#35, February 9, 2000
Mr. Hagen was the "Quizmaster" in this year's
North Bay Regional Academic Decathlon "Super Quiz" last Saturday.
This is part of his introductory remarks to the students.
"We can change the world, rearrange; the world is dying
to get better." Three decades ago, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young sang
this challenge to my generation. We were witnessing (for many of us, firsthand)
what paranoid nationalism and the military industrial complex could do to the
peasants and farms and forests of Indochina. We didn't like it, and we weren't
about to ignore it.
During the war came the Oil Spill, the ecological wake-up
call from Santa Barbara. In 1969, two decade's before the Exxon Valdez plowed
the reef at Price William Sound, we beach-loving Californian's witnessed seals
and birds smothered in black goo. What an arresting metaphor, the watery
freedom of the feathered grebe reduced to a wretched mass, writhing in the
congealed blood of the earth. "There's somethin' happenin' here, what it
is ain't exactly clear…"
I was a senior at Gilroy High, Class of 1970, the year of
the first Earth Day. Flush with idealism, my buddies and I knew that too many
people were making too much pollution, and that "we the people" had
the power to stop it.
For the past thirty years, we enviros have been largely on
the defensive against greed and ecological ignorance. The ever-more
conglomerated transnational corporations are behaving like fully laden
supertankers, their pilots unwilling or unable to look beyond the fog that
shrouds the shallows. So, students and fellow citizens, we need still more
smart activists and honest politicians, to be the tugboats pushing back these
behemoths, steering them away from disasters.
But the tide is turning, as evidenced in part by the topic
of this year's Super Quiz, "The Sustainable Earth." Sustainability is
becoming the new and powerful organizing principle for the future of
civilization. It shifts the environmentalism focus from "stopping
something" (e.g. pollution, habitat destruction) to "building
something" (i.e. creating a culture that thrives on earth's solar income
while restoring its natural capital.)
This paradigm shift expands our opportunity-- to board those
huge fossil-powered ships, chart a new course, and eventually reconstruct them
stem to stern. For some great ideas about this, read the book Natural
Capitalism by Lovins, Lovins and Hawken. You could be the entrepreneur
whose "bio-mimicry" labs create pollution-free synthetic super-fibers
from biomass (e.g. dead bugs) by replicating the silk-making machinery of the
common spider. Or the engineer who designs the mass production of 200 mpg
solar/hydrogen cars. And keep an eye on Sonoma County, and my home town of
Petaluma. We will be on the leading edge of the sustainable community
revolution.
This afternoon, you have the opportunity to demonstrate your
mastery of the facts surrounding the ecological crisis. And as vital as this
knowledge is, please don't forget the other half of the our sustainability
yin-yang: emotion. Emotion, mover of souls, rising in songs which lift the spirit,
giving us goose bumps, and strengthening our will to work in the face of
adversity.
Above all, we must learn to fall in love with the earth, and
to give it love. That means getting out on to and into the land, from Alaska to
the top of Sonoma Mountain to the banks of your local creek. Put yourself in
the arms of the wild forces that truly rule the world, feel the pulse of
photosynthesis and respiration, swim the hydrologic cycle. Rescue the trout
stream and the damselfly in distress. Sing with the wind in the trees:
"Open up the door."
The idealists of my generation are not giving up; we ain't
ready to hand off any baton. No, we 47s need every one of you 17s, and all the
7s in between and beyond to carry on the evolution of humanity. So protect and
nurture your idealism; you will discover, or even rekindle, the idealism of
your elders.
I thank you, fellow students, for your commitment to learn
and your will to achieve. I wish you all good luck today, and health to you and
your grandchildren's grandchildren.