Commencement Address

It's the time for graduations...and here is an address by Paul Hawkin (founder of Smith & Hawkin) that I thought was particularly good:

Commencement Address to the Class of 2009, Un iversity of Portland, May 3rd,

2009

By Paul Hawken

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple

short talk that was "direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean,

shivering, startling, and graceful."  Boy, no pressure there.

 But let's begin with the startling part.  Hey, Class of 2009: you are going

to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time

when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is

accelerating.  Kind of a mind-boggling situation - but not one peer-reviewed

paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement.

Basically, the earth needs a new operating system, you are the programmers,

and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of operating instructions, but we seem to have

misplaced them.  Important rules like -- don't poison the water, soil, or

air, and don't let the earth get overcrowded, and don't touch the thermostat

-- have been broken.  Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so

ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying

through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for

seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food - but all that is

changing.

 There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and

in case you didn't bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it

says: YOU ARE BRILLIANT, AND THE EARTH IS HIRING.  The earth couldn't afford

to send any recruiters or limos to your school.  It sent you rain, sunsets,

ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you

are dating.  Take the hint. And here's the deal: Forget that this task of

planet-saving is not possible in the time required.  Don't be put off by

people who know what is not possible.  Do what needs to be done, and check

to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

 When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is

always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth

and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand data.  But if you meet the

people who are working to restore this earth a nd the lives of the poor, and

you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse.  What I see everywhere in

the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and

incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and

beauty to this world.  The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, "So much has been

destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with

no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world."  There could be no better

description.  Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and

the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages,

campuses, companies, refugee camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.

 You join a multitude of caring people.  No one knows how many groups and

organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate

change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human

rights, and more.  This is the largest movement the world has ever seen.

Rather than control, it seeks connection.  Rather than dominance, it strives

to disperse concentrations of power.  Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the

s cenes and gets the job done.  Large as it is, no one knows the true size

of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of

people in the world.  Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up

of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers,

nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students,

incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors

without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the

United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say,

the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

 There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the

Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true.

Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it

resides in humanity's willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild,

recover, re-imagine, and reconsider.  "One day you finally knew what you had

to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad

advice," is Mary Oliver's description of moving away from20the profane

toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.

Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening

news is usually about the death of strangers.  This kindness of strangers

has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century

roots.  Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global

movement to defend the rights of those they did not know.  Until that time,

no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of

this movement were largely unknown - Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson,

Josiah Wedgwood - and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that

time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each

other was what human beings had done for ages.  And the abolitionist

movement was greeted with incredulity.  Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the

abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and

activists.  They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England

into poverty.  But for the first time in history a group of people organized

themselves to help people they would never know, fr om whom they would never

receive direct or indirect benefit.  And today tens of millions of people do

this every day.  It is called the world of non-profits, civil society,

schools, social entrepreneurship, and non-governmental organizations, of

companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their

strategic goals.  The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in

history.

The living world is not "out there" somewhere, but in your heart. What do we

know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the

conditions that are conducive to life.  I can think of no better motto for a

future economy.  We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people

and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes.  We have failed

bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets.  Think

about this: we are the only species on this planet without full employment.

Brilliant.  We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy

earth in real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it.  You can print

money to bail out a bank but you can't print=2 0life to bail out a planet.

At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and

calling it gross domestic product.  We can just as easily have an economy

that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it.  We can either

create assets for the future or take the assets of the future.  One is

called restoration and the other exploitation.  And whenever we exploit the

earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering.  Working for the earth

is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

 The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and

its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams.  Literally you are

breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother

Teresa, and Bono.  We are vastly interconnected.  Our fates are inseparable.

We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells.  In each

of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells.

Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would

perish in hours.  Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conduct ing

millions of processes between trillions of atoms.  The total cellular

activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one

moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it.  In a millisecond, our body

has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe

- exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover

that each living creature was a "little universe, formed of a host of

self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the

stars of heaven."

So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body?  Stop

for a moment.  Feel your body.  One septillion activities going on

simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it,

and wonder instead when this speech will end.  Second question: who is in

charge of your body?  Who is managing those molecules?  Hopefully not a

political party.  Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life

inside you, just as in all of nature.  What I want you to imagine is that

collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming

together20to heal the wounds and insults of the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out

once every thousand years.  No one would sleep that night, of course.  The

world would become religious overnight.  We would be ecstatic, delirious,

made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night,

and we watch television.

This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the

multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a

thousand years, not in ten thousand years.  Each of us is as complex and

beautiful as all the stars in the universe.  We have done great things and

we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation.  You are

graduating to the most amazing, challenging, stupefying challenge ever

bequested to any generation.  The generations before you failed.  They

didn't stay up all night.  They got distracted and lost sight of the fact

that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to

be on her side.  You couldn't ask for a better boss.  The most unrealistic

person in20the world is the cynic, not the dreamer.  Hopefulness only makes

sense when it doesn't make sense to be hopeful.  This is your century.  Take

it and run as if your life depends on it.   --

Paul Hawken is a renowned entrepreneur, visionary environmental activist,

and author of many books, most recently Blessed Unrest: How the Largest

Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming.  He was

presented with an honorary doctorate of humane letters by University

president Father Bill Beauchamp, C.S.C., in May, when he delivered this

superb speech. Our thanks especially to Erica Linson for her help making

that moment possible.