Paul Hawken Keynote At 2010 Skoll World Forum
Environmentalist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken, CEO of OneSun Solar, an energy company focused on ultra low-cost solar based on green chemistry and biomimicry. His speech at the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship 2010 focuses on environmental problems around the world.
With: Paul Hawken
Sally, you know some things my mother doesn't know. Hope she is not watching.. wow look at you.
I want to thank you, Jeff, for everybody's thanking you. I had not met Jeff until I had arrived here in Oxford. And there is two ways to get to know someone, one by relationship. But there is another way to get to know a person, I believe and that is to understand them through the people that they attract, and that are drawn to them.
The intelligence and the discernment and the intention and the quality of values that you express through the people that you gather around you is extraordinary. I want to thank you so much for who you are and what you are doing in the world. Thank you. And one of those people is Sally, whom is equally extraordinary in terms of who she attracts and brings to her side and I have worked with your staff now.
They are extraordinary I want to thank them, but I also want to extend my thanks to the people who aren't here, to the hundreds of people in the volunteers and the janitors, and the chefs, and the cooks, and the waiters, and the maids, and all the people who make this moment possible who cannot share it but who deserved our gratitude.
I want to say thank you to all of you. You know every generation has the express vanity historic times and I suppose that is always true. We, I do not think have that vanity. I think we have a different one which is not a vanity We live in civilization at all times. These times we live in would decide whether in fact there is a civilization.
Now, we are told and given different estimates, that we have 20, 25, maybe more, maybe less years and in which to reduce our carbon emissions. To control, carbon in the upper atmosphere, so that it does not exceed 450ppm then temperature rise at earth should not exceed 2C and to do that is an extraordinary thing. And even than we don't know what will happen because the carbon in the atmosphere in last for centuries after that. And we may have to even begin the long process of draw down, which our technologies and techniques, we do not fully understand and to do that, our friend who's a physicist, made a list of what we'd have to do, and for the next twenty five years, we would have to make a new ten percent efficient solar panel every second, every second for 25 years.
We have to create a new fifty-square meters of solar mirror every second for 25 years, we would have to create a 3 megawatt wind turbine every day for twenty five years. We have to create one new three gigawatt to the nuclear power planet every week by 25 years. If you don't want to do that, then we have to create 250 square meters of solar panel every second for 25 years and we will have to pay 100 megawatt geothermal plant every day for 25 years and then every second one Olympic sized swimming pool of algae for bio fuels, every second, for twenty five years and on top of that we have to cap the energy consumption that the world consumes today, thats 16 terawatts, despite the fact that two plus billion people will be joining us soon. So there's the shopping list. And on top of that as you know we have to feed and nourish 9 billion people.
We have to educate those who do not have it, our children, the girls and boys around the world. We have to eradicate poverty. We have to reforest a billion hectares of land on earth. We have to stop ocean acidification. The death of coral reefs, we have to recharge our aquifers, expand, our wetlands, we have to create a affordable healthcare in the world, apparently not in the United States, everywhere else we have to.
We have to squeeze into our ecological footprint. A just and meaningful society. Now, there are many of you, or not you, but many people who say this is impossible and the reason it's so nice to be here with you for tonight is to be with people who say that it is possible. And that's why we're here.
Ten years ago, I noticed in my lectures and in my talks that I would recive business cards from people who are in NGOs and volunteer organizations and institution foundations, and as they piled up in my house I brought them home. I had thousands of cards, and I decided to do one thing, which is to count.
Not just the cards in my bag, but I wanted to know how many organizations in the world are here today to address this issue of poverty, of climate, of injustice, of deforestation, of all the different social environmental issues that we are addressing together collectively. So I began to count and I got to thirty thousand and I was pretty excited.
It is more than the Catholic church, it must mean something. think and I got to fifty thousand, I got to a hundred thousand, and the numbers kept going and going. And with Becky's help I would like to show you just a video to give you some sense of scale, because numbers don't really say something.
