Blessed Unrest:
Growing a Future for
Life on Earth
Videos and other materials available on our Program page.
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Let’s face it: Emissions reduction strategies to address global ecological catastrophes, including massive climate disruption, have not worked. Of course we should go to zero for many reasons, but this doesn’t offer solutions at the scale needed in the time we have left. We have to do something else. That something else is to invoke the power of the natural world.
Blessed Unrest offers many practical nature solutions from speakers around the world. Collectively we can change course to a healthy and bountiful planet for all.
Generously co-sponsored by these departments at Tufts University:
Department of Environmental Studies
Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life
Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development
In 2020 Biodiversity for a Livable Climate joined the world in celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day. Yet here we are, still facing exponential decay of the life support systems necessary for continued human presence on this planet.
Our most powerful institutions – governments and corporations – are not facing this crisis squarely.
On the other hand, thousands of independent organizations and millions of individuals worldwide are restoring living processes in their local areas while connecting with each other to create global change. This is the spontaneous, non-governmental movement that environmentalist and author Paul Hawken has called “blessed unrest”.
We will present a conference named after a 2007 book by Hawken: Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World. He describes how this movement “came into being and why nobody saw it coming.”
That was over a decade ago, and we see it coming now!
This extraordinary leaderless movement is still largely invisible to the doom-and-gloom mass media – but that hasn’t stopped it from growing in extraordinary ways. Back then these peaceful revolutionaries were relatively isolated in their own corners of the world, many feeling alone but determined. Now, aided by the internet, we’re all starting to connect, helping and encouraging one another, challenging the terrifying hockey stick of climate and ecosystem disaster by following a new exponential curve of inspiration, hope and action. Mainstream science is scurrying to catch up.
Our job at Bio4Climate from the beginning has been to demonstrate positive solutions to what seem like intractable problems. And even further, to present Nature as the most powerful force on Earth, and how we must treat her right to benefit all species. Now we are introducing you to some more of the people who are treating Nature and one another well. In all kinds of ways from all kinds of places.
We see this conference as a meeting of participants from a broad array of farmers, urban planners, gardeners, scientists, fishermen, ranchers, activists and many others who, in Hawken’s words, make up “humanity’s immune response to ecological degradation.”
If you’re not yet receiving our e-mail newsletter, please sign up on the right-hand column of this page. If you have questions, comments or suggestions, please contact us at staff@bio4climate.org.
And take a few minutes to listen to Paul’s prescient observations from when the millennium was young . . .