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Read this amazing talk by Paul Hawken:
Paul Hawken: A Direct, Naked, Shivering, Startling, Graceful Talk
Posted: 18 May 2009 05:08 AM PDT
Commencement Address to the Class of 2009
University of Portland
"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
onepeer-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 and 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, refuge
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 scenes 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, reimagine, 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 from the 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, from 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 inhistory.
“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
life 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
conducting 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 together to 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 in the 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.
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Paul Hawken: A Direct, Naked, Shivering, Startling, Graceful Talk