Numbers go in and out of our head. They're sort of abstract and they're conceptual. But, what we see, soon, on the screen, Becky's nodding, is a list, and it's a list of non-profit organizations from around the world. And the reason I show them to you is not to call them out individually or collectively as being more important than others.
Not at all. The reason I show this to you is to give you an idea of how many there are. For if we were starting to play this now us we are, and we sat here all night and tomorrow, and all day Friday and Saturday all day Sunday. If we stayed here for a week, 24/7, I would come back in the room and tell you that you'd have to stay yet another week.
And at the end of those two weeks I'd say you have to stay two more weeks, and after watching this for a month, I'd come back to you and say it's only one month more. In other words, you'd have to sit here for two months, 24 hours a day, watching, at this rate, the names of your brothers and sister organizations in the world who are addressing the salient issues of our time.
That's who you are. That's who we are. This is our family. This is the fastest growing movement in the world. Make no doubt about it. The person who made this for me was a big fan of Star Wars, and he thought like two months was too long, and so you'll see as it starts to fade out into the solar, whatever you want to call those star worlds.
We'll see. As... It's way ahead of me. Here it goes, anyway. The number of organizations. by the way, is approximately two million. That's how long it would take to look at the names of two million organizations. And, here we go, move on. Jumping, I don't know what's going on. But as I finished, if you will, the count, and know that it's innumerable, I then went to another area, which is I wanted to know where do we come from, where are our roots?
Two million organizations didn't happen overnight it may be extraordinary. Quick and fast now and rapid in its growth, but it has very, very deep roots, culturally. And you have to go back, what Paul Farmer talked about last night, you have to go back to the abolitionist movement in say, 1787, where a group of Quakers and a couple of Anglicans got together in a print shop in London and decided to abolish the trade in slavery in the UK, in the world they hoped, but starting with the UK.
But what was so extraordinary about that is that, at that time, people did not organize themselves on behalf of people they did not know, would never know, and from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. It was so odd that people in Parliament derided them, they made fun of them.
They called them liberals, do-gooders, activists, progressives. Oh, my god! Terms that we use then as they are now. Not much is changed. But today as so elegantly underlined by dean Peter Moores in his opening the arts the decade of the arts have starkly underlined the institutional bankruptcy of the culture of self.
This culture of "beggar thy neighbor". And this meme that began in the nineteenth century with the Abolitionists is now I think and the Dean I think underlined, underscored that has become the measure of what it means to be a meaningful human being today. We do what was odd then as a matter of fact today.
We think nothing of it to organize our lives on behalf of people that we don't know. It's an extraordinary thing that's happened. Now this movement addresses what Paul farmer calls the pathologies of power. Those hoary infirmities of privileged that have caused untold suffering to all people. And invoking Farmer's metaphor, we can say that, in a sense, this movement that has no name is humanity's immune response to political corruption, economic disease, and ecological degradation.
I mean, we have
now, an economy that tells us the ultimate pathology, the ultimate fallacy, which it tells us that it's cheaper to destroy the Earth in real time then to renew or restore or re-stain it. You can print money to bail out a bank, but you cannot print life to bail out the planet.
A present essentially we are stealing the future, we are selling it in the present and we are calling it growth. we would look back at that as with the same implorance as we looked at those slave ships that Paul showed yesterday. Astonishing, that a whole global culture could do that, be taught that, in its business schools and its economic schools that that is economic growth but that is exactly what we are doing.
We can, however, just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future rather than stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take those assets from the future. One is called restoration one is called exploitation, and whenever we exploit the Earth we cause untold suffering to other people.
Working for the Earth and for its people is not a way to get rich, but it is a way to be rich. One of the awardees tonight Scott Gilmore, described this change perfectly, two nights ago. He left his prestigious job as a diplomat, because he wanted to do something that he could be proud to tell his daughter about. Now he was a diplomat but his job was to manage files. And now, quoting Scott, he can turn to his daughter and say "now I help people."
