It's been many years since I visited Kerala last, and I'm sure a great deal has changed, but I hope the thing that struck me most strongly is still true: that of all the places I've ever been on earth, it was the one where the highest percentage of people were really engaged in thinking about their place and its future.
Of all the statistics about Kerala--low birth rate, low death rate, and so on--the one that always struck me was that more people read a daily newspaper there than any spot on earth. Malayalam was one of the world's great languages for thinking about how the world needed to change! And people didn't just read, they acted--in those days, anyway, the Kerala People's Science Movement was a real model for how ordinary people could come together to make change, and for how academic experts could both guide and learn from people whose expertise came from a lifetime of work.
I've tried to take some of that spirit to other places around the world. It was one of the inspirations for founding 350.org. People told me that it would be hard to get people in poorer parts of the world concerned with big issues like global warming, but I knew from having spent time in Kerala that that simply wasn't true. And so it has proven to be, in India and around the planet!
Official site: http://www.billmckibben.com
