to give you a sense of scale. No other reason. When I showed it two years ago, I said that if we had started running this on Friday and ran it all day Friday, and Friday night, and all day Saturday, and all day Saturday night, all night Saturday night, all day Sunday, all night tonight, that it wouldn’t be until Tuesday morning that you would have seen all the names of the organizations in the world who are working towards social justice and ecological restoration and human rights. But what I know, two years later, is that you would not leave Tuesday morning, you would be still sitting here and you would have to continue sitting here for all of next week. You would still be here next weekend. You would be here the week after. You would still be watching the names during the elections and wondering maybe if that was enough organizations, but no, you would still be sitting looking at this list, saying, I don’t think this is such a good idea, but I’m impressed. It wouldn’t be until Thanksgiving when you smelled the pumpkin pie in the oven that this thing would shut off. It would take a month to see all the names.

This movement is about ideas, not ideologies. We have to make those ideas better known to the world. This movement claims no special powers. It grows up in small ways, but now we have to become more powerful. Rather than control, it seeks connection and now we must become much better connected to each other. Rather than seeking dominance it strives to disperse concentrations of power, but now we have to aggregate our voices. We have to make it known that this movement is about addressing the suffering on this planet and those who bear the suffering. Knowing its weakness creates innovative tactics to leverage itself. It forms, gathers, and dissipates without central leadership command or control. No one knows its size, especially those inside it. There is such fierceness here. There is no explanation for the raw courage and the heart seen over and again in the people who march, speak, create, resist, and build. It is the fierceness of what it means to know that we are human and want to survive. To witness the worldwide breakdown of civility into camps and ideologies and meaningless wars, to watch the accelerating breakdown of our environmental systems is harrowing and dispiriting. I said this movement is an immune system. Well, immune systems fail too. This movement most certainly can fail. What stands before us, I think, is a gift of self-perception, the gift of seeing who we really are. We will either come together as one globalized people or we will disappear as a civilization.

Our minds were made to defend us, born of an immune system that brought us to this stage in development and evolution. We are so surfeited with the metaphors of war that when we hear the word defense, we think attack. But the defense of the world can only be accomplished by cooperation and compassion. Science now knows that every child while still in diapers exhibits altruistic behavior. It’s hardwired. It’s in our genes. Concern for the well being of others is something we are born with. We become human by helping and working with others, and buried in those one quadrillion cells, those lymphocytes, in those genes literally is faith and love. What it takes to arrest our dissent into chaos is one person after another remembering who they are, where they are and joining together to save and restore life on Earth. It is such an honor and privilege to speak to you, for which I offer my bow and my deepest respect. Thank you all very much.

Paul Hawken is the author of numerous books, including the forthcoming Blessed Unrest. Excerpted from “Biology, Resistance and Restoration: Sustainability as an Infinite Game,” Hawken’s 2006 Bioneers conference plenary, which is available for purchase on CD or DVD at the Bioneers Store.