The catholic nun and author, Karen Armstrong talks about this idea of people helping people, and she describes the source of this is the actual age, 200 to 900 BCE, and this is a time of great barbarity, of cruelty. Tremendous balance in people who were were repulsed by it and there was this revolution to what the people saw around in everyday life.
And out of this came an extraordinary number of teachers and sages, Socrates and Sophocles, Buddah, and many others. These teachers, some of which either have religions or ways of life now surrounding them didn't give a fig, about creating an religion, or enlightenment, or not interested in monotheism, and they caution their followers to not believe. What they interested in doing is new type of human being.
These people repairing social moments. That's what they were doing. That's what you're doing. This origin of to doing unto others which you have done to you, or the opposite to never do unto somebody have not have done to you. This golden rule that emerged during this time informs every thing that we do. This is real policy. Now, when Paula Kravitz and I, two nights ago we were early for reception we went to Christ Church and extraordinary you have not heard the Christ Church Choir which is well renowned and famed for good reason. It's extraordinary. We walked in the sun's coming through the stained glass windows. And there, after the choir stopped, we're at the reading meeting, the deacon or somebody stood up, and in a beautiful gravelly voice read Matthew five three twelve which is probably, maybe the most famous, or one of the most famous passages in the Bible. It is of the attitude Mark quotes Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount, and I'm sure you know it well, when he says that blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted, and blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the Earth and blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy. And blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God, and blessed are the peace makers, for they shall be called the children of God.
Now, when I heard that as a child, I kind of thought I was supposed to get on my knees and pray. and when I heard that two nights ago, I realized what Jesus was saying, is get off your butt and do something." Jesus too was creating a social movement. That's a social manifesto. In a sense, asking us to create in President Bill Clinton's words, "integrated communities of empowered people." Now again and again, what you hear in the environmental social justice movement is: it's too late, we're not doing enough, we failed at Copenhagen.
You hear this litany of failure. This is the only movement that circles the wagons and shoots inwards. But I would caution us. I don't think you've ever been on a team where the team says "Man, you guys getting worse everyday. I'm depressed. I'm getting more so. You haven't put a run up on the board yet. We're made fun of, people are mocking us and so forth. I don't know if I can keep doing this." That's not how you win. The way you win is to recognize that what we are doing is extraordinary. Cob15 wasn't organized to succeed. What succeeded at Cob15 is who came there and got together, and the information that was exchanged.
I was with Sir David King last night at dinner. I mean he bounced right up. He's going to meeting after meeting, new proposals, new solutions, new ideas. The thing here is that what we've taken on is the whole tamale. It's not like we're trying to fix one thing. We're trying to fix everything, the whole industrial system.
Every node, every aspect, every part of it needs to be addressed and reimagined, because it is reimagining what it means to be a human being, right. And if we were winning, we would be doing the wrong thing. That would be too small. We're going to get defeated again, and again, and again. We're going to get laughed at and that's how we know we're on the right track.
This is big.
But two years after
Parliament here passed, and read the law banning the trade in slavery and Emerson's wife died and he took a boat from Boston to Malta, came up to Boudevilliers and landed in Paris on his way to see his friends here in the UK, John Stuart Mill, Wordsworth and others, and he stopped in Paris at the Jardin des Plantes, which is this extraordanary botanical garden put together by the Jussieu Family, Bernard and Antoine. And, what they had done is gathered the plants, and the corns, and the seeds and the bones, and the creatures that came from explorers all over from the New World and had brought them and dumped them in Paris, in London, in Amsterdam and other places.
Their job was to organize this bounty of nature that was streaming in from the world in some recognizable way and give it some order. And they did. They arrayed things by color and shape and form and morphology.
Emerson, who was depressed and mourning his wife - and you see in his journal entries how down he was - goes in there and he looks at everything and he has this epiphany, this epiphanic experience where he sees the web of life. He sees that everything is connected; that everything is nature; there is no non-nature.
