About a year and a half ago when I first had the idea for this site, I went to the bookstore on my lunch break hoping to find a book to read that would inspire me to keep going. Lucky for me, Paul Hawken had just released his latest, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World.

The book starts out with a history of the environmental movement, from John Muir and his campaign to protect natural places to Rachel Carlson sounding the alarm in Silent Spring to the present day. At this point, he says, there are more than one million groups on the planet working for environmental and social justice.

In a talk he gave at the Bioneers conference in 2007, a list of these groups scrolled on a screen behind him as he spoke. “To give you a sense of how big this movement is, if I had started this tape on Friday morning at 9 am when this conference began, and if we sat here [until] ... Monday, we still would not have seen all the names of the groups.”

I got what I wanted from this book—it fired me up and kept me going. I wanted to participate in the movement; I wanted to help create the new world I wanted to see. I was also thrilled to see the database/social networking site Hawken’s team created at Wiser Earth.

A few months later, my friend Tim invited me to dinner with filmmaker Paul Lussier who had been talking with Hawken about creating a new kind of film based on Blessed Unrest. Over dinner he filled us in on his ideas, and now they are taking larger shape at Blessed Unrest: The Film.

The film will be made up of footage uploaded by filmmakers around the world, using the website as a tool for editing and communication. Currently folks are signing up to participate—the film is expected to be completed sometime next year.

This participatory model of filmmaking really fits the participatory, decentralized nature of the movement Hawken writes about. We don’t have to wait for governments and corporations and other big entities to fix the world, and we don’t have to wait for a big studio to co-opt the movement and sell us back a movie about what we are already doing! We can tell our own story.

The short film that Lussier’s team has put together has a bit of that old-school, us-vs.-them flavor that we at The Sunny Way feel must be laid down, but that will likely not be the case with the finished movie. And there’s no denying the power of the stories being told.

In particular, this quote from Orland Bishop of the Shade Free Multicultural Foundation really stuck with me:

We are not thinking of revolution anymore as violence. We are thinking of revolution as the power of agreement, that a group of people can one day say “This is what we prefer to have.”

Participating in this movement is the best way I can think of to express what we would prefer to have. And I’m very grateful that Hawken and Lussier are documenting it with our help. To sign up to contribute to the film, visit the Join the Film page on their site.