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Healing or Stealing? – “You are brilliant, and the earth is hiring…”
Paul Hawken, Culture Change
Commencement Address by Paul Hawken to the Class of 2009, University of Portland, May 3, 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 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.
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.
(17 May 2009)
Simplicity on the outside, complexity on the inside
Carolyn Baker, Speaking Truth to Power
… Some people tell me that the notion of living simply became increasingly appealing as they found themselves suffocating in possessions, consumerism, and the overall busy-ness of advancing their careers, parenting children, maintaining properties, and living the conventional middle class lifestyle. In fact, for some, the burden became so unbearable that life seemed scarcely worth living, and as they felt progressively more devoured by the complexity of their lives, questions of meaning could no longer be ignored or swept under the rug.
For others, it was those nagging questions like “What is this all for anyway?” that surfaced first, leading them to investigate Peak Oil, climate change, and other thorny topics of transition. Perhaps marriages ended, careers crashed, financial devastation erupted, or other losses invaded their lives like emotional Katrinas, engulfing people, activities, accomplishments, or possessions that had previously offered a sense of purpose.
Whatever the scenarios that have led people to collapse awareness, the complexity that attends their awakening is never far from the simplicity they have chosen to embrace. One of my favorite writers, psychotherapist Thomas Moore, notes in his book Original Self:Living With Pardox and Originality, that “Simplifying the externals allows us to cultivate a rich inner and outer life. A cluttered existence may keep us busy, but busyness doesn’t mean that we are fully engaged in what we are doing.” In fact, the busy-ness serves to prevent us from being present to ourselves, our work, and those we love. Remove it, and we are confronted with deeper levels of our relationship with everything and everyone.
Something calls or compels us to live more simply, we choose to do so, and almost immediately, our inner world begins stirring. Sometimes the movement is subtle, sometimes dramatic, but merely the decision to simplify communicates to the psyche that we are giving it more space-more space to revive itself, to launch emotions, daydreams, night dreams, or creative impulses that could not be consciously appreciated by us as were engulfed by the trappings of civilization. And before we know it, a “life of simplicity” on one level becomes anything but simple on a much deeper level.
(19 May 2009)
Message in What We Buy, but Nobody’s Listening
John Tierney, New York Times
Why does a diploma from Harvard cost $100,000 more than a similar piece of paper from City College? Why might a BMW cost $25,000 more than a Subaru WRX with equally fast acceleration? Why do “sophisticated” consumers demand 16-gigabyte iPhones and “fair trade” coffee from Starbucks?
… Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, says that even the slickest minds on Madison Avenue are still in the prescientific dark ages.
… Sometimes the message is as simple as “I’ve got resources to burn,” the classic conspicuous waste demonstrated by the energy expended to lift a peacock’s tail or the fuel guzzled by a Hummer. But brand-name products aren’t just about flaunting transient wealth. The audience for our signals — prospective mates, friends, rivals — care more about the permanent traits measured in tests of intelligence and personality, as Dr. Miller explains in his new book, “Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior.”
… But once you’ve spent the money, once you’ve got the personality-appropriate appliance or watch or handbag, how much good are these signals actually doing you? Not much, Dr. Miller says. The fundamental consumerist delusion, as he calls it, is that purchases affect the way we’re treated.
The grand edifice of brand-name consumerism rests on the narcissistic fantasy that everyone else cares about what we buy. (It’s no accident that narcissistic teenagers are the most brand-obsessed consumers.) But who else even notices? Can you remember what your partner or your best friend was wearing the day before yesterday? Or what kind of watch your boss has?
… why would natural selection leave us with such unproductive fetishes? — but Dr. Miller says it’s not surprising.
“Evolution is good at getting us to avoid death, desperation and celibacy, but it’s not that good at getting us to feel happy,” he says, calling our desire to impress strangers a quirky evolutionary byproduct of a smaller social world.
“We evolved as social primates who hardly ever encountered strangers in prehistory,” Dr. Miller says. “So we instinctively treat all strangers as if they’re potential mates or friends or enemies. But your happiness and survival today don’t depend on your relationships with strangers. It doesn’t matter whether you get a nanosecond of deference from a shopkeeper or a stranger in an airport.”
(18 May 2009)
Recommended by Nate Hagens of The Oil Drum.