And, at that time there was such a division between society and nature. And it all came together as one. And not surprisingly when he came back his first book was called Nature. And in that, he says I have confidences in the laws of morals as of botany. In the laws of morals as of botany. I have planted maze in my field every year and it has never come up strychnine. My partially beat turnup, carrot, buckthorn, chestnut, acorn are as sure. I believe that justice produces justice, and injustice.
Injustice, right? In this integration of nature and justice that is his book, and he became a mystic from then on. And the first person to buy that book was Henry David Thoreau who was at Harvard then and he asked Emerson to come to his class, the senior class talk, he went to Emerson's house that night and said "what shall I do? I've studied classics," you know they didn't have a business program then. He was a pencil maker and Emerson said, "keep a journal". Which he did from that night for 7000 pages until he died in 1862.
And the story we know most famously about the row is walking to town, to Concord, and being arrested by Sheriff Sam Staples for not paying his poll tax. He had not paid it in years before because it banned, prevented African Americans from voting. This year he didn't pay it because of the Mexican American War, which was illegal.
Where Texas Rangers were rapping Mexican women and he would not pay his taxes, he was thrown in jail. And after that night in jail, he gave a talk on it. He wrote an essay with his sterling title, "Of the Duty of Submission to Civil Government" which might have been forgotten, except in 1866, 4 years after he died, Somebody retitled it "On Civil Disobedience." And exactly four years later to the day it was printed, somebody - we do not know who - but at the Indian Times in Durban, South Africa, handed an essay to a slight solicitor who had proclaimed with his Muslim brothers in a meeting to protest the black pact that he would get arrested as a solicitor, Mohandas K. Gandhi.
And Gandhi says that it had a huge influence on his forumlation Satyagraha. But 50 years after that, almost to the day after Martin Luther King had been elected head of the Montgomery Improvement Association, after the front of his house had been blown up with his kids and wife in the house, after he had armed his house with rifles and guns.
Somebody gave him Civil Disobedience and Gandhi's autobiography. And within the week he incorporated this into his sermon as the Ebenezer baptistchurch and why do you mention these three, they would have been famous, well known people? But what I want to point to is this is that who knew about the Jessieu brothers?
Who was the person who retitled that essay? Who are the women who paved the Montgomery to Improvement Association? Who was the person who gave that essay and that autobiography to Martin Luther King? What I'm saying here is that nothing thing we do is inconsequential. There is no such thing. There is only consequential inaction.
And we can not know the results of what we're going to do. We can not know the future, we can relax in that sense. You know, take that burden off your shoulder. The only thing we can do is hone and purify our intentions in the world, and how we express those intentions, and the rest we give over to each other and to this extraordinary experiment called humanity.
Emerson posed one other question, which I will end with. And he asked, rhetorically, what would happen if the stars only came out once every thousand years? I've wondered the same after reading that. I think the weeks of preparation there'll be parties before probably speeches boring who knows, but speeches, there would be lectures about why Thats all eighty thousand years.
But there will be some serious wine making, serious dance lessons, am sure 12 new religions would happen that night. Losts of kids would be created. That's for sure. But the stars actually come out every night, and we watch TV. But I think for you, it is different, your stars every day and night. They are Gertrude and Josephine for you, Andrew in Kenya. They're the thousands of Afghans who are employed to do the work of Scott Gilmore.
They are the livelihood created by you, Michiel Jenkins, in the forest where there were none. There were indigenous land saved by Adaloberto and Carlos at Imazon. They're the community sustained by the work of Ambrosuis and so Silverius of Telapak, they are the millions and millions of girls who have gained and maintained their honor and dignity, because of Molly. I toast her. And they are the new found lives discovered through the work of Mark Friedman.
And, for me, those stars are also beaming at me right now. They're you. All of you are demonstrating and embodying what it means to be a new human being; what the sages of the actual age were talking about. Because they said, if you could create and become a human being, full of generosity and kindness, you would change the world.
Thank you to the awardees past and present for your work and dedication, your endless enthusiasm, your literal brilliance, and for creating a world that we can believe in. And thank you to everyone else for making this world so stunning a place. I want to be in a place I'm happy, a time I'm happy to be born in.
