AU Media: Spring 2008 Commencement Speech by Sylvia Earle

2008 Commencement

American University
College of Arts and Sciences
Commencement Address: "The Luckiest Generation"
Sylvia Earle, National Geographic oceanographer and explorer-in-residence
May 11, 2008
[as delivered]
(10 MB)

Yo. Class of 2008. Are you having any fun yet? I certainly hope so. I am. I hope you are half as pleased to be here today as I am. For me, it's a tremendous honor to become a part of the great American University family. This place is large enough to have great diversity, small enough so you actually get to know one another.

For you, it should be a celebration of an ending of sorts but more importantly. . .a beginning. I mean, that's what a commencement is after all. . .

Now it begins . . . whatever IT is.

I agree with Katie. This is a time of unprecedented opportunity. And I'm going to start my few comments here by giving you the punchline. You are really lucky. You're lucky to have a front row seat during the most important time in human history, and you don't have to just sit there and watch the world slip by on the sidelines. You have the power to act, to do something that will make a difference to the future of our species that transcends the power of any who have preceded you.

I am not alone in realizing that we are at a pivotal point in history, with the potential for nudging our species toward a sustainable future. A time when we can find an enduring place for ourselves within the natural, living world that keeps us alive. We aren't there yet. This is the crunch time. It's really up to us–especially up to you—you who arrived on the planet at just the right moment when we know enough to know that we have real problems. That's the first step toward solving problems—you know you've got one… Or two… Or six. We also know enough to understand that it is not too late to do something about it. You can have a magnified impact on all that follows.

This may sound a little heavy duty, but in reality, you are part of the luckiest generation ever to exist. If ever you wanted to make a difference, to leave a mark in the history of human kind. Never before has it been possible to see the world in ways that you can see the world – through the eyes of astronauts, through the eyes of those of us who have had a chance to spend thousands of hours diving into the blue heart of the planet. You can see the world on a computer screen, see how rivers flow into the sea, sometimes flowing brown or red with upstream earth washed over once-thriving reefs. You can spin the world on a computer screen. You can vicariously look back fifty years or five hundred or one thousand or more and see the extent of polar ice and grasp the significance of how quickly—in your lifetime—it's shrinking. You can see deforestation in Brazil, in the Philippines, Indonesia, Africa, China, Canada, Russia and right here at home. You can be like an eagle and fly over mountaintop removal for mining and see the real cost to surrounding farms and cities, see rivers polluted, the life of the mountain destroyed as a cost of business that we unwittingly pay. As never before, you can see that we're all connected. We are all indigenous people on this one earth encompassed by one blue ocean.

And by the way, I suppose you do know that the new green is blue. Yes, it is. I can identify—and so can you—the world's hot spots of conflict. Wherever poverty and disease and war are closely linked to lack of clean air and water, reliable food supplies, of a dearth of places to live in peace or anticipate a prosperous future . . .You can do this with that wonderful computer technology that now exists. You can hold the world in your hands. You can see that the world itself is becoming a hot spot… I don't mean just through global warming… I mean that through the increasingly fragile state of the underpinnings of what makes life possible for all of us. What has happened just in recent history to the air, to the water, reliable food supplies, places to live where it is possible to anticipate a prosperous future. These assets are shrinking.

Are you concerned about security? What's happening to the natural world globally—call it the environment if you will—poses security risks of monumental proportions.

But, you of this luckiest generation, can connect with the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of those who have lived before, as well as those who are now alive, and see the world through their eyes. As my fellow explorer in residence at the National Geographic, Zahi Hawass, who is the director of the pyramids—what a concept—says, in a voice that my grandchildren love to imitate, “If you do not know your past, you cannot know your future!”

Knowing the global past and the global present as never before, you have a power to glimpse the future and it will be dependent on what we do—what you do—or don't do in the next decade or two. Things are moving that fast. It's clear that the next ten years are going to be the most important in the next ten thousand years. That makes you really lucky.

If you haven't figured out what you're going to do next, it's really okay.

Bernie Marcus, founder of Home Depot thought he knew what he wanted to do when he graduated. He wanted to become a doctor . . .But instead he wound up being an executive in a business that fired him. He said it was the best thing that happened to him when he got fired. Can you believe it? Because it provoked him and a buddy to start Home Depot and things kind of worked out for him.

The Google founders thought they knew what they wanted to do . . .They were going on to be PhDs, but they kind of got this idea about downloading the Internet and gave graduate school a break . . .and for them, things kind of worked out, too.

I get asked myself sometimes, “How did you get to be explorer in residence at the National Geographic? How did you get to be a scientist?” and I say… ‘Cause it is what happened … It's really easy. You start out as a little kid and you do what little kids do, you ask questions. You're an explorer. You have that unquenchable sense of wonder. Who? What? Why? Where? How? You just never stop asking questions. No good scientist I know has ever stopped asking questions. They're just little kids who haven't quite grown up. And that's how I qualify too.

Filmmaker George Lucas once reminded an audience, “ We do have choices—we are blessed to live in a free country; we can—you can—follow your heart.”

By all means, take heart that you are free to make choices that enable you to not only enjoy the pursuit of happiness, as the founding fathers, and mothers, of this country would have us do. But we have the freedom to actually achieve happiness. This being Mothers' Day, I want to salute the mothers of the founding fathers that made this country and university possible… And most particularly to salute all of the special mothers and fathers who made your presence here possible. So salutes to you.

