[Reader-list] Paul Hawken's Commencement Address to the Class of 2009 -- University of Portland, May 3rd, 2009

[Chintan]

>From Nipun Mehta's post on http://www.dailygood.org/more.php?n=3697

Paul Hawken is a friend of CharityFocus, renowned entrepreneur, visionary
environmental activist, founder of Wiser Earth and author of many books --
most recently Blessed Unrest.

He was presented with an honorary doctorate of humane letters by University
of Portland, when he delivered this superb commencement address.

*Paul Hawken's Commencement Address to the Class of 2009
University of Portland, May 3rd, 2009
*
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.