FUSsa-talk Mailing List: Paul Hawken Speaks--Commencement Address--Challenge to students for a future for Their World‏

[MADELINE SIMON (madeline-mpls]

>From Joe Schwartzberg.
 
Message to the next generation: "This is your century. Take it and run as if 
your life depends on it."

Peace,
Madeline

FROM: Citizens for Global Solutions Minnesota Chapter
MESSAGE: Dear friends, Great essay! Joe Schwartzberg

Sent by Allen L. Roland:

On May 3rd, 2009, Paul Hawken delivered this commencement address at the 
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 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 de code 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 i n h
 istory 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 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 w a
 s 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 20 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."