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.” No
pressure there.
Let’s
begin with the startling part. 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, civilization needs a new operating
system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few
decades.
This
planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have
misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water,
soil, or air, 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
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 the 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, non-governmental organizations, and
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. We are the only species on the planet
without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that
tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time
rather than 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.
And dreams come true. 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, which is 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. You can feel it. It is called life. This is who
you are. 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. Our innate nature
is to create the conditions that are conducive to life. 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 create new religions
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, 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. Hope 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.