A gift of the work that we share is something that is the most special thing that could happen in a thousand years. Anyone can make despair possible, but to make hope possible takes real genius and real heart. Thank you very much.
I want to thank you, Jeff, for everybody's thanking you. I had not met Jeff until I had arrived here in Oxford. And there is two ways to get to know someone, one by relationship. But there is another way to get to know a person, I believe and that is to understand them through the people that they attract, and that are drawn to them.
The intelligence and the discernment and the intention and the quality of values that you express through the people that you gather around you is extraordinary. I want to thank you so much for who you are and what you are doing in the world. Thank you. And one of those people is Sally, whom is equally extraordinary in terms of who she attracts and brings to her side and I have worked with your staff now.
They are extraordinary I want to thank them, but I also want to extend my thanks to the people who aren't here, to the hundreds of people in the volunteers and the janitors, and the chefs, and the cooks, and the waiters, and the maids, and all the people who make this moment possible who cannot share it but who deserved our gratitude.
I want to say thank you to all of you. You know every generation has the express vanity historic times and I suppose that is always true. We, I do not think have that vanity. I think we have a different one which is not a vanity We live in civilization at all times. These times we live in would decide whether in fact there is a civilization.
Now, we are told and given different estimates, that we have 20, 25, maybe more, maybe less years and in which to reduce our carbon emissions. To control, carbon in the upper atmosphere, so that it does not exceed 450ppm then temperature rise at earth should not exceed 2C and to do that is an extraordinary thing. And even than we don't know what will happen because the carbon in the atmosphere in last for centuries after that. And we may have to even begin the long process of draw down, which our technologies and techniques, we do not fully understand and to do that, our friend who's a physicist, made a list of what we'd have to do, and for the next twenty five years, we would have to make a new ten percent efficient solar panel every second, every second for 25 years.
We have to create a new fifty-square meters of solar mirror every second for 25 years, we would have to create a 3 megawatt wind turbine every day for twenty five years. We have to create one new three gigawatt to the nuclear power planet every week by 25 years. If you don't want to do that, then we have to create 250 square meters of solar panel every second for 25 years and we will have to pay 100 megawatt geothermal plant every day for 25 years and then every second one Olympic sized swimming pool of algae for bio fuels, every second, for twenty five years and on top of that we have to cap the energy consumption that the world consumes today, thats 16 terawatts, despite the fact that two plus billion people will be joining us soon. So there's the shopping list. And on top of that as you know we have to feed and nourish 9 billion people.
We have to educate those who do not have it, our children, the girls and boys around the world. We have to eradicate poverty. We have to reforest a billion hectares of land on earth. We have to stop ocean acidification. The death of coral reefs, we have to recharge our aquifers, expand, our wetlands, we have to create a affordable healthcare in the world, apparently not in the United States, everywhere else we have to.
We have to squeeze into our ecological footprint. A just and meaningful society. Now, there are many of you, or not you, but many people who say this is impossible and the reason it's so nice to be here with you for tonight is to be with people who say that it is possible. And that's why we're here.
Ten years ago, I noticed in my lectures and in my talks that I would recive business cards from people who are in NGOs and volunteer organizations and institution foundations, and as they piled up in my house I brought them home. I had thousands of cards, and I decided to do one thing, which is to count.
Not just the cards in my bag, but I wanted to know how many organizations in the world are here today to address this issue of poverty, of climate, of injustice, of deforestation, of all the different social environmental issues that we are addressing together collectively. So I began to count and I got to thirty thousand and I was pretty excited.
It is more than the Catholic church, it must mean something. think and I got to fifty thousand, I got to a hundred thousand, and the numbers kept going and going. And with Becky's help I would like to show you just a video to give you some sense of scale, because numbers don't really say something.
Numbers go in and out of our head. They're sort of abstract and they're conceptual. But, what we see, soon, on the screen, Becky's nodding, is a list, and it's a list of non-profit organizations from around the world. And the reason I show them to you is not to call them out individually or collectively as being more important than others.
