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Current mood:  awake Category: Life
You are Brilliant and the Earth is
Hiring
Paul Hawken's Commencement Address in Portland- May 09
Dear
Friends: On May 3rd, Paul Hawken spoke to the graduates of the University of
Portland. He asked that the text be shared with as many people as
possible.
HEALING OR STEALING?
“You are brilliant, and the earth
is hiring…”
The Unforgettable Commencement Address
To the Class of
2009, University 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 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 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. Our thanks especially to Erica Linson for her help making
that moment possible.
4:02 PM
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