The next big book is Paul Hawken's "Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming," out from Viking on May 10. Hawken is attempting to describe the worldwide "movement of movements" -- individuals and small, community-based organizations (including community arts) working on environmental, social-justice and indigenous issues This movement, which I think will become the "civil-society movement," is so spread-out, diverse and unprecedented that it's only visible when its components gather for large demonstrations where their values coincide. Hawken says it's invisible to the media and almost everybody else (even its members) because we can't recognize something without a cognitive precedent. We can't see it because it's all about the future and we've never seen anything like it. Hawken claims he learned about all this firsthand from giving lectures worldwide about environmental issues over the last decade and meeting audience members of every nationality, ethnic group, religion and political persuasion who pressed their business cards into his hand. All of us need a big meet-up, and his organization, the Natural Capital Institute, is trying to catalog us in a CAN-like Web site called WiserEarth; much of its arts-related content was culled from CAN (yay!). He says that scrutinizing all this has made him an enthusiastic optimist. You can buy the book from Amazon through the CAN Bookstore: http://www.communityarts.net/bookstore/index.php.

   

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