Not at all. The reason I show this to you is to give you an idea of how many there are. For if we were starting to play this now us we are, and we sat here all night and tomorrow, and all day Friday and Saturday all day Sunday. If we stayed here for a week, 24/7, I would come back in the room and tell you that you'd have to stay yet another week.
And at the end of those two weeks I'd say you have to stay two more weeks, and after watching this for a month, I'd come back to you and say it's only one month more. In other words, you'd have to sit here for two months, 24 hours a day, watching, at this rate, the names of your brothers and sister organizations in the world who are addressing the salient issues of our time.
That's who you are. That's who we are. This is our family. This is the fastest growing movement in the world. Make no doubt about it. The person who made this for me was a big fan of Star Wars, and he thought like two months was too long, and so you'll see as it starts to fade out into the solar, whatever you want to call those star worlds.
We'll see. As... It's way ahead of me. Here it goes, anyway. The number of organizations. by the way, is approximately two million. That's how long it would take to look at the names of two million organizations. And, here we go, move on. Jumping, I don't know what's going on. But as I finished, if you will, the count, and know that it's innumerable, I then went to another area, which is I wanted to know where do we come from, where are our roots?
Two million organizations didn't happen overnight it may be extraordinary. Quick and fast now and rapid in its growth, but it has very, very deep roots, culturally. And you have to go back, what Paul Farmer talked about last night, you have to go back to the abolitionist movement in say, 1787, where a group of Quakers and a couple of Anglicans got together in a print shop in London and decided to abolish the trade in slavery in the UK, in the world they hoped, but starting with the UK.
But what was so extraordinary about that is that, at that time, people did not organize themselves on behalf of people they did not know, would never know, and from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. It was so odd that people in Parliament derided them, they made fun of them.
They called them liberals, do-gooders, activists, progressives. Oh, my god! Terms that we use then as they are now. Not much is changed. But today as so elegantly underlined by dean Peter Moores in his opening the arts the decade of the arts have starkly underlined the institutional bankruptcy of the culture of self.
This culture of "beggar thy neighbor". And this meme that began in the nineteenth century with the Abolitionists is now I think and the Dean I think underlined, underscored that has become the measure of what it means to be a meaningful human being today. We do what was odd then as a matter of fact today.
We think nothing of it to organize our lives on behalf of people that we don't know. It's an extraordinary thing that's happened. Now this movement addresses what Paul farmer calls the pathologies of power. Those hoary infirmities of privileged that have caused untold suffering to all people. And invoking Farmer's metaphor, we can say that, in a sense, this movement that has no name is humanity's immune response to political corruption, economic disease, and ecological degradation.
I mean, we have
now, an economy that tells us the ultimate pathology, the ultimate fallacy, which it tells us that it's cheaper to destroy the Earth in real time then to renew or restore or re-stain it. You can print money to bail out a bank, but you cannot print life to bail out the planet.
A present essentially we are stealing the future, we are selling it in the present and we are calling it growth. we would look back at that as with the same implorance as we looked at those slave ships that Paul showed yesterday. Astonishing, that a whole global culture could do that, be taught that, in its business schools and its economic schools that that is economic growth but that is exactly what we are doing.
We can, however, just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future rather than stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take those assets from the future. One is called restoration one is called exploitation, and whenever we exploit the Earth we cause untold suffering to other people.
Working for the Earth and for its people is not a way to get rich, but it is a way to be rich. One of the awardees tonight Scott Gilmore, described this change perfectly, two nights ago. He left his prestigious job as a diplomat, because he wanted to do something that he could be proud to tell his daughter about. Now he was a diplomat but his job was to manage files. And now, quoting Scott, he can turn to his daughter and say "now I help people."
The catholic nun and author, Karen Armstrong talks about this idea of people helping people, and she describes the source of this is the actual age, 200 to 900 BCE, and this is a time of great barbarity, of cruelty. Tremendous balance in people who were were repulsed by it and there was this revolution to what the people saw around in everyday life.