So okay… Follow your dreams. Follow your heart. That's good. That's very good. But at this particular point in history, ten years to go to really make a difference. Just indulging your passion to be whatever it is that you uniquely can be is not quite good enough. And thinking about what I could possibly say that would have even the slightest chance of being meaningful today, I thought first about the advice I've heard throughout my life. Do what you love. Follow your heart. Do what makes your heart beat fast not just by exercising your body and brain, but by exercising your spirit. That's what my mom, my dad, advised me.

But you've probably noticed if your heart is beating, at all, that the world has some major problems that put at risk all that human kind holds near and dear. Our pale, blue dot of a planet, as Carl Sagan described it, is in trouble. Those hot spots of turmoil around the world owing to poverty, to hunger, to disease, to oppression, to war are all curiously connected and all grounded in environmental issues. Water. Food. Shelter.

You also know that earth is itself becoming a hot spot not just because of global warming, but in the broader sense that we have overdrawn the natural assets that make it possible for our species to have an enduring future. We have to do a much better job of taking care of the natural systems that take care of us.

Human health is a big issue. After decades of medical breakthroughs and an increase in life expectancy, we're now facing a widespread breakdown of the underpinnings to human health. HIV alone has reduced the average life expectancy in parts of sub-Saharan Africa to somewhere in the 40's, about what it was during the Dark Ages in Europe a few centuries ago. Heart and lung problems relating to the food we consume, the air we breathe are growing concerns. If the planet is polluted with toxic chemicals, pesticides, fire retardants, heavy metals, we become polluted. It is and we are. It's a no-brainer that human health relates directly to the health of the environment. If we care about our health, we need to really focus on the health of the natural world.

We care about wealth. I mean, don't you? Doesn't everyone. Right. But where does wealth come from? Lester Brown says we have built an environmental bubble economy where economic output is artificially inflated by overconsumption of earth's natural assets. Those who have a head for business would understand clearly. You know, we're depleting the capital. We're just chewing away at the principal. Those of you who have a biological twist of mind, we're consuming the golden goose: feather by feather, wing by wing, leg by leg. Those of you who are of an engineering frame of mind: we're chopping up the machinery that runs the planet. Is that smart? I don't think so.

Tim Wirth, who is the head of the Turner Foundation, summed up the relationship between the economy and the environment by pointing out that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment. I took my cue from astronauts when I spoke at the World Bank last year, by showing the astronaut's view of earth and pointing to it up on the screen, saying to those assembled “There it is: The World Bank.” That's all there is.

When our numbers were small and the world was largely wilderness, we could sustain ourselves on the interest generated by a richly endowed planet. Hunting and gathering enabled a few million people to live more or less sustainably. Notwithstanding biologist Ed Wilson's observation that over the ages humankind has had a way of eliminating the large, the slow and the tasty. The wildlife that shared the planet with us once upon a time: the big elephants, the large turtles, tortises, and a few other big animals. Only by learning to efficiently grow mostly three grasses—corn, wheat and rice—and domesticated, plant-grazing animals—cows, pigs, chicken, carp, catfish—that efficiently convert plants to proteins, have we been able to grow our population from thousands to millions to billions.

But can you imagine today satisfying the appetites of six and a half billion people on wildlife alone? Song birds and little furry things? Actually, on the way to developing effective agriculture, we managed to do-in much of the wildlife that shared the planet with us. And curiously, although we should know better by now, we're doing the same thing to the ocean. Not over thousands of years, but in decades. In the sea, we savagely reduced the large—that is the whales, the dolphins, the seals, the manatees, the turtles. And with wonderous new technologies in just a few decades, we have managed to eliminate 90 percent of the sharks, the cod, the grouper, the halibut and other tasty creatures including the fast—the tunas, the swordfish, the marlin—and the small: the anchovies, the herring, the capelin, the menhaden. And more recently the slow-growing deep water species—monkfish, Chilean sea bass, arctic cod, orange roughy. Each one decades, decades, in the making.

That orange roughy swimming on your plate with lemon slices and butter may have been swimming two thousand feet deep in the ocean for more than a century, at the time this university was founded in 1893.

Some of the deep, slow-growing coral destroyed in order to catch the orange roughy began life when the pyramids were being built in Egypt . Wild caught fish are not exactly like corn or rice or cows and chickens. They are basically bush meat, wildlife, part of what makes our life possible by making our life support system function.

We have entered what some people call the “bulldozeroic” era; fish might say the “longlinerozoic,” “the trawlerozoic.” Some call it the anthroprozoic, a world where one species has so altered the nature of the planet, that the fundamental systems that make the planet function are at risk.

What can you do? You can use your talents, whatever they are, whoever you are. And while you are following your personal dreams, be mindful of where in the universe you are. A little, mostly blue planet that is wonderfully resilient, but not infinitely so. Think of it as “the world bank,” if you will, and remember that half of the coral reefs have either been destroyed or are in a serious state of decline in half a century. But half are still in pretty good shape. In half a century, while we have consumed 90 percent of many of the ocean's big fish, they're not all gone, yet . There is still a chance that they might recover if we give them a break. They might not, if we don't. Mangrove forests and marshes and dunes that protect coastal areas should be protected as if our lives depend on them—because they do. For the same reasons, we need to expand our national parks, our marine sanctuaries, the high seas that generate most of the planet's oxygen, sequester carbon, drive climate and weather, and hold the planet on a steady course.

It's your job more than any previous generation to hold the planet on a steady course.

You, the luckiest of the luckiest generation. You, armed with knowledge that can make all the difference in the world. You have a chance to put humankind on a path to an enduring future, as never before.

And maybe, as never again. So let's hear it for you. You exceptionally brilliant, extraordinarily fortunate, energetic and lucky, noble class of 2008. Yes! Onward. Thank-you.