Paul Hawken Commencement Address to the Class of 2009

[Bill Scheurer]

Commencement Address to the Class of 2009
University of Portland, May 3rd, 2009
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 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
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 o! r 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 wa! 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 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.