And out of this came an extraordinary number of teachers and sages, Socrates and Sophocles, Buddah, and many others. These teachers, some of which either have religions or ways of life now surrounding them didn't give a fig, about creating an religion, or enlightenment, or not interested in monotheism, and they caution their followers to not believe. What they interested in doing is new type of human being.
These people repairing social moments. That's what they were doing. That's what you're doing. This origin of to doing unto others which you have done to you, or the opposite to never do unto somebody have not have done to you. This golden rule that emerged during this time informs every thing that we do. This is real policy. Now, when Paula Kravitz and I, two nights ago we were early for reception we went to Christ Church and extraordinary you have not heard the Christ Church Choir which is well renowned and famed for good reason. It's extraordinary. We walked in the sun's coming through the stained glass windows. And there, after the choir stopped, we're at the reading meeting, the deacon or somebody stood up, and in a beautiful gravelly voice read Matthew five three twelve which is probably, maybe the most famous, or one of the most famous passages in the Bible. It is of the attitude Mark quotes Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount, and I'm sure you know it well, when he says that blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted, and blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the Earth and blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy. And blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God, and blessed are the peace makers, for they shall be called the children of God.
Now, when I heard that as a child, I kind of thought I was supposed to get on my knees and pray. and when I heard that two nights ago, I realized what Jesus was saying, is get off your butt and do something." Jesus too was creating a social movement. That's a social manifesto. In a sense, asking us to create in President Bill Clinton's words, "integrated communities of empowered people." Now again and again, what you hear in the environmental social justice movement is: it's too late, we're not doing enough, we failed at Copenhagen.
You hear this litany of failure. This is the only movement that circles the wagons and shoots inwards. But I would caution us. I don't think you've ever been on a team where the team says "Man, you guys getting worse everyday. I'm depressed. I'm getting more so. You haven't put a run up on the board yet. We're made fun of, people are mocking us and so forth. I don't know if I can keep doing this." That's not how you win. The way you win is to recognize that what we are doing is extraordinary. Cob15 wasn't organized to succeed. What succeeded at Cob15 is who came there and got together, and the information that was exchanged.
I was with Sir David King last night at dinner. I mean he bounced right up. He's going to meeting after meeting, new proposals, new solutions, new ideas. The thing here is that what we've taken on is the whole tamale. It's not like we're trying to fix one thing. We're trying to fix everything, the whole industrial system.
Every node, every aspect, every part of it needs to be addressed and reimagined, because it is reimagining what it means to be a human being, right. And if we were winning, we would be doing the wrong thing. That would be too small. We're going to get defeated again, and again, and again. We're going to get laughed at and that's how we know we're on the right track.
This is big.
But two years after
Parliament here passed, and read the law banning the trade in slavery and Emerson's wife died and he took a boat from Boston to Malta, came up to Boudevilliers and landed in Paris on his way to see his friends here in the UK, John Stuart Mill, Wordsworth and others, and he stopped in Paris at the Jardin des Plantes, which is this extraordanary botanical garden put together by the Jussieu Family, Bernard and Antoine. And, what they had done is gathered the plants, and the corns, and the seeds and the bones, and the creatures that came from explorers all over from the New World and had brought them and dumped them in Paris, in London, in Amsterdam and other places.
Their job was to organize this bounty of nature that was streaming in from the world in some recognizable way and give it some order. And they did. They arrayed things by color and shape and form and morphology.
Emerson, who was depressed and mourning his wife - and you see in his journal entries how down he was - goes in there and he looks at everything and he has this epiphany, this epiphanic experience where he sees the web of life. He sees that everything is connected; that everything is nature; there is no non-nature.
And, at that time there was such a division between society and nature. And it all came together as one. And not surprisingly when he came back his first book was called Nature. And in that, he says I have confidences in the laws of morals as of botany. In the laws of morals as of botany. I have planted maze in my field every year and it has never come up strychnine. My partially beat turnup, carrot, buckthorn, chestnut, acorn are as sure. I believe that justice produces justice, and injustice.
