kR@ziE kArLs

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.