WiserEarth - Infrastructure For the Spontaneous Coordination of Sustainability Success?

Paul Hawkens founded WiserEarth in 2007 to provide an infrastructure for "people who are transforming the world;" to provide the connectivity needed to support the spontaneous coordination and cooperation needed by the "more than one million organizations and the one hundred million individuals who actively work towards ecological sustainability, economic justice, human rights, and political accountability" around the world everyday to enhance their effectiveness in remaking a sustainable world. The following excerpts from the WiserEarth website expand on its mission.

WiserEarth serves the people who are transforming the world. It is a community-editable international directory and networking forum that maps out and connects the largest movement in the world – the hundreds of thousands of organizations within civil society that address social justice, poverty, and the environment.

WiserEarth provides the tools and a platform for non-profit organizations, funders, social entrepreneurs, students, organizers, academics, activists, scientists, and citizens to find each other, make connections, build alliances and share resources.

The more than one million organizations and the one hundred million individuals who actively work towards ecological sustainability, economic justice, human rights, and political accountability work on issues that are systemically interconnected and intertwined. However, their effectiveness to prevent harm and institute positive change is undermined by the lack of a collective awareness, duplicative efforts, and poor connectivity. A widely diverse network of organizations is the best defense against injustice, but to be effective, it needs to be connected and intelligent. What is missing is a map and directory of this network that includes the resources for communication and cooperation, created and managed by the community; in essence, an infrastructure through which to coordinate our efforts. WiserEarth provides this movement a way to see itself and become connected. 

I have given hundreds of talks about the environment in the past fifteen years, I'm not sure how many. After talks people come up to talk, ask questions, or exchange business cards. People are creatures and we like to exchange, meet, touch our antennae. Many of my friends to this day I met this way. Those offering their cards work on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. They were from the non-profit and non-governmental world, also known as civil society, and they looked after rivers and bays, educated consumers about sustainable agriculture, retrofitted houses with solar panels, lobbied state legislatures about pollution, fought against corporate-weighted trade policies, were studying hard at school, worked to green inner cities, or taught children about the environment. Quite simply, they were trying to safeguard nature and justice. I now believe there are over one million organizations working towards ecological sustainability and social justice. Maybe two.

This website is a result of counting. It is a gift of the thousands of organizations that want to save the earth from our basest instincts and create a culture of peace in its place. It is also the gift of the thousands and thousands of hours devoted to it by volunteers, interns, and staff members of Natural Capital Institute. It is now your site, top to bottom.