Injustice, right? In this integration of nature and justice that is his book, and he became a mystic from then on. And the first person to buy that book was Henry David Thoreau who was at Harvard then and he asked Emerson to come to his class, the senior class talk, he went to Emerson's house that night and said "what shall I do? I've studied classics," you know they didn't have a business program then. He was a pencil maker and Emerson said, "keep a journal". Which he did from that night for 7000 pages until he died in 1862.
And the story we know most famously about the row is walking to town, to Concord, and being arrested by Sheriff Sam Staples for not paying his poll tax. He had not paid it in years before because it banned, prevented African Americans from voting. This year he didn't pay it because of the Mexican American War, which was illegal.
Where Texas Rangers were rapping Mexican women and he would not pay his taxes, he was thrown in jail. And after that night in jail, he gave a talk on it. He wrote an essay with his sterling title, "Of the Duty of Submission to Civil Government" which might have been forgotten, except in 1866, 4 years after he died, Somebody retitled it "On Civil Disobedience." And exactly four years later to the day it was printed, somebody - we do not know who - but at the Indian Times in Durban, South Africa, handed an essay to a slight solicitor who had proclaimed with his Muslim brothers in a meeting to protest the black pact that he would get arrested as a solicitor, Mohandas K. Gandhi.
And Gandhi says that it had a huge influence on his forumlation Satyagraha. But 50 years after that, almost to the day after Martin Luther King had been elected head of the Montgomery Improvement Association, after the front of his house had been blown up with his kids and wife in the house, after he had armed his house with rifles and guns.
Somebody gave him Civil Disobedience and Gandhi's autobiography. And within the week he incorporated this into his sermon as the Ebenezer baptistchurch and why do you mention these three, they would have been famous, well known people? But what I want to point to is this is that who knew about the Jessieu brothers?
Who was the person who retitled that essay? Who are the women who paved the Montgomery to Improvement Association? Who was the person who gave that essay and that autobiography to Martin Luther King? What I'm saying here is that nothing thing we do is inconsequential. There is no such thing. There is only consequential inaction.
And we can not know the results of what we're going to do. We can not know the future, we can relax in that sense. You know, take that burden off your shoulder. The only thing we can do is hone and purify our intentions in the world, and how we express those intentions, and the rest we give over to each other and to this extraordinary experiment called humanity.
Emerson posed one other question, which I will end with. And he asked, rhetorically, what would happen if the stars only came out once every thousand years? I've wondered the same after reading that. I think the weeks of preparation there'll be parties before probably speeches boring who knows, but speeches, there would be lectures about why Thats all eighty thousand years.
But there will be some serious wine making, serious dance lessons, am sure 12 new religions would happen that night. Losts of kids would be created. That's for sure. But the stars actually come out every night, and we watch TV. But I think for you, it is different, your stars every day and night. They are Gertrude and Josephine for you, Andrew in Kenya. They're the thousands of Afghans who are employed to do the work of Scott Gilmore.
They are the livelihood created by you, Michiel Jenkins, in the forest where there were none. There were indigenous land saved by Adaloberto and Carlos at Imazon. They're the community sustained by the work of Ambrosuis and so Silverius of Telapak, they are the millions and millions of girls who have gained and maintained their honor and dignity, because of Molly. I toast her. And they are the new found lives discovered through the work of Mark Friedman.
And, for me, those stars are also beaming at me right now. They're you. All of you are demonstrating and embodying what it means to be a new human being; what the sages of the actual age were talking about. Because they said, if you could create and become a human being, full of generosity and kindness, you would change the world.
Thank you to the awardees past and present for your work and dedication, your endless enthusiasm, your literal brilliance, and for creating a world that we can believe in. And thank you to everyone else for making this world so stunning a place. I want to be in a place I'm happy, a time I'm happy to be born in.
A gift of the work that we share is something that is the most special thing that could happen in a thousand years. Anyone can make despair possible, but to make hope possible takes real genius and real heart. Thank you very much.
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