Slow-motion revolution: shifting the world onto a sustainable path is a big job, but progress is being made. It's just going to take awhile.

• Author: Durning, Alan Thein

All over the world, the movement for sustainability--for a healthy, lasting prosperity grounded in place--is advancing in a slow-motion revolution. From faith communities to labor unions, from government leaders to business executives, people on every continent and from all stations in life are increasingly acting on the values at the heart of sustainability--strong communities, fair markets, and responsible stewardship.

Consider a few current trends. Wind power is now the world's fastest-growing source of electricity. Tinkerers and engineers are devising new manufacturing techniques built on the ideals of zero waste and carbon neutrality. Community leaders are inventing or rediscovering potent and equitable ways of managing overexploited resources, such as fisheries and the atmosphere. Thinkers and entrepreneurs are creating ways of properly valuing nature's contributions to the human economy, making prices tell the ecological truth as never before. Some consumers are even discovering for themselves what psychological evidence has suggested for decades (and most faith traditions have taught for millennia): that the consumer society is not only unsustainable but hollow--so, no loss.

Unfortunately, remaining challenges such as climate change are so daunting, and countervailing trends such as global population growth and the rise of anti-scientific fundamentalism are so menacing, that it's easy to get discouraged. A look at the history of social change movements offers one antidote to such dejection. Setting the campaign for a sustainable economy beside similarly audacious causes of the past, such as the crusades for emancipation and suffrage, makes clear that our movement is advancing as quickly as can be expected, if not as quickly as we might hope.

Movements for fundamental change always unfold over many years, in fits and starts. Even the most visionary leaders cannot predict their course, only their ultimate success. As Martin Luther King, Jr., said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

Twelve men meeting in a London bookshop in 1787, for example, launched the cause of ending slavery in the British Empire--a movement whose chances of success at the time appeared infinitesimal. Slavery was far older than the Empire and more than half of humans then on the planet were held in slavery, serfdom, indentured servitude, or debt peonage. Worse, channels to reform were few. Scarcely one in ten Englishmen--and no...