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. This was the 1990s, and the media largely ignored them. (Al Gore was so derided for Earth in the Balance, his prescient book on climate change, that he didn't mention it in his 2000 campaign.) In those small meetings I had a chance to listen to the audience. They were students, grandmothers, teenagers, tribal members, businesspeople, architects, teachers, retired professors, and worried mothers and fathers. They were informed, imaginative and vital, and offered tips, ideas and information. They had a lot to say.

My new friends would thrust articles and books in my hand, tuck small gifts into my knapsack, or pass along plans for green companies. A Native-American taught me that the division between ecology and human rights was an artificial one, that the environmental and social justice movements addressed two sides of a larger dilemma. The way we harm the earth affects all people, and how we treat each other is how we treat the earth. As my talks mirrored this realization, the hands offering cards grew more diverse. I would get from five to thirty cards per speech, and after being on the road for a week or two, I would return with a couple hundred cards stuffed into various pockets. Since I wasn't a salesman or running for office, I had no need to record them, but I couldn't throw them away. I would lay them out on the table in my kitchen, read the names, look at the logos, envisage the mission, and marvel at what groups do on behalf of others. Later, I would put them into drawers or paper bags, keepsakes of the journey. In the years that followed the cards mounted into the thousands, and whenever I glanced at the bags of cards in my closet, I kept coming back to one question: Did anyone know how many groups and organizations there were? And did it matter? At first, this was a matter of curiosity, but it slowly grew into a hunch that something larger was afoot, a large networked movement that was eluding the radar of mainstream culture.

I began to count. I looked at government records for different countries and using various methods to approximate the number of environmental and social justice groups from tax census data, I initially estimated that there were 30,000 environmental organizations strung around the globe; when I added social justice and indigenous organizations, the number exceeded 100,000. I then researched past social movements to see if there were any equal in scale or scope, but I couldn't find anything, past or present. The more I probed, the more I unearthed and the numbers continued to climb. In trying to pick up a stone, I found the exposed tip of a geological formation. I discovered lists, indexes and small databases specific to certain sectors or geographic areas, but no set of data came close to describing the movement's breadth. Extrapolating from the records being accessed, I realized that the initial estimate of 100,000 organizations was off by at least a factor of ten. 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.

One of the many reasons why we do this(my granddaughter):


Below is another reason: Otus the owl sitting on my son's head. Otus is Otus leucotis in real life, an African Scops Owl.

WiserEarth, this site, is an extension of those informal meetings at schools, colleges, conferences, and actions. It is intended to be a means to enlarge our awareness and contacts, to learn more, to share more, to better grasp the scope of this movement that has no name, a movement that is populated by citizens everywhere who care deeply about people and the earth. It is that simple. And it is that complex (e.g. see Areas of Focus). This movement is the most complex thing human beings have ever done. If it were organized from the top down it would collapse of its own weight. For years, no decades really, the movement to restore the environment, prevent harm, stop poverty, and move away from violence to peace was seen as marginal. It still is but the margins are getting huge. And the idea here, one of the big ideas, is to work together so that can see eachother, visualize the links and breadth, and perhaps know for the first time that human beings have a remarkable ability to heal the wounds that we human beings have ignorantly caused.

That is the hope and prayer offered here. Everything you see except for personal profiles can be added to, amended, edited, improved, and expanded. If it doesn't work for you in any way, please change it.