A speech by Paul Hawken

Today I was forwarded this amazing speech by Paul Hawken, an environmentalist whose written some books which have had a pretty big impact - I remember one corporation CEO, featured in the great film 'the corporation' http://www.thecorporation.com/, talking about how one of his books had left him completey enlightened and lead to a complete turn around of how he viewed life and ran his business. The book was 'The ecology of commerce' - I picked it up in Cairns, Australia on my last big trip, but never got round to reading it. This speech pretty much sums up my current thoughts about the world, our place in it, pessamism and hope, and quite franky it has brightened up my day!

The Unforgettable 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. 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.

A little something for vegetarian week

As Monday marked the first day of national vegetarian week, I thought I'd put up this interesting article from the guardian this week for all to browse:

Can vegetarians save the world?
A small town in Belgium has gone meat-free one day a week. A sign of things to come, says one food historian. By Tristram Stuart.

For decades, environmental arguments against eating meat have been largely the preserve of vegetarian websites and magazines. Just two years ago it seemed inconceivable that significant numbers of western Europeans would be ready to down their steak knives and graze on vegetation for the sake of the planet. The rapidity with which this situation has changed is astonishing.
The breakthrough came in 2006 when the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) published a study, Livestock's Long Shadow, showing that the livestock industry is responsible for a staggering 18% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. This is only the beginning of the story. In 2008, Brazil announced that in the 12 months to July it had lost 12,000 sq km (3m acres) of the Amazon rainforest, mainly to cattle ranchers and soy producers supplying European markets with animal feed. There is water scarcity in large parts of the world, yet livestock-rearing can use up to 200 times more water a kilogram (2.2lbs) of meat produced than is used in growing wheat. Given the volatile global food prices, it seems foolhardy to divert 1.2bn tonnes of fodder – including cereals – to fuel global meat consumption, which has increased by more than two and half times since 1970.
Vegetarians have been around for a very long time – Pythagoreans forbade eating animals more than 2,500 years ago – but even as the environmental evidence mounted, they didn't appear to be winning the argument. Today in Britain just 2% of the population is vegetarian.
Thankfully, a more pragmatic alternative to total abstinence now seems to be emerging. In September 2008, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a vegetarian himself, called on people to take personal responsibility for the impacts of their consumption.
"Give up meat for one day [a week] initially, and decrease it from there," he said. "In terms of immediacy of action and the feasibility of bringing about reductions in a short period of time, it clearly is the most attractive opportunity." This week the Belgian city of Ghent met his demands by declaring Thursday a meat-free day. Restaurants, canteens and schools will now opt to make vegetarianism the default for one day a week, and promote meat-free meals on other days as well.
This is not the first institutional backing for such a move. In Britain, the NHS now aims to reduce its impact on the environment partly by "increasing the use of sustainably sourced fish and reducing our reliance on eggs, meat and dairy". Last year, Camden council in London announced that it would be issuing a report calling for schools, care homes and canteens on council premises to cut meat from menus and encourage staff to become vegetarian. (In the end the initiative was shot down by Conservative councillors who insisted that people should not be deprived of choice.) While in Germany the federal environment agency in January called on Germans to follow a more Mediterranean diet by reserving meat only for special occasions.
These initiatives may sound novel, but in fact they reinstate what was for centuries an obligatory practice across Europe. The fasting laws of the Catholic church stipulated that on Fridays, fast days, and Lent, no one could eat meat or wine; on some days, dairy products and fish were also banned. Even after the Reformation Elizabeth I upheld the Lenten fast, insisting that while there was no religious basis for fasting, there were sound utilitarian motives: to ­protect the country's livestock from over-exploitation and to promote the fishing industry (which had the ancillary benefit of increasing the number of ships available for the navy).
Towards the end of the 18th century, two consecutive bad harvests in Europe created shortages. There was a huge public clamour for the wealthy to cut down on their meat consumption in order to leave more grain for the poor. The idea that meat was a cruel profligacy became current, and led Percy Bysshe Shelley to declare that the carnivorous rich literally monopolised land and food by taking more of it than they needed. "The use of animal flesh," he said, "directly militates with this equality of the rights of man."
In the wake of last year's food crisis and with mounting concern over global warming, we appear to have reached a similar crisis moment.
The vegetarian argument is complicated, however, by the fact that in terms of environmental impact, no two pieces of meat are the same. A hunk of beef raised on Scottish moorland has a very different ecological footprint from one created in an intensive feedlot using concentrated cereal feed, and a wild venison or rabbit casserole is arguably greener than a vegetable curry. Likewise, countries have very different animal husbandry methods. For example, in the US, for each calorie of meat or dairy food produced, farm animals consume on average more than 5 calories of feed. In India the rate is a less than 1.5 calories. In Kenya, where there isn't the luxury of feeding grains to animals, livestock yield more calories than they consume because they are fattened on grass and agricultural by-products inedible to humans.
In a paper published last month in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, food ecologist Annika Carlsson-Kanyama showed that kilo for kilo, beef and pork could produce 30 times more CO² emissions than other protein rich foods such as beans. On the other hand, the paper also indicated that poultry and eggs had much lower ­emissions than cheese, which was among the highest polluters. So do meat-free days, and arguments for vegetarianism in general, take adequate consideration of these subtleties, or should we all be chucking out the cheese and going vegan?
"A vegetarian day is a simple message that people can understand," says Carlsson-Kanyama, "though probably what we ultimately need to do is eat less animal products overall."
Alex Evans, fellow at the Centre on International Cooperation at New York University, points out that more and more people – including Sir Nicholas Stern, the author of a 2006 review on the economics of global warming – accept that the only equitable way of achieving an international agreement on climate change is for rich and poor nations to converge on an equal per capita "fair share" of carbon emissions. "The same ought to apply to food," Evans says, "but currently there is no agreed method for calculating what is my 'fair share' of the world's food supply – in particular how much meat."
Based on the global food production figures published by the FAO, I did a few preliminary calculations. Global average consumption of meat and dairy products including milk was 152kg a person in 2003. Average EU and US consumption, by contrast, was over 400kg, while Uganda's was 45kg. In order to reach the equitable fair share of global production, rich western countries would have to cut their consumption by 2.7 times – and this doesn't include the fact that the butter will have to be spread even more thinly if the global population really does increase by another 2.3 billion by 2050.
However, still further reductions would be necessary because global meat production is already at unsustainable levels. The IPCC among other bodies, has called for an 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Since high levels of meat and dairy ­consumption are luxuries, it seems reasonable to expect livestock production to take its share of the hit. For rich ­western countries this would mean decreasing meat and dairy consumption to significantly less than one tenth of current levels, the sooner the better.
It is all very well for 2% of the population to live in a monastic state of meatlessness while everyone else gorges their way towards environmental meltdown or the nearest heart clinic. Vegetarianism is good for the willing ­minority, but not much use as a campaign tool. Beginning as Ghent has done, with one meat-free day a week, is a historically-proven idea palatably re-fashioned for the age of eco-consciousness. It also appears to be gaining popular approval, even if McDonald's need not fear for the survival of its Big Mac, yet.