Paul Hawken

This - by now - classic speech, or better Commencement Address by renowned entrepreneur Paul Hawken, is just as profound now as it was when it was delivered to a lucky graduating class at Portland University many years ago.

Just read on and see. If reading this doesn't represent a MAJOR Silver Lining approach of looking at things, I don't know WHAT uplifts you! (Maybe eating donuts?)

****************************

Healing or Stealing?

We found it for our Magazine at the time as:

YOU are Brilliant and the Earth is Hiring

When I was invited to give this speech, Paul starts his 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:... And here, he warns these young people:

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…This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them….

He continues… The earth…sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating.

And he adds:

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.”

… and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refugee camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.

And Paul goes on so beautifully. Pleeease look up the entire article online. It is found easily on his website of the same name and many other places. On he goes:

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.

R.J.: I have to shorten this BEAUTIFULLY poetical article terribly here, but he continues saying further on that “…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.

…The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart.

What do we know about life?...

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.
…
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.

…. You are graduating to the most amazing, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation…
and he reminds everyone 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.
-----------------------
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. www.paulhawken.com
-----------------------
© Copyright by Paul Hawken. All rights reserved.

Paul Hawken

Healing or Stealing?

Related Articles

Pam D.

B. Brumder

Regina J.

Anne Herbert

Regina J. Silver-Lining