The Unforgettable Commencement Address to the Class of 2009,
University of Portland, 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 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.
Inspirationis 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 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.
Thescope 